Drive-by Groceries

A few weeks ago I decided to try out one of the curbside pickup services offered by our local supermarkets. I’ve avoided them for several years now, partly because I prefer surveying the products on offer before making my selections, and partly because there are some things I want to check for myself – expiration dates, freshness and lack of mold, amount of fat and/or gristle, and so on. I trust the company not to try to pass off expired goods on me, if only because of the massive legal and regulatory problems that would cause them, but the difference between something that expires on Thursday and something that is good until the following Monday can be important in my household, especially when you only go shopping once a week. Recently, though, there have been offsetting considerations…

 Unless you’ve been living on another planet since January of 2020 you already know about the world-wide health crisis that makes going out in public a risky proposition, but there are other issues worth the mention here. For example, I already didn’t like people who insist on standing close enough to you in a checkout line that you can tell what they had for lunch; these days, though, that’s practically germ warfare. I also hate people who insist on arguing with the cashier about every price, why the store should accept coupons for things they aren’t actually buying, or why corporate has chosen to impose any one of hundreds of policies. And don’t get me started on people who insist on trying every credit card they own – three times each – before reluctantly admitting that they may not have paid their bills in a while…

And who’s even mentioned people who won’t wear a mask, or who insist on explaining at length why they have the legal, moral, political, or religious right to infect anyone they want to yet?

I’m not going to specify which vendor I was using, any unless you are from this part of the country you probably haven’t heard of it anyway, but like most supermarket chains these days they have their own smartphone app and a website where you can pick out the items you want to purchase. First, the good news: setting up an account isn’t difficult, and the website isn’t hard to navigate. It can take a very long time scrolling through lists of products to find the exact size and flavor you want, and the “search” function isn’t as much help as you’d probably expect, but setting up the order isn’t hard.

 Finding the pick-up location was a bit of a challenge the first time. There are eight parking spaces on one side of the lot with a phone number to call when you arrive, but the parking lot is big enough to land a 747 on, and there’s no indication of where the pick-up spaces are. You also have to plan out the trip in advance – there is a lead time before they can get your order ready, and only so many pick-up times in any given day – but I expected all of that. A much bigger issue, at least for me, was the stock-outs…

The website has a number of products on it with an “out of stock” notation on them, but this does not appear to be tied into the individual store’s Inventory Control system, because almost a quarter of the items on my list were out of stock when I arrived, and the crew member processing the order offered me substitute products instead. Some of these were acceptable (I really don’t care what shape my French fries are in) but others weren’t (my wife will not go near anything cherry-flavored except actual cherries), and there were a number of items for which no practical substitute exists. And there was at least one case where I didn’t want the substitute product, but ended up getting it mixed in with my order (and having to pay for it) anyway…

Now, I’m not saying that going inside the store would have helped with any of these issues, particularly the stock-outs. There were a few items in my order that I haven’t seen on the shelf in weeks now, but I selected them anyway, since they weren’t marked at “out of stock” on the website, and it was always possible that they had some in the stockroom that hadn’t been put out yet. And there are some health and hygiene products I’m not going to trust someone to pick out for me anyway. But while I don’t believe the curbside service will ever completely replace going into the store and looking for things I might need, I can’t deny that there is a definite utility to not having to deal with quite so many stupid, annoying, entitled, or diseased people when I go to the store every week…

Out of the Pool!

Back when I first became aware of Uber, and the other ridesharing aps, I remarked in this space that the whole concept was something in which I would only consider participating if that were one of the demands made by terrorists holding my wife hostage. Even granted that these services have become extremely popular in some areas, the first-hand accounts of people trying to make a living driving for Uber sound worse than any job I’ve ever had, and the idea of hitching a ride with someone I don’t know has not appealed to me since a classmate of mine was murdered while hitchhiking forty years ago. But none of that really compares to the company’s new policy of kicking people off of its service if their “rider rating” drops below 4 out of a possible 5…

You can pick up the Business Insider article here if you’d like, but they’re usually reliable to be going on with. Uber instituted a two-way rating system a number of years ago, with drivers allowed to rate their riders as well as the riders rating their drivers. I’ve also noted in this space that this has resulted in at least some percentage of Uber users and drivers developing a “quid pro quo” arrangement – you give me five stars, and I will give you five stars” deals that effectively gut both parts of the system. This doesn’t appear to have prevented a number of problem drivers from remaining “employed” by Uber, although in fairness we should note that the number of driver-related mass shootings has gone down in the last few years. It also hasn’t, apparently, prevented large numbers of riders treating their drivers as badly as they do most other service workers…

It isn’t clear from this article if the company already has such an arrangement with the drivers, and I certainly don’t plan to start driving for Uber in order to find out. Originally, of course, the whole business model was supposed to be self-correcting: drivers who compiled a bad record wouldn’t get any riders, and riders who were unpleasant enough (on whatever dimension) would not be offered any rides. But with the aforementioned accommodations reached between drivers and riders, it would appear that the company has felt the need to take a more active hand in managing the actual rides it sells…

Now, admittedly, I have no experience with Uber in either role, and no clear information on what effect (if any) being banned from using the service for six months at a time would have on the behavior of habitual riders. But as someone who does spend his working life dealing with anonymous rankings in a system where there is no verification of the complaints being made or appeal for inappropriately bad feedback, I can’t imagine doing business with a company (or its “driver partners”) under conditions where anyone who wanted to could give me a one-star ranking based on my appearance, political affiliation, favorite sports team, favorite food, alma mater, city of origin, city of residence, country of origin, age, height, weight, religion (or lack of it), profession, or reluctance to pay them off in return for a better rating…

Whether this new policy will have any impact on the problems Uber is trying to fix, whatever those might be, remains to be seen, of course. I’ll let you know if I spot any follow-up on this story, but for the moment, the idea of being kicked out of the ridesharing participation pool without warning or chance for appeal for whatever inappropriate (or dishonest) reason somebody feels like dreaming up isn’t making me any more likely to consider using their service…

Not Even Trying

Suppose for a moment that you were a parent traveling with children, possibly small children, and when you attempted to book tickets in the same row with your children (and spouse) you were told that the airline was going to charge you an additional fee for letting your party sit together. Let us further suppose that you asked the justification for this peculiar charge, and were told that there was no particular reason for the practice; the airline was just doing it as a way to wring more revenue from each flight, because they can. And, just to cap things off, let us suppose that you asked what the CEO of the airline thought about this practice, only to be told that the whole thing had been his idea in the first place. Would you still book the tickets?

Since you’re reading this story on my blog (assuming I have readers) you’ve probably figured out by now that this is an actual policy at United Airlines, according to an interview with their CEO on the Flyer Talk site this week. United President Scott Kirby claimed that the practice was just a matter of the company charging extra for a superior product – effectively, increasing the price because of value added – and defended it on the grounds that all companies charge extra for more valuable products or services, and airlines shouldn’t be any different. Whether he was missing the point deliberately or just brushing off the reporter isn’t clear from the article, but I feel it’s worth raising the issue anyway…

In general, any business policy that involves forcibly separating parents from their children – or extorting money from them in exchange for not doing so – is going to cause trouble, particularly if there isn’t any objective reason for doing so. Leaving aside over-protective parents who literally carry their children everywhere until the kids are school-age, most people find travel with small children stressful enough without having to worry about where they might be or what they might be doing/breaking/ingesting at any given moment. For that matter, most other travelers don’t particularly want to have to consider the complications of sitting with unaccompanied children just because the airline wants to make a few extra dollars. If this story is accurate, though, United is running the risk of irritating every customer on a given flight…

Now, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I consider annoying the customer to be a colossally bad idea; I’ve gone so far as to suggest that the Second Law of Business should be not to do this. In the case of a company like United, which is already having public image and customer relations issues due to things like having customers dragged off of flights (and possibly beaten), this policy goes beyond “stupid” and is careening directly toward “complete fiduciary misconduct.” While I can admire Mr. Kirby’s honesty and candor, I can’t help feeling that he’s not even trying to understand the potential shortcomings of the policy he is defending. If I still owned stock in United (I don’t) I might be trying to sell it, but I’d almost certainly be trying to oust the CEO at the next proxy vote…

From this perspective, I can’t actually tell if this policy (or admitting to it in public, at least) is insanely brave, utterly tone-deaf, or unbelievably arrogant. All I can tell you for sure is that none of these are adjectives that I want to associate with a company with which I do business, or with the senior management personnel of such a company. If United wants to improve relations with its customer, or at least stop being the punchline of jokes written by millions of scruffy bloggers across the Internet, they need to at least try to consider the needs of their passengers. Before things get any worse…

What Color Are Your Skies?

There are times when I will read an article online and wonder about the tone of surprise and wonder the author is taking. I don’t mean the “product reviews” that say nice things about products made by companies that advertise heavily on that channel, or travel articles that encourage people to spend money on services provided by companies that do (or might someday) advertise on that channel. Both of those are common (if sleazy) practices that go back to the time of 1970s sitcoms, and it would actually be much more alarming if they didn’t happen. As American humorist Dave Barry points out, what travel site is going to publish an article titled “Uruguay: Don’t Bother” in the first place?

On the other side of the issue, you have people who write in breathless tones about people being rude to servers in restaurants, or flight attendants, as if no one is ever rude, arrogant, or snotty in public just because they are horrible excuses for human beings and the service workers can’t fire back. When that happens, I have to wonder if these writers have ever been to a public venue, let alone worked in a service occupation. I had a similar reaction to the Business Insider article about the top complaints that workers at Trader Joe’s markets have about the customers who patronize their locations. Have they ever been to a supermarket?

Granted that I have spent time in retail, but I’d imagine that everyone has discovered trash left on a shelf or in a shopping cart at least once, and most likely everybody has seen some really gross examples from time to time. A pet peeve of mine was finding frozen products dumped in non-refrigerated parts of the store – it’s generally disgusting, and always a cause of “shrink” (product stolen or destroyed by the public). Mercifully, I never worked in a store with a meat section; finding an ice cream bar that had been left out and was now a bulging wrapper full of rancid liquid was revolting enough. We also didn’t do product samples, but the idea that people would abuse such offers and attempt to graze on them for lunch can’t be that surprising, either…

Anyone who honestly thinks that members of the public aren’t going to be randomly horrible to service and retail employees, however, is either living in a dream world or has no idea how much their local service and retail workers would like to bury them head-first in a dumpster full of cat droppings. Let me recommend, once again, the compilation site of funny and stupid customer behaviors known as Not Always Right.com, where you can find thousands of specific examples of this principle in action. Although I must say that, after having worked in Academia for the last ten years, their affiliate site Not Always Learning.com is just as on-the-money, and possibly even more distressing…

Why does he tell us this? I hear some of you thinking. I don’t imagine that any of my readers (assuming I have readers) are planning careers in retail or service companies and are naïve enough to be unaware of these conditions. And while anyone can have an off day (and do things they would normally find repugnant), anyone who makes a habit of behaving that way is unlikely to recognize themselves in any of these stories or care if they do. I’m calling out writers who have never worked down at the sharp end for a day in their lives for their naivety, for assuming that these stories from the retail and service sectors are somehow alien or exotic. We can’t sentence everyone to work one of these jobs sometime in their lives, nor would I wish that on anyone. But with the service economy growing more important every year I think it may be time for everyone to start thinking of life in retail as being more than the question “Paper or plastic?”

The Ethics of Loitering

There has been a lot of ink over the past few weeks about the Starbucks incident where some overanxious store employee called the police because a couple of people were waiting for an associate to arrive before they purchased anything. Once again, I don’t think there is any controversy in this particular case; the employee appears to have acted because the people waiting in their store happened to be African-American, while ignoring the fact that many of their customers who aren’t people of color do this all the time. Starbucks responded by closing all of their stores to retrain the staff, and issuing orders to let anyone hang around the store for as long as they want to whether they order anything or not – which makes me wonder how many more of these incidents have happened recently. But regardless of what happened in this specific case, I thought that the company’s response brings up a larger question…

One could argue that as a place of public accommodation, Starbucks has an obligation to extend service to anyone who isn’t actively violating any laws, and that one of the services they offer is a place in which to sit and enjoy your coffee. One could also argue that chasing away people who may be about to place an order is bad for business, and chasing away people because one of the employees has an unreasonable fear of one or more specific demographic groups is bad for the entire company’s reputation and brand image. In that sense, the company’s response and the new standing orders make perfect sense. Anyone who has ever worked in a food service, customer service, or other “public facing” job already knows that there is another side to the story, however…

Sadly, there are people in any society who will abuse anything any product, service, or resource to which they can gain access. If the personnel in a Starbucks store are not allowed to ask anyone to leave for any reason, we can almost guarantee that someone will make inappropriate use of their premises, more likely sooner than later. That might mean relatively harmless things like people using the seating area for an office they don’t pay rent on, or helping themselves to condiments and paper products without buying anything, or it could mean serious problems like homeless people using the store to sleep in, drug users shooting up in the restrooms, or stalkers spending all day watching one or more employees before trying to follow them home…

Any of these latter cases is going to be virtually as bad for business as the conditions that precipitated the company’s policy change, with the added issues of OSHA violations and hostile and offensive working environment suits being a near-certainty. No one, least of all me, is going to suggest that any company should tolerate open or even implied bigotry among its employees, but anyone who doesn’t realize how much harder these measures have made an already difficult job category has never worked a public-facing job in a tough neighborhood. All of which leads me to the question:

Do we, as businesspeople, have an obligation to accept loitering, trespassing, or other inappropriate use of our facilities because a non-zero number of visitors will be offended by anything other than free and unlimited usage of the property? Realistically, some people are going to take offense no matter how carefully we attempt to meet all of their needs and no matter how hard we try to make them feel welcome. By the same token, some of our employees are going to have some discriminatory beliefs no matter how hard we try to screen them out, or how carefully we attempt to train them to keep those opinions to themselves during business hours. Where do we draw the line between trying to never offend anybody (which is impossible) and trying to maintain a perfectly clean, safe, professional working and eating/drinking environment (which is also impossible)?

It’s worth thinking about…

Lounge in a Box

Once in a while I will come upon a story in the online news sites that sounds good at first look, but which demonstrates a more hopeful world view or greater faith in humanity than I have left at this point. Despite what my critics might imply, I don’t believe that all people are terrible, or that if it is possible for members of the general public to steal and/or destroy something for their own fun and profit that everyone will do so. The problem is that in many cases it only takes one bad actor to ruin everything for everyone else. I’ve often summed up businesses that failed because of the work of a limited number of bad actors with the expression “Another beautiful idea – ruined by people.” This was my first reaction to the CNN story about small, private rooms that can be rented by the hour being installed in airports…

The company behind this, which calls itself Jabbrrbox, claims that these cubicle-sized rooms can be used to provide a quiet space in which to place phone calls, get some work done, or speak with others in privacy, much like a very small, private airport lounge. The company also claims that these are more cost-effective than executive clubs offered by airlines, although at $10 for 15 minutes and $30 for a whole hour this is only the case if you are planning to use the Jabbrrbox unit for fewer than 15 hours per year (American Airlines’ “Admiral’s Club” is $450 per person per year, for example) or fewer than 2 hours in a visit (a one-day pass for the Admiral’s Club is $59). It also lacks the concierge service, refreshments, business services and other amenities one would find in a conventional executive club. It does, however, offer greater privacy – which I can’t help thinking is going to be the biggest problem…

At the moment, the Jabbrrbox units have a clear door panel, but the company is talking about equipping future units with a privacy screen, and even if they don’t, anybody could block the panel with a handful of printer paper and a spool of scotch tape. I’m not suggesting that people are going to start using the cubicles for drugs, sex, or contraband, just because they can. I’m saying that people will already use any relatively secure or temporarily private space for all of those purposes, and I can’t see anything that would keep people from doing the same with the Jabbrrbox compartments. Again, I don’t expect everyone to turn one of these cubicles into a drug den or a brothel, but it wouldn’t take more than one such bad actor to put an entire bank of them out of service…

That seems unfortunate, since this is a potentially useful service, and they’ve already got to deal with more common criminal activities like vandalism, credit card fraud, and a significant chance of squatters, including customers who will refuse to leave when their time is up and drunks passing out on the floor. I’ve written extensively in this space about how difficult it can be for an entrepreneurial start-up business to survive, let alone flourish, but in this case the company is going to have a lot more to deal with than the capitalization, cash flow, and customer development/marketing issues that will destroy more conventional businesses…

