I’m a small business guy in a world (bookselling) dominated by industry giants. So I know that to make a success in a small market, I need to offer well above and beyond the ordinary level of service.
This not only involves taking worldwide searches for obscure books as a personal challenge, but also to delivering, in person, when necessary, a customer’s book.
I will do anything and everything to get the right book into a customer’s hands – at at the best price and with a smile and some coffee and chocolate.
But there is one other aspect of service even little go-getters like me forget.
And thanks to a link from Deep Muck Big Rake, here it is:
A Deaf Mom Shares Her World: Steak N Shake Denies Service
There seems to be a happy ending here (but you should read all the posts and comments anyway – fascinating). The Steak N Shake corporate types met with the blogger who was denied service at the drive through window and are looking to make amends in making sure this never happens again.
The whole problem was that this lady cannot hear voices from the squakboxes these fast food places have in their drive through (heck, I have normal hearing and sometimes I can’t make out the mushmouth-like squakings that come out of them). So she went to the window to order and told the person there she was hard of hearing.
The clueless guy at the window (who apparently was/is a manager) stuck to policy and refused to take her order at the window – even after she showed him her hearing aids! He even threatened to call the police on her for blocking the drive through!
What I also found, and what you will find every time one of these stories are posted, the troglodyte ‘personal responsibility’ types that come out of the woodwork and post anonymous criticisms of the person wronged. In their perfect world, everyone who is treated rudely (and in this case against the ADA law) should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and shake it off. These same people would never understand what it’s like to live in the world with a disability. If I had a dollar for every rude comment or look I’ve seen thrown at my autustic son over the years, I’d own Borders.
In any case, I have a story too and I need to remind myself of it every now and then just to be on my toes. And it’s probably a good one to pass along.
I have had customers come through my back door (three steps) and I have assisted them with walker and wheelchairs and will gladly do that all the time in the future. I’m in the first floor of a century home and its not the easiest walk-through for those with physical challenges.
But this one gentlemen was not blind, nor deaf but could not speak.
I will not use the old word to describe this condition. You know what it is. But he was a chipper guy and, Heaven and all the Goddesses help me, seemed like, well, like he was doing a mime. It took me a little while to catch on that he could not speak.
I bent over backwards to serve this person and felt horrible that I didn’t pick up on it immediately. I castigated myself for days. Even though he wasn’t offended and let me know he wasn’t, I was still offended at myself for being such a clueless oaf.
With the incident that happened with Deaf Mom, one of the excuses some of the letter writers alluded to was that the guy at the window may have felt she was putting him on. Well if you check out her site and see photos of this lady, its clear that she’s not a teenager looking to give some poor counter jockey a difficult time.
(A digression: I’ve seen this in action. Back in high school I was in a car with friends who went to the local McDonalds drive through and, the one guy, in his best Elwood Blues voice, ordered four pieces of dry white toast – it was 1980 and The Blues Brothers movie was the latest hit. The actually served us toasted buns. I felt very embarrassed to be with those guys).
The bottom line, is that, in the world of customer service, you will occasionally run into people who are just out to give you a hard time – that’s no excuse to ASSUME that an otherwise harmless customer is trying to make your life difficult.
It sounds corny and trite, but the Golden Rule is still the prime directive – treat others as you would wish to be treated. Again, trite and but true: follow the rule and you’ll never go wrong.
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