Tag Archives: service

The Underlying Problem of Giving Them the Pickle

Business, Education, Healthcare, , , , , , , , ,

Pickle

Just recently, I was working for a health care organization that seemed to be having some difficulty in customer service. As a result, the higher-ups thought it would be really beneficial if the education department (of which I was a part) took up the task of teaching customer service to the front line employees, specifically the people who engage patients when they come to the hospital system. So, after a few meetings that consisted of management explaining how customer service needs to improve (in which I was reminded of the infamous pro dominant adage of “We will beat our slaves until moral improves” but I digress), we were then shown a motivational film that’s been making the circuit called “Give Them the Pickle.” In case you’re not familiar with this film, it features the creator of the ice cream parlor Farrell’s as he explains how a customer got really upset in one of his establishments because he asked for an extra pickle and was then told that pickles are extra, or something like that. This started a whole series of adventures where this owner decided to change the customer service model of his franchise forever. There may have been an “and they lived happily ever after” at the end of it as well. I’ll admit, it was motivational and it was a good presentation. But it seemed to miss a few things, specifically when dealing with the company where I just worked.

First, the problem inherent in our company has a lot more to do with service than just customer service. To begin with, customer service tends to be lacking WITHIN the organization, so that quite often it can be a bit difficult to deal with other parts of the company because of the silos that have been created and maintained. When you have that sort of atmosphere going on, telling those same employees that they now need to focus on customer service when they’re having enough trouble providing company service to each other, well, there’s a dysfunction already harming the larger issue.

One day last year, I was on the bus near the main hospital when I overheard a conversation between a bunch of the passengers. One said something about our hospital, as in he’s never been there and people always told him to avoid it. And then people chimed in about how the people that worked there were rude, the services were all overpriced, and not a single one of them failed to mention our competition as the better facility to go in case you ever need health care needs fulfilled. I brought this conversation back to my organization when I first heard it, and the immediate response I received from management was a reinterpretation of the message, that they were complaining because they couldn’t afford the good health care that was provided by our establishment, not that it was overpriced; when it came to the customer service part, they just continued talking about how because they were already miffed at the prices, they would interpret anything else as negative. Basically, they had solid information from people who were complaining, and the response was that obviously they were confused about what they were complaining about, so nothing needs to be changed.

This is the organization that now needs to “improve” customer service by teaching employees how to give free pickles as ice cream parlors. Keep in mind that we don’t give out free health care, free testing supplies (or tests), cut rates on surgery, an actual better product than any other health care facility (even though the argument keeps being made that they do, based on a sample size of none, as statistics don’t really make a lot of sense when you’re comparing to yourself (one divided by one still does manage to equal one).

So, how do you improve customer service when you actually don’t pay any attention to the public to whom you are now supposed to be providing better customer service? The simple answer is you don’t. The solution isn’t really a riddle, but an acknowledgement that perhaps we need to go out into the population and talk to them, find out what they would like from a large hospital system that claims to know what they need without actually asking them, and perhaps worrying less about pickles and more about why people might be there in the first place. I was in the hospital last year with a kidney problem, and I was scared during the time I was in there. One of the worst doctors I’ve ever experienced was one who was actually from the place where I worked. She didn’t care one iota about how her patients felt, and she was kind of a moron as well (which as a communications person, I attributed to the fact that she had zero listening skills, which made her diagnosis work absurdly bad).

Which brings me back to the whole communication aspect of this whole situation, which you probably should have guessed it would come in at some point or another. If you want to figure out what’s wrong with your customer service, talk to your customers and try to find out. It’s a good thing to look at comment cards and all that, but quite often a comment card is one of those things logged AFTER a bad experience, which means you don’t really have the opportunity to fix what was wrong, and like the place where I worked, they probably never will.

Some of these things should go without being said, but unfortunately I think that’s the problem. They haven’t been said, and thus, people are now convinced they have the answers after having watched some old entrepreneur talk about giving pickles to customers when they ask for them.

Secret Service Agents Fired for Being Cheapskates with Hookers

News, Politics, , , , , , ,

You know, when it comes down to it, the Secret Service agents who were fired (retired, or whatever) from service were let go because one of them allegedly decided to screw over an escort after she had spent the night in his room for an agreed amount of money that he decided not to pay. According to an interview with the woman, she agreed to come to be his escort for the night for $800, and when it came time for paying after it was all over, he tried to give her $30 and send her on her way. Now, you can think whatever you want about whether or not things were right or wrong; the reason this whole situation blew out of control was because one Secret Service agent decided to renege on the contract he negotiated with the woman.

Now, their come-uppance came about because Americans have a problem with anything that involves sex. We’re a repressed country that still seems to be stuck in a Puritan mentality, while we all sit at home and watch debauchery on television as reality programming. In other words, we want to hold people to standards that we generally don’t support ourselves.

It’s the same thing with politicians. We blow a gasket whenever we discover a politican had a blow job from a woman not his wife, but we support all sorts of other people who live all sorts of depraved lifsestyle, buying their books, CDs, going to their movies and supporting them in all sorts of obnoxious ways. Statistics indicate that Americans are imbibers in all sorts of illegal drugs (from marijuana to cocaine), yet we’ll crucify anyone for smoking a joint twenty years ago when they went to college.

Basically, we’re hypocrits who don’t know when to just turn the other cheek.

But back to our Secret Service agents. If this behavior really did take place, what we basically had was a group of executive agents who partied in Colombia with the local prostitutes. It’s not illegal there, so they broke now rules. They broke “moral” codes that are put into writing by government standards. So, as politicians will generally have sex with anything that moves, and then lie about it, anyone else who gets caught is held to standards that, well, no one else follows. The Department of Defense has been releasing statements about how its rules FORBID such activity from its own soldiers, yet if you served in the military, you saw it around practically every military post in the United States and around every military post overseas. At Leonard Wood, Missouri, I remember stepping off post and finding taxi drivers that didn’t even ask you where you were going as they were so used to driving you directly to the whorehouses located all around that particular post. It was so institutionalized that cab drivers would wait in the lobby of the cathouse to get their cut of the transaction. I remember almost getting into a fist fight with a cab driver because I wanted him to drive me to an actual restaurant where I could get something to eat, not to have sex with Asian hookers working at the local whorehouses (I know that’s what they were because the cab driver spent no less than five minutes detailing “how wonderful the Vietnamese pussy is for young GIs like you”. Suffice to say, there wasn’t a single military installation I visited or served on that didn’t have some huge prostitution thing going on around it.

The point is that the miltary didn’t care. They practically supported it. So when I hear that the Department of Defense is “disappointed” in its soldiers who may have been involved, I have to seriously laugh and ask, “what the hell are you talking about?”

What’s sort of funny about this whole “scandal” is that if the executive Secret Service agent had actually just paid the money that the woman claims he promised, he’d still have a job today. Instead, he lost his. And so did a bunch of others who actually paid their agreed upon rates. Talk about being screwed. One guy, as usual, ruined it for the rest of them.

The more interesting factor is that it does open up an opportunity to talk about the real problems of prostitution, sexual slavery and trafficking. But that won’t happen. Our reason for being outraged is exactly for those reasons, the latter ones particularly. Yet, when all is said and done, we’ll railroad a bunch of people out of government service and do absolutely nothing to make life better and safer for women who are forced into lives of prostitution by greedy men who prey on them. The window for opportunity is right now, and instead, we’ll focus on how bad the Secret Service is morally, and then politicians will use it as campaign fodder for the November election. And the band will continue to play on.