Now, I would be the first to admit that I don’t have any hard data on how much crime still goes on in American airports, any more than I know what percentage of air travelers are destructive nihilists or ugly drunks. I also have no idea what measures (if any) Jabbrrbox has in place to deal with the objections I’ve pointed out in this post. It’s entirely possible that I’m just being too conservative, pessimistic, or traditional in my assessment of this company’s long-term prospects for success; it’s also quite possible that the company has already got all of this figured out and are just waiting for clearance to start installing these private lounge units in airports all over the world. I’m just saying that whoever came up with this idea has a higher opinion of the general public, or even of air travelers, than I do…

The Hits Keep Coming

Suppose for a moment that a random customer of yours has just saved your company from a disaster that would have meant the loss of an asset worth at least $100 million, plus at least a few hundred wrongful death lawsuits, each of which can easily run into the millions of dollars all by itself. Let us further suppose that the employees to whom they initially reported the impending disaster did not believe their report, and only reluctantly verified the story while being particularly rude to those customers. And while we are at it, let’s suppose that the signs of impending doom that they discovered could have been noticed by any ordinary school child, and that enough witnesses exist that trying to cover up the details of the story would be asinine. Where would you expect to find those customers when the dust clears?

Well, unless you said “Sleeping on the floor in the Baggage Claim area because no one gave them a hotel voucher” you have, again, over-estimated the customer service and public relations skills of our old friends over at United Airlines. According to a story from the New York Post a United flight was departing from Newark for Italy when two of the passengers noticed fuel leaking from the airplane’s main tanks in the wing. Not just a dribble, either; they described it as looking like the stream from a fire hose. The flight attendants reacted to the report of this information by yelling at the passengers to get back in their seats, and only reluctantly looked out the window – whereupon they immediately called the cockpit and told the flight crew…

After aborting the takeoff and returning to the gate the flight crew were nice enough to the heroes of our story, personally thanking them for saving the plane and everyone aboard from the fiery (and idiotic) death the airline had unknowingly been courting. United’s ground personnel were less effusive, however, proceeding to attempt to cover up the incident, issuing a statement downplaying the leak, and trying to get everyone on the flight rebooked and overseas before they could start talking to the press. They managed to get meal vouchers to all of the passengers, but somehow failed to supply hotel vouchers to all of the customers they had just massively inconvenienced (and nearly killed), including the couple who had noticed the leak in the first place…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that these two people, a couple on their honeymoon, were the only thing standing between United and total disaster. We can probably assume that the flight crew would have noticed the rapidly dropping fuel levels, either on a routine check or when the flight computer’s alarms went off, and returned to the airport. I’m also not suggesting that the airline go to any special lengths to thank them, although one would imagine that customer retention concerns alone would make that worth the effort. I’m just pointing out that I’ve gotten better care than that when a flight I was supposed to be on was canceled at the last moment, and all I have ever done for that particular airline was buy a ticket…

Okay, so this wasn’t really an atrocity. The worst thing that seems to have happened is that a group of passengers was moderately to severely inconvenienced (if the worst thing that ever happens to you while traveling is having to sleep in an airport, you’re an extremely fortunate traveler), and any of that could have happened on any ordinary day, even without mechanical failures and employees who appear to be thick as a brick. But it does make you wonder how many close calls a single company can survive, even leaving potential air disasters out of it for the moment. Sooner or later people are going to get fed up with the various United shenanigans and start voting with their feet. You might expect that the company would want to put off that day for as long as possible, or at least avoid any billion-dollar disasters in the meantime…

But unless this story turns out to be a hoax, you’d be wrong about that, too…

Consider the odds

If anyone out there is surprised at hearing about new and different examples of airline personnel screwing up by the numbers no one has mentioned it to me. It’s possible that this is the result of all of us getting desensitized to these stories because of how often they come up, or perhaps the increasing deluge of horrible and horrifying news is making all of us jaded. For the record, I don’t believe that the world is actually getting worse; I think it’s far more likely that as the world becomes increasingly interconnected we’re getting more information of all kinds, good and bad. I do consider the most recent story, which is being brought to you by United Airlines (the people behind the Dave Carroll episode!) is particularly inept, but I think it speaks as much to the size of the problem as it does to any specific airline or airport…

If you missed the original story you can pick it up off the Washington Post site. It’s another one of those cases of a United supervisor trying to have their own way instead of thinking, in this case continuing to insist that a musician travelling on a United flight had to check her 17^th Century violin despite Federal law that explicitly gives musicians the right to carry their instruments aboard. In this specific case, the musician had informed the airline at the time she booked her ticket that this carry-on arrangement would be necessary, and told the gate agents that she would leave and take a different airline if they wouldn’t let her carry her violin with her. For the supervisor to have continued to insist on checking the instrument at that point is absurd, as well as illegal, but when the supervisor made a sudden lunge and tried to rip the violin case out of the passenger’s hands it crossed the line into a level of stupid that we rarely see even in Airline stories…

Fortunately for the airline their passenger was not permanently injured during the ensuing wrestling match; even more fortunately, she has apparently decided that she has better things to do than suing the airline. Why, exactly, someone in a supervisory position was either unaware of the laws regarding this situation or too pig-headed to obey them (or both) is beyond me, but I think it points up just how complex the customer service function is in this industry. Consider, if you will, that the last time I checked the US airline industry moves somewhere over 2.2 million people a day – on the order of 820 million people per year. That means that even if screw-ups like this one are literally one in a million, there will be a couple of them every day, and over 800 in a year. It also means that the various airlines could get everything perfectly right 819,999,948 time each year and we would still have an atrocity like this one going on somewhere every week on the average. Or, if you like, every company in the industry could get every one of its people certified to Six Sigma standards and there would still be around 2,780 failures per year (about 53 per week), although admittedly not all of them would be this idiotic…

