By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO, April 5 – There’s a commercial on television that has been drawing chuckles about a hapless bride and groom. You hear an off-camera voice ask whether the groom takes the bride for his lawfully wedded wife, but there’s no person to whom the groom can direct his answer – only a machine with a “yes” or “no” button. A bored photographer takes pictures that leave the bride’s head out of the shot. En route to their honeymoon, they have to use credit cards to use the airplane’s bathroom. And finally when they get to their hotel room, when they try to open their door, it falls off its hinges. The commercial, suggesting CarMax is an exception to the trend, offers the unfortunate truth that service just isn’t what it used to be.
Abominable service is nothing new. I’ve been reading Ernie’s America: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s 1930 Travel Columns, a thoroughly enