The Death of Customer Service
It is official, ‘Customer Service’ is dead, RIP Customer Service. It seems that people just don’t care or try anymore, it is sad. Yesterday, I called Walgreens about a prescription I had. At the end of the short conversation, instead of saying “goodbye” or maybe “have a nice day” or for that matter, saying anything, the Walgreens Pharmacy employee on the other end just hung up. Okay, maybe she was having a bad day, but I’m fairly certain that this is how she normally does things because she didn’t seem to be too interested in talking to me.
At work, I have a Dell server that is down due to hardware failure. No problem, I arranged for Dell to come out and repair it. It has been 15 days now and I’m still playing tag with the repair guy from World Wide Technologies (Dell subbed the service to World Wide Tech) to come and slap in a new motherboard. Normally I would just have the parts sent to me, but because I’m not 100% sure it is the motherboard, that is the problem, plus we paid nearly $50K for the damn beast, then Dell should come out and service it.
Yes, I said nearly $50K, and that is because it is a dual Xeon Platinum processor with 56 cores and 768Gb of RAM with an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000Â with four 2TB SSD M.2 drives, like I said, it is a beast.
The problem is that Dell sends you notice on the day of the repair that today is the day the tech is coming out. And beyond that, I get no further details. So I have to wait from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for this guy to show and fix the motherboard. At the end of the day, I have been getting a notice that the tech was unable to reach a customer (I’m that customer). Now I checked the address they have for the ticket and Google Maps takes him to the correct location. The lobby is always staffed between 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and I left my phone number(s) with the tech and the front lobby people. I even told them that he was supposed to be coming and where to find me.
Yesterday, I got a call late in the day from the tech who is supposed to come and repair it. He stated that he wasn’t able to make it today, but can tomorrow and if I’m available. I told him once again, yes I’m available, but I bet he doesn’t show again.
The tech finally showed up and took 4.5 hours to replace the motherboard and left without fixing it. He came back again, after a few “no-shows” and swapped out some of the memory, which again didn’t resolve the problem. And to top it off, he shows up in big baggy grey sweatpants and a button-down untucked shirt that is several sizes too large, and not very professional. So I have a $44K paperweight for now, ugh.
I love french fries, it is one of my favorite foods. My wife and I were out and I stopped for some fries and a Coke. I used the drive-thru and when I pulled up, the kid who was working the window just handed me my food, not one word was exchanged and the fries were cold, not cold like being under a heat lamp, but cold like just coming out of a refrigerator cold. I parked and headed in and had to break it down Barney style for the manager (who couldn’t be much older than 18). The kid a the drive-thru window argued with the manager, stating that the fries were straight out of the fryer. The sad part was that the guy who came into the store behind me was complaining about the same thing. He finally gave me my replacement fries. But there should have never been a reason for me to do that in the first place.
I was getting three ice cream blasts from the Sonic drive-thru and I had to repeat my order twice then we waited a good 6-7 minutes as the two cars ahead of us finally got their food. When we pulled up the window, it was another lengthy wait before we were handed our order.
I learned that Arby’s closes down the kitchen well before they close the store. It was 9 p.m., one hour before they closed down for the day. They didn’t have any crinkle fries, no ice cream, and no cherry turnovers. Now this has always pissed me off. You close at a prescribed time, which means you are open for service until that time, it doesn’t mean that you close down parts of the restaurant in the hopes of saving some time when closing. Again, a good manager would never allow that to happen.
I can tell that our local Texas Roadhouse has a new manager, as the service has really slipped. My wife adult daughter and I went there one evening and we had a really long wait to be seated, we passed a bunch of open booths on the way to our seats. They took our drink order quickly, and I ordered cheese fries as an appetizer. The drinks arrived, but there were no straws and no refills during the entire meal. The cheese fries were just disgusting, they we soaked in oil, dripping, and not fully cooked either. We requested silverware and we were told that they ran out and will get us some shortly. So we had to eat our appetizer with our fingers. The entire dinner was a mess.
I really hate to see customer service die like this.