It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) that even in the Airline industry, where customer service failures can result in million-dollar fines, billion-dollar lawsuits, and potentially even deaths, customer service is apparently still being regarded as an expensive function that does not generate any income. I don’t know how much longer the industry can go on this way, and I don’t know how many additional companies can go bankrupt before people stop blaming rising fuel prices, uncooperative unions, or fickle customers, and figure out that what is really killing these companies is management incompetence and inadequate customer service…

Or that, at least in this case, those two factors are one and the same…

The Truth

If you’ve been following the last two posts (assuming that anyone is reading any of these posts) you may have been asking why the management failures I’m describing keep happening. How could anyone be daft enough to issue contradictory orders to their employees? For that matter, why would anyone treat all of the customers (without whom we do not have a business) as though they were compulsive thieves who routinely steal everything that isn’t nailed down? I could make any number of nasty, sarcastic remarks at this point, but the truth is that like so many other things, operational management of any public-contact organization is harder than it looks…

Spend any length of time in any large retail store, for example, and you will come upon physical traces of shoplifting, such as the boxes expensive merchandise arrived in that have been emptied when the thief stashed the actual product on their person. If the store carries groceries you will find signs of “grazing” – people walking through the store, eating as they go, and then leaving without paying for any of their meal. Check out the back room and you will probably find evidence of employee fraud – all it takes is opportunity and the ability to rationalize the theft; even need is secondary. The only thing that will prevent either problem is an increased chance of getting caught; countermeasures like video cameras are useless if no one is ever monitoring their pictures, and the severity of the punishment threatened is irrelevant if no one will ever have to face those consequences…

It is possible to offset some of the theft problem with security tags and cameras, but the only fail-safe method is simply raising prices to cover the cost of the losses – and as noted elsewhere on this blog, any shoplifter who believes that the company won’t do this is kidding him or herself, and stealing from the community more than the store. You can beat the customer service contradiction by just accepting that some people are going to try cheating the company at the service desk and telling your supervisors to make the customer happy, no matter how absurd the customer’s demands happen to be. But if you want to combat any of these issues without simply shoveling money out the window, the only other choice is to get busy…

A manager who knows his or her employees can develop their people, promote and reward the good ones and eliminate the completely crooked. A good loss-prevention team can catch the most blatant thieves and fraudsters in the act, and thwart many of the others with simple active countermeasures like careful inventory control and locked displays. A management team that is committed to excellence in customer service can support their front-line personnel, take on the worst cases themselves, and never second-guess the unfortunate line supervisor who got stuck dealing with a “screamer” at some obscene hour of the morning. The problem is that all of these things take effort…

Now, no one who has ever done it would ever suggest that customer service management is easy. The hours are absurd, the conditions are terrible, and as the only exempt personnel in the company, the line managers are the lucky ones who get to deal with every extra detail for which the company does not have overtime hours available. Taking the time to walk the aisles and get to know everybody in the building at any given time is a huge drain on time and resources that you probably don’t have. But as I have noted on a number of occasions, if you study the dominant company in any given field it will probably be the firm with the best customer service, and in many cases it will also be listed as the best place to work. The bottom line is that we can blame lazy, thieving employees and greedy, thieving “customers” all we want to, but the success or failure of any company that makes its living off of direct interactions with the public is up to the management team. It’s on us…

It may be an unpleasant truth. But it is still the truth…

Mine

It’s a truism in the Service Sector – at least among management personnel – that it’s always the nice customers with whom you have to be the most careful. Bad customers, whether absurdly entitled, short-tempered, fault-finding, easily offended, bigoted, smug, condescending, mind-numbingly cheap, exceptionally rude, chronically late for everything, out of touch with current pricing, oblivious to health and safety regulations, unafraid of the law, or simply whacked out of their tiny little minds are not going to alter their behavior not matter what we do, and that includes boycotting our business. In fact, some of these oddballs will actually refuse to do business with any company that does not give them things to complain about. In many cases, it is doubtful if you could actually lose these customers if you tried, and there would be little to worry about if you did. They’re not really the problem…

The real problem are those customers who will arrive without fuss, behave politely, follow any clear signage or instructions, pay the appropriate price for the product or service – and leave, never to return, if treated badly by the customer service personnel. In fact, if your company’s customer service personnel are sufficiently incompetent, or if your company’s customer service policies are sufficiently horrendous, you may be quietly hemorrhaging these customers and never know it until the firm starts to go bankrupt…

Now, I’m not suggesting that the customer service function is easy, or that managing personnel who perform that function isn’t a challenge. The truth is that while inventory loss due to customer actions – shoplifting as well as vandalism – does not approach the losses most businesses experience due to employee theft and damage, those actions are much more exasperating to the front-line personnel who have to clean up the resulting mess, and front-line managers who have to deal with both the horrible customers (and outright thieves) and the corrosive effect they have on the employees. It does not take many episodes of being lied to, cheated, insulted, abused, or grossly inconvenienced before the average person will realize that any given visitor may turn out to be completely monstrous and start treating everyone as a potential criminal…

In many cases the “nice” customers are the counterpart of our “loyal” employees – the people who adhere to company policy, do their best to perform their job duties correctly despite the miserable conditions and insulting salaries, and would never dream of stealing. Treating these people as potential thieves and embezzlers makes no more sense than treating all customers as potential shoplifters and vandals. Where this becomes a critical problem is when a loyal employee is trying to adhere to the company policies and rules (standards to which the company is holding them) but in doing so outrages a customer, either because the customer really is a thief or a scam artist, or because they’re a nice customer who resents this treatment. This can, and frequently does, result in a situation where the employees know that if they deviate from company policy they will be fired, but if they comply with company policy and a customer complains about them (either because they’ve been thwarted from taking criminal actions or because they’re honest people who would never resort to criminal actions – the behavior is generally the same) they will be fired anyway…

Faced with this kind of Catch-22 situation, many employees will attempt to balance the need to conform to absolute, arbitrary rules written by people who may be completely out of touch with the realities of front-line customer service and the need to placate difficult, dishonest, or completely sociopathic customers. However, some employees will become disillusioned, engage in counterproductive work behaviors (from loafing to outright theft), or just quit, resulting in many of the problems described in the previous post. After all, being threatened with termination (or actually being terminated) so that a thieving “customer” can successful steal from the company is completely unjust, and utterly violates the implied social contract between the employee and his or her supervisor…

There have been a number of attempts to change this situation, or at least contain the most damaging parts, to both the employees and the customers who would actually be worth having. But that will bring us to Part Three of the story…

Yours

I was wandering around on the always entertaining Not Always Right site, laughing at some of the obviously stupid events (and stewing over some of the injustice) when I ran across one of the frequent comments about companies siding with customers – including abusive, lying and thieving customers – over loyal employees. Regular readers of this blog (assuming I have any) already know that I’ve been on both sides of this issue over the years. Some of you may recall that my hopscotch career has included stops in Retail and Cable Television, both on the Customer Service side, where I’ve seen most of these issues play out. This is where I developed the contention, often expressed in these posts, that people who want you to do things for their benefit that provide no advantage to the company aren’t really customers, and should be treated accordingly. But when I read the most recent examples on NAR, I was struck by the fact that like all stories, the issue of loyalty to the company versus loyalty to the employees has three sides: Yours, Mine, and the Truth…

Consider, for example, the issues inherent in managing a retail store. In any crew, there will be people who will faithfully serve the company in miserable conditions for minimal reward for decades at a time and adhere to every regulation the company applies. Regrettably, the converse is also true: on every store’s roster you will find people who can’t get through a single 8-hour shift without stealing anything that isn’t nailed down. In fact, there are several authorities who will tell you that more theft and damage is caused by the employees than the customers and the general public put together. That doesn’t even count the assets and merchandise that are lost by careless employees, destroyed by ignorant (or occasionally just stupid) employees, or stolen under the noses of oblivious employees. That isn’t the worst of it, though…

In retail, as in most front-line customer service applications, a single mistake can wipe out all of the progress you have made in the previous twenty-seven successful sales. That is, a sufficiently angry customer will generally tell between twenty-five and thirty (it depends on who you ask) other people about how appalling your service and/or product was. That statistic does include psychopaths who will be outraged by what color the sky is that day, and the easily-offended people who will consider the cashier’s hairstyle to be a vicious cultural insult, but it also includes perfectly normal people who happened to ask an employee an unfortunately annoying question on a particularly difficult day. And while a satisfied customer will tell four people about a positive experience (thus lowering the ratio to a still-horrendous seven-to-one), it can be difficult to generate any particularly positive experiences during a simple interaction like a retail purchase. That isn’t the worst of it, either…

For most of the retail managers I’ve worked with, met, interviewed, read about, consulted with, or in recent years taught in the Business College, the worst aspect of running a business that offers insultingly low pay, laughable benefits, miserable working conditions, mind-numbing job duties, and the constant risks and aggravations of working with the general public, is simply the fact that almost no one wants to do the job in the first place. Turnover is a constant problem, with people leaving to take better jobs at their first opportunity, but absenteeism, tardiness, low work performance (or zero work performance), fake worker’s compensation cases, real worker’s compensation cases, disciplinary issues, and abuse of the handful of benefits actually available to the employees makes this one of the most challenging Management roles in any free-market economy. And while the theft issues are not as much of an issue in the Service sector, work avoidance, social loafing, freeriding, and abuse of both company assets and the available benefits are, if anything, even worse…

All things considered, it’s not actually that surprising that the people running the company, who we should remember are responsible for keeping the doors open, the lights on, and the payroll checks from bouncing, might place greater importance on the people who come to their place of business to give them money than they do upon the workers they employ. But this is only Part One of the story…

Doubling Down

In my last post, I joined with the thousands (millions?) of other bloggers out there who are piling on to United Airlines for their determination to set customer relations back a hundred years by not just bumping customers off of overbooked flights but actually using the seats freed up that way to move their own employees around the country. Since the story first broke the victim in the original story has retained legal counsel and the CEO of United has issued a real apology for the incident – in that order, unfortunately. Whether that will help with the multiple lawsuits that are about the hit the company remains to be seen, but over the last day or so a similar event has popped up in the news that has even more disturbing implications…

You can pick up the original story off of the Los Angeles Times website if you want to, but apparently there was a United passenger who needed to get from Hawaii to Los Angeles in time for a business meeting, so he paid for a full-price first-class ticket. He had already boarded the plane on Kauai and was enjoying the complimentary orange juice prior to takeoff when a United ramp agent ran onto the plane and told him he had to get off. Upon asking, the passenger in our story discovered that United had overbooked the flight, and were going to give away his seat to a passenger with “higher status.” Apparently there is a pecking order among frequent flyers (based on number of hours flown, maybe?), and the company will cheerfully screw over anyone if a higher-ranking customer wants their seat…

I’m already on record as saying that the company’s handling of the original situation was asinine, and I’ll stand behind that, but at least we can consider the idea that moving the four crew members would prevent the cancellation of an entire flight – that is, the company was accepting annoying four customers to avoid completely browning off two hundred of them. In the Hawaii case, however, the only advantage the company seems to have gained was the chance to suck up to someone who already flies with them all the time, while at the same time costing themselves another frequent flyer, everyone from his company, and anyone else who might be concerned with being bumped off their flight by someone whom the airline likes more than them…

Now, we should probably note that, like overbooking, bumping passengers to make room for VIP customers is a long-standing practice on all of the airlines. In some cases there might even be a sound business reason for doing so, as in the case of emergency travel or a family trying to get somewhere together. But the idea that every business practice that was acceptable in 1931 (when the company began flight operations) is still reasonable today is utter nonsense, and the assumption that your customers will put up with being displaced purely at the whim of some slightly more frequent flyer is demonstrably preposterous. It took a week of pushback, and the threat of even more legal action, before the company even came up with a written apology and reimbursed the customer for the price difference between his full-fare first-class ticket and the middle seat in Economy class they ended up sticking him into…

I’m not sure how much more of this knavery, chicanery and buffoonery the United Airlines stockholders are going to tolerate; I know that I personally would have started demanding resignations from everyone responsible for this crap starting with the “United Breaks Guitars” episode involving Dave Carroll. I’m also fairly sure there’s a limit to the number of times a company facing strong competition, rising costs, falling revenues, customer dissatisfaction, and an increasingly hostile operating environment world-wide can go alienating current and potential customers by making mistakes that any small child could tell them are idiotic…

Piling On

I’m not sure what I can say about the current United Airlines situation that hasn’t been said by millions of business bloggers (and travel bloggers, one assumes) since the story broke. If you missed it, the story goes that United had oversold a flight from Chicago to Louisville, and then compounded the problem by trying to get four passengers to give up their seats so that a flight crew could get to Louisville in time for the flight they were supposed to work the next day. When no one volunteered, the airline selected four passengers who were already on board the aircraft and attempted to eject them. One of these four people took exception to being forced to give up his seat, refused to leave the plane, and was eventually forcibly removed by ground security personnel – literally kicking and screaming…

In any era prior to this one, the whole episode would probably not have made it onto the local television news; it might have made the local paper if it was reported at all. Unfortunately, in an age when almost literally everyone carries a camera around with them every day it is unrealistic to expect that no one on the plane wouldn’t have recorded video of the whole thing and posted it to various social networking sites before the flight even took off. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that a graphic (and to some extent disturbing) video like this one would have gone viral immediately, either, or that this would cause additional Public Relations nightmares for a company that isn’t exactly known for good PR or good customer relations. Why it appears to have come as a surprise to senior management is beyond me…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that overbooking flights – and bumping people off of them when necessary – has been standard practice within the airline industry for decades. It’s completely legal, and in fact you have already agreed to put up with it – there is a clause in your ticket agreement that give the airline the explicit right to do that. It is also probably worth noting that for most of its existence, the airline industry has wielded enormous political and financial power in the US, and senior management personnel have apparently gotten used to answering to their stockholders, the FAA, Congress and the Unions before they consider what their customers might want. And I’m sure you already know that most people my age and older don’t automatically think about how the world will view their actions, if only because they don’t think of the world as watching them…

What struck me about the affair wasn’t the remarkable tone-deafness of the management team, as demonstrated by the CEO’s non-apology for the events, or the laughable incompetence displayed by the customer service personnel involved. It was the fact that United appears to see this whole situation as being nothing more than business as usual; this is the way they have done business for generations, and they see no reason to change now. But the fact is this level of disregard for your customers and disdain for anything they or the general public might feel about your company would have represented gross incompetence even before any given disgruntled passenger could share his or her gripes with every other potential customer in the world in a matter of seconds. And even more importantly, perhaps, this situation is not going to change…

As we plummet ever further into this new century, every customer-contact position must be treated as if everyone in the world is watching, because they effectively are. And every employee who holds such a position needs to be trained to ask him or herself how they would handle the situation in front of them if the whole affair was going to appear on every television and Internet news channel in the world within a few minutes, because it probably will be. Simple, ordinary, it-could-happen-to-anybody mistakes will be bad enough; errors that involve callous disregard for your customers, putting the company’s interest ahead of the customers, or violation of either criminal or civil law will at minimum damage your corporate image and credibility, and may very well end up destroying the entire company if you annoy enough of the wrong people badly enough…

But that’s a story for another day…

How Stuff Works: Franchises

I was reading a story earlier this week about a man who owned a Dairy Queen franchise who apparently did not understand how a franchise agreement works. I say that because after he went off on a racist tirade that was captured on video and posted online he was still surprised when the parent company revoked his franchise and closed the location he had previously run. The only explanation I can imagine for the original meltdown, let alone the naïve belief that a public apology would be enough to extricate himself from this mess, was that the former franchisee believed that since he owned and operated his own business, no one could call him into account for behaving like an ass in front of customers or making the company look bad. But in a franchise arrangement this isn’t always the case…

You can find the original story from the Washington Post here if you want to, but there isn’t a whole lot more to it. James “Jim” Crichton had been the franchise owner of the Dairy Queen location in Zion, IL, until he was unwise enough to get caught on video yelling racist epithets and profanity at a customer. Although Mr. Crichton tried issuing a public apology and promising to put himself and his staff through sensitivity training, the parent company was no more impressed by that offer than the community in Zion was, although I would imagine the fact that one of the things he was recorded as saying was that he could call anybody anything he wanted to in his own restaurant probably didn’t help in either case…

