Customer Service

As you know, Sam and I religiously run errands every Saturday. We might go to the bank, we might go to the post office, we might go to the Farmer's Market. All of those places are infrequent and optional. What's not optional is going to the local Food Club and the grocery store.

Oh, we might shake things up by going to the grocery store first, and then the Food Club, but it's always those two places.

As you also may know, I resent self checkouts. The Food Club has several of these and except for a couple of rare instances, I choose to have nothing to do with them - that is, until this past Saturday when Sam and I went on our usual errands and the Food Club felt it necessary to have only one manned register open.

I was about third in a long and growing line, and the first person who didn't already have anything placed on the belt, when an associate came over and asked me if she could ring me out on the self checkout register.

Sam and I followed her over to the other register, under the watchful glare of the other poor souls in line. What happened next? Well, let me let my email complaint to "Customer Service" do the talking. I wrote this when Sam and I first got home. Here it is verbatim (aside from the redactions)...

Hello,
I've been a member for years, going every Saturday to your redacted location. Today was the first time in all of those years that I have been to this store and there was only one manned register open.
I made a comment to one of your sales associates in passing, that you must be short handed today. The response I got was along the lines of, "No. The company is just trying to encourage customers to use the self check-out."
If this is true, boy, is this a mistake!
I was a loyal redacted customer for years, easily spending hundreds of dollars a month. Now and in recent years, I avoid it like the plague - and I'm not alone. The few times I go in, I usually regret it. There are often long lines and the people in those lines resent being "encouraged" to use the self checkout. I know this from personal experience.
There is a reason people like the personal touch of those at the registers. In my opinion, you should be celebrating the service you offer, not undermining it.
I am not a person that emails things like this lightly. It's rare, in fact. But I feel strongly that if this is the direction you're going, it's a mistake.
In case you want to make sure this is legit, my membership number is: redacted.
Thanks for you time.

Almost immediately, I received the following response - and before you ask, this is also verbatim. Any missing punctuation, words, sentences, or coherent thoughts are not due to the inadequacies of my copy and pasting skills. Here you go...


Hi redacted,

Thank you for contacting redacted.

I do apologize in regards to this happening in your local club. I know we are making improvements in regards to the local club to improved definitely not run our members away so again I do apologize about that. Please continue to be patient. I will be sending over an email to the upper management team of the local club to look into this matter and get it resolved. Your opinion does matter to us and it will be heard.

Thank you for being a loyal member.

This response is a little bit of an impressionist painting to me - in that it's giving me the impression, the feeling of an answer.

The other thing is, I wonder if the Customer Service Rep was supposed to insert the name of my local club in each place that it says, "local club." You know, something to personalize it. Otherwise, it becomes a little generic. Maybe they're banking on the fact that I'll be too distracted by tying to figure out what the missing words and sentences were.

Anyway, thinking that the Customer Service Representative and I were not quite on the same page, I, in turn, sent a response...

I want to be clear that my comments are in no way a criticism of any personal at my local store. If anything, it's quite the opposite. They are a huge part of why my son and I enjoy shopping there.

My email is solely to express concern that if the Corporate Office thinks that encouraging people to use self-checkouts is a positive move, it's not (in my opinion.) You have a valuable resource in your personnel and you may be underestimating the role they play in serving your customers.

Things went silent after that - until today. Today I came home to an email with a link at the bottom of the page, asking me to take a customer satisfaction survey because, "[my]  feedback is important to [them]."

I clicked the link and it brought me to a brief questionnaire, of five or six questions. Each question offered a me a single choice from a selection of five or six responses.

It was one of those surveys that asked questions such as, how happy was I with promptness of the response. How do I answer that? The response couldn't have been any quicker but the choices for an answer only ranged from "extremely" to "not at all" and didn't include grey areas such as, "the response was barely coherent."

Other questions were asking me to rate if the issue was resolved and how happy I was with the resolution - again, all answers formatted in a preordained set of selections; again, with no shades of grey choices such as, "How the hell do I know" Or "I doubt it if you don't even understand my comment."

I don't know if any of this has any impact beyond me getting something off my chest. But in the end, it hasn't even done that. All it's done has added another item to the long, long list of things that I resent/frustrate me - the same list that contains, among other things, self checkout registers.