Do we just except bad service.

We have all at one point in our lives received bad service, if you say that you have never received bad service then you are either an infant with an all giving mother, or you have locked yourself in a room and again you have an all giving mother to bring you food and drink.

I was reading an article on news24 where they mentioned bad service, which got me thinking. Why does bad service exist? After some thought a few reasons came to mind. Firstly we have to look at who is serving us, for example when you go to KFC or steers you are not expecting the royal treatment, all you want is your meal and you want it fast.

You don’t want your chips to be forgotten so that as soon as you arrive at your house and sit down to eat jour meal you realise that there aren’t any, and it would take you an extra 30minutes to go back and argue what you paid for.
However the truth is you are served by people who don’t want to be there and really don’t give a dam that you’re starving because they earn so little it actually isn’t a priority to them.

How long have you spent waiting in bank queues? Now I don’t know about you but I work 5 days a week and some weekends. When I go to the bank it is generally on a Saturday, does anyone else find it odd that they are only open till eleven on their busiest day? And only open till four every other day of the week, when you work until 5 what is that about. Technically a bank should be offering you a service not trying purposefully to inconvenience you and charging you for it. So you take your precious day of your weekend and spend half of it waiting in a queue because they can’t have the foresight to plan ahead.

I was at the Vodaworld the other day, the flagship store for Vodacom trying to enquire about a 3g card. Wait for it another line. I waited a half hour to be told I was in the wrong line. No wonder they need a golf course there while you wait, because you’ll finish 18 holes before you get any service.
How often do you go to a restaurant and find your waiter just doesn’t know what he/she are doing, he forgets your drink order and then forgets to take the mushrooms off your pizza for example. Or you spend 30 minutes just waiting for a glass of water, because that doesn’t contribute to your waiters tip.

These are just a few examples. My question is have we just come to expect crap service from everywhere, and what are we doing to stop it?

When last did you send you food back because it was cold or it wasn’t what you ordered, the fact is as long as you don’t the cycle will continue. If you wait longer than a half hour in a bank, report it on hello Peter and join a new bank that has better facilities and they are out there. If your chips were forgotten, don’t just leave it, you paid for them demand another meal and fill out one of the service cards. Start remembering the names of people who serve you. There are thousands of people unemployed in this country why not let someone who is good at the job do it.
I know this is really an entire blog of moaning but quite frankly I’m fed up with having my time and money wasted on a daily bases. If the people aren’t interested because they need more pay, maybe the institution employing them needs to think about that. If they need more training maybe they need to think about that too. Maybe they need better processes or maybe they need to think about that. But they are never going to know unless people say something.

If you are in a restaurant and you don’t get the food you want and you think if you complain they will bring you back food that has been spat on simply get up and leave the restaurant. I did that the other night not quite the same but I was at Cabana and I asked for a glass of water as I am on a diet, Lionel who was with me ordered one to. They asked us if we wanted sparkling or still, we said tap. Call me whatever you like but I refused to pay for water in a country where free water is healthy. They said they only served sparkling or still and refused to give us tap water. We opted to leave and I found a great restaurant up stairs that had fantastic meals and offered tap water, Cabana lost out on a R600 tab and I found a restaurant I will continue to go to in the future.

Why just accept things the way they are when we have a choice? This is not about saving R7 on water, it’s about not doing something you don’t want to, if Vodacom is going to take all day to serve you, go with MTN, and if you can’t get a Telkom phone go with Neotel. If the supermarket is full and only five tills are open go to another supermarket in future. Stop accepting and then complaining about how you had to wait for ages. Which I know is ironic because it is pretty much what I am doing now, but maybe we can all learn from my mistakes.

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