I can't believe how many people in retail/food service have never heard of the concept of CUSTOMER SERVICE! As a retail employee, if I am chatting with a co-worker, and a customer walks in, I stop mid-sentence to greet the customer and ask if I can help them. Partly because I view customer service as important, and partly because I don't want to offend any customers(my co-worker and I talk about politics on occasion).
I mean seriously, Customer Service 101 is: "Always acknowledge the customer" If you are busy, you at least tell the customer "I'll be with you in just a moment" or something tot hat effect.
OH! I just thought of a bad_service! It didn't happen TO me, but WITH me. My first day at Kinko's...I am assigned to do some self-serve/greeter/cashier training with this girl, we'll call her, "J". She seems nice enough, and we start talking about customers, the copy machines, how they work. I was given a checklist of stuff to go over. I keep trying to get her to answer the questions I have related to the checklist, but she doesn't really get to it.
Fast forward to a customer interaction. We are walking to the production area when a customer comes in. She goes to ask a question and J turns, gives this rude glare and says "I'll be right with you" and a snotty tone.
I told an AM about it and apparently, they have had problems with her before and have had complaints. The whole day of my training was full of her being rude and snotty to customers. I felt bad too, because I was shadowing her and felt that the customers thought that I was also rude by proxy or something. I tried to keep an apologetic look the whole time. The AM said that it makes her have a good opinion of me because I was able to recognize bad customer service. =)
...J got fired not too long after that.
So yeah, just thought I'd share.