The reason I am calling Mr. Crichton’s understanding of franchises into question is that control over the operation of these locations is the entire point of franchising a Dairy Queen in the first place – at least, as far as the company is concerned. Selling somebody a franchise license is, by definition, cheaper than building and staffing a new store yourself. Once the franchise makes back the franchise fee the subsequent profits will be much lower for the company, but that can take years, and long before that happens the company should be able to sell another franchise somewhere else. But if it were to become known that any Dairy Queen franchise is selling an inferior product, or, as in this case, an inferior dining experience, the company’s chances of selling either Dairy Queen products or additional franchises will drop significantly…

For this reason, all major franchise contracts incorporate quality standards, and most of the ones that involve consumer services also place requirements on the behavior and conduct of the operator and his or her employees. Without seeing the Dairy Queen franchise contract I can’t tell you how strict their version happens to be, or how draconian the penalties for failing those quality standards are, but the ones I’ve seen from other fast food chains also had provisions that would have allowed the parent company to revoke the franchise under these conditions. In the case of a McDonald’s franchise, the company would not have to return the franchise fee, either, and a McDonald’s franchise can run upwards of $2 million USD just for permission to start one. Unless the Dairy Queen corporation is a great deal more understanding than any other I’ve ever heard of, the tantrum in the linked story may turn out to have been a seven-figure mistake…

Now, I don’t want to suggest that franchises, or even licensing agreements, are by any means simple. There is no way I would ever negotiate, let alone sign, such an agreement without advice of counsel and a great deal of background research. But in all honesty, if I’m going to sign a multi-page contract that not only lays out how much money I have to pay someone else but also the conditions under which they can repossess the property they are selling me without refunding my money, I’m going to be very careful about remaining in compliance with that agreement. Because the fact is, despite the name, you don’t really own a franchised business. You may control certain rights, but ultimately you are operating a branch of somebody else’s company, and they can and will dictate the terms and conditions under which you are allowed to do so…

If that idea bothers you, or if you want to truly have the right to scream any racist, sexist, profane or stupid thing you want in your place of business, then you’re going to have to start your own…

Watching Them Watching Us

I stumbled across an article this week – it’s Maureen Dowd’s op-ed piece in the New York Times – talking about how people using the Uber service are rated by the drivers at the same time and in the same ways they rate their drivers. There have already been issues with Uber drivers, who are all independent contractors not employed by the company, not conforming to the same standards of service or safety; there have also been cases of complaints about user ratings that are delivered by mean, spiteful, or simply insane customers that bear no relationship whatsoever to what actually occurred. This kind of thing is to be expected in any customer service position, of course, and it’s one of the primary reasons it is so difficult to maintain staff levels in those positions. But this is the first case I have ever seen where customer service personnel are being allowed to rate their customers – with a similar disregard for accuracy or fairness…

In the article, Ms. Dowd notes that while some of these reviews are based on interactions with the customer – such as people who keep the driver waiting or are rude during the ride – some of them are as simple and petty as people who are not fun, friendly or appealing to drive around, and even worse, there does not appear to be any control in place over these potentially damaging ratings. The author goes on to note that some users recommend paying additional cash tips (ones which will not be reported to the company or the IRS unless the driver wants them to be) and promising to give the driver a 5-out-of-5 rating in return for receiving one as a customer. However, there’s no way to tell how prevalent such methods are, or what effect (if any) they actually have on your desirability as a customer…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that any public-contact job is going to be made more difficult by the tiny percentage of customers who will inevitably end up being horrible people. In the case of Uber drivers, we’ve already had stories about drivers refusing to pick up people with service animals, people who did not appear to be sufficiently clean, or people who smelled bad, and having people throw up during the ride has become so common that the company has had to institute a standard fee for cleaning it up. There haven’t been any confirmed cases of customers using an Uber ride as a washroom or a brothel yet, but it’s not clear whether those things haven’t happened or if those cases just haven’t reached the media. Even the company itself would have no way of knowing about any such incident unless the driver elected to report it…

Given these working conditions, and the fact that Uber drivers have to be able to see a user’s profile before they can offer to pick up that user in the first place, I think we can assume that an ad hoc system of rating customers – and passing notes about which ones to avoid – would probably have come into being by now even if the company hadn’t chosen to provide one. In theory, such a system should help to enforce basic rules of behavior and courtesy for Uber passengers, just as the rating system for drivers should enforce rules about service, safety and upkeep on the vehicles; bad customers will not get offered a ride, and bad drivers will not get taken up on any offers to provide one. What isn’t clear is how often this system will lead to additional abuse – and what the company can be expected to do about the situation…

Imagine someone whose Uber passenger rating gets to be so bad that no one will stop to pick them up, forcing them to use a (generally much more expensive) conventional taxi. Now suppose that a driver does stop to pick them up, but will only agree to provide transportation if given a large cash-only tip – effectively raising the price of the ride. How long would it take before all of the drivers started demanding such tips in return for a 5-out-of-five rider review? Can the riders fight back by threatening to leave a poor driver review in retaliation? Or, more to the point, perhaps, how long is it going to be before all of the ratings are either quid pro quo arrangements or retaliation against the other party, all of which are completely useless to anyone (driver or passenger) trying to use the system?

This issue has always been a problem for sites that offer customer reviews of anything, from Amazon to online service providers, but unless the company has some revolutionary new approach that we haven’t seen yet, the problem has just taken on all new dimensions…