A few days ago I went to a well-known perfumery which also stocks make-up. I was looking for a specific item and since I knew that the shop in question stocked the particular brand I was after, I trotted there on my lunch break.
After searching fruitlessly for a few minutes, I decided to hail one of the salesgirls who was just meandering around aimlessly in that wonderful gormless way that the completely unbusy and uninterested have. I enthusiastically explained what I was after and was greeted with blank confusion.
She called over another less graceful lady for whom it was not enough to merely say that they didn’t have it in stock and probably never would. Instead, this wonderful specimen of humanity decided to do that wonderful thing that many Maltese people do when faced with the constraints of their own ignorance: she decided to mock me.
I was asked to explain what it did in minute detail and after I did, I was roundly and almost smugly informed that she had never heard of this magical item that half of Europe and America are using and, if such a thing did indeed exist at all, they would not be stocking it because apparently, Maltese people don’t care about the latest trends.
I didn’t bother to show her my Google searches or any photos of the item because by then I had already decided that I would just save myself further time, energy and money and buy the item off the internet for a fraction of the price. Yes, the customer service was as ghastly as usual but that’s not what I want to focus on today.
It’s your ability to smile and be helpful that will ultimately keep paying your own bills; a shop with no customers soon becomes a shop with no employees
The main problem as far as I am concerned is not just the base rudeness but it is the lack of knowledge and basic interest many show in their jobs.
I have always wondered, sometimes quite loudly, how people who work in one place for eight hours a day, five or seven days a week, manage to escape learning anything at all about the brands they are so ineffectively meant to hawk.
Even if by habit or general boredom I would at least expect people to know the basics of the brands they are representing; I would expect them to care about the seasonal colour palettes or at least feign interest. However, all strata of our job society are littered with people who take no pride in their work at best and go around being rude and complacent if anyone merely infers their service to be inferior, at worst.
Secretaries who can’t answer the phone, designers who wouldn’t know the difference between Galliano and Schiaparelli if you hit them on the head with a Bible (and that’s if they’ve even heard of the aforementioned titans); even insurance agencies and government departments use me as a human ping pong ball and just redirect me from place to place with incorrect instructions.
However, if I even dare to complain that no one is doing their job or knows what it is they are meant to be doing, I am given the kind of entitled attitude that makes Mariah Carey look like Mother Teresa’s mentor in humility.
When a customer knows your brand better than you do, it doesn’t mean that they are haughty or that they have nothing better to do: it means that you need to get a grip and actually give the service you’re being paid to.
A customer well taken care of is a customer who will feel more inclined to return to your badly-painted, shabby shop which looks like a throwback of the worst of the 1980s instead of ordering everything from the comfort of their own home. It’s your ability to smile and be helpful that will ultimately keep paying your own bills; a shop with no customers soon becomes a shop with no employees.