Friday 30 October 2009

Did you miss me?

That was a rhetorical question. Anyway, it's only been 7 months since I last wrote anything on here and I haven't got the time or inclination to go into why, except to say that I'm back on it now and will be blogging on a far more regular basis. My last one ended with me saying that I was off to South Africa and it may have appeared that I never came back. I did, eventually. Great trip, business-wise and personally. When I lived there in the late 1970s apartheid was at it's terrible height - and there I was having lunch in Soweto and taking photos of Nelson and Winnie Mandela's houses.

I think the TH website says that this blog is about customer service - so I had better make it about customer service. Yesterday I left the house 10 minutes early to get petrol. I pulled into my local Tesco, oblivious to the sign on the forecourt that said SORRY NO DIESEL. It wouldn't have unduly bothered me anyway as I don't drive a diesel car. I parked next to a pump and then noticed that both unleaded outlets had yellow and black "OUT OF ORDER" caps on them. I was about to get back into the car and find another pump when I noticed drivers at every other pump looking puzzlingly at the nozzles, then at the pump displays, then at the shop, then back to the displays. A Tesco worker then came out armed with a small pile of A4 paper and a roll of sticky tape. "Sorry guys, no unleaded petrol today," he said apologetically. I enquired why there was no sign, like there was for diesel. "Someone stole it" he said. Why would anyone steal a SORRY NO UNLEADED sign? Who, other than another petrol station, would need a SORRY NO UNLEADED sign? "There's another Tesco in Addiscombe" he said, "you'll have to try there."

So we all got back into our cars and set off in a convoy of strangers for the bigger Tesco 1km away. We all pulled in, one after another, a procession of seven cars all with one singular goal. I parked next to a pump and got out... before noticing that all three hoses had yellow and black OUT OF ORDER caps on them. I looked at my new-found friends and we all shook our heads. They had no fuel either and to make it worse they didn't have a sign of any kind on the forecourt. No NO DIESEL and no NO UNLEADED. How ridiculous is that? The two biggest and busiest petrol stations in town had not a drop of fuel between them.

I got back into the car, preparing to head off to another station further out of town and further out of my way. I pulled out in front a large truck. As it got closer I noticed that it was a petrol tanker and behind it was another one - both were branded with the logo of the stations had I just had fruitless attempts at filling up from. Where were they going? Why hadn't one of them pulled in to replenish this station's meagre stocks and why had they clearly driven past the first fuelless Tesco?

As customer service goes, that's pretty poor in my book. Would you go into HMV to buy a CD and expect to be told that they didn't have any? Or go into a shoe shop and be told that they were all out of shoes? I think not. As drivers we are customers of a shedload of organisations and companies and on the whole we don't get treated all that well. Phil Tarnoff's article on ITS customer service in our new North American edition plots a similar course - it's well worth a read, as is, naturally, every other article in that issue so if you haven't already, quit this and dive in.