Tags
Australia, Complaint, Customer, Customer service, PR, public relations, Review site, Standard of service
So I caught up with a friend of mine who did something I found quite disagreeable. We went to a lovely café with good coffee, good food and genuinely friendly and helpful staff.
She gave them a bad review on an Internet review site. Why? Because they’d run out of scones.
Seriously. Wtf. They did everything else right but they had run out of one thing. ONE THING. I find it irritating when the one thing I want to order has run out, but my response to that is not to post sparky passive aggressive reviews on the Internet. I just order something else. It wasn’t as if she rated everything else good or acceptable. No, it was all bad.
In Australia, good customer service is hard to find. Mainly in large cities. Unhelpful, lazy, rude staff with fake smiles until you dare complain is generally what you get. This café stood out for its excellent service.
I don’t see what being the customer equivalent of the rude unhelpful staff member gets you.
I had a friend who also loved complaining about minor service gripes. He once complained about the intercity train arriving 1 minute early meaning he missed the train and got to work an hour late. Honestly dude when it comes to an intercity train, it behoves you to be a couple of minutes early. It’s abominable to blame the train for your own lack of organisational skills.
There’s plenty to complain about when it comes to customer service and service provision in Australia but complaining about irrelevant shit seriously dilutes the genuine complaints.
I guess it’s all about a culture of entitlement. Yes, we do have the right to be treated well, to have good service, to not be subject to abusive behaviour, to a reasonable standard of service. We do not have the right to sit on our arses because we can’t be bothered working, or make vexatious complaints or treat others like dirt because of minor gripes.