Customer service

A friend of mine was telling me the other day about ordering a plant last spring he had seen advertised on television. The plant was shipped promptly and planted but it didn't really take root and my friend was disappointed to the point that he called the company. They apologized for the bad results but told him they were totally sold out of that particular plant. He was pretty upset, thinking he had been taken for a ride and didn't think much about it when they told him they would send him a replacement plant THIS Spring. Yesterday, a year later and true to their word, he received his plant and he went from being a disenchanted customer to a return customer.

Good customer service is the key element to any successful business because, regardless of how good a product is, there will always be people who aren't satisfied for a variety of reasons and how their complaints and concerns are handled often times makes or breaks a company.

An interesting development locally has been how businesses are dealing with the state-wide ban on smoking, especially bars and clubs, which have more smokers per capita than practically any other kind of business. Smoking and drinking apparently go hand in hand.

Some owners took action immediately when the ban went into effect. They built smoking rooms on to their existing structures or simply opened up structures that were already there for the comfort and convenience of their customers. Other owners didn't act as quickly and a couple of owners didn't act at all.

One bar in particular recently completed a smoking room add-on at the rear of the bar that most likely didn't come cheap and it's a very nice addition. It's partly open-air as required by law, it has tables, chairs, and umbrellas and has already proven to be popular with the customers. The surprising thing is that management won't send a bartender or waitress back to the smoking room to take drink orders. When asked about that recently as I was sitting in the main bar having a cocktail after work with a friend of mine, the manager replied in surly tones that the people in the smoking room could come back in the bar and get their own drinks.

This conversation took place when there were more customers out in the smoking room than in the bar proper but the manager didn't seem to care about that. I was surprised by his attitude and tone since we have always gotten along well and dropped the subject.

I knew that most of the bars in town provided service to their customers sitting in smoking areas and so, when I got home, I called the other bars I wasn't sure about and discovered that all of them provide this service which baffled me about the one that didn't even more.

There's an old saying in business that if you take care of your customers, they'll take care of you and everything I read and hear confirms that adage. But, on the other hand, when you treat your customers with disdain and act like you don't care whether their needs are being served or not, those customers will often take their business someplace else.

In human relations, whether they be personal, romantic or business, we tend to get what we give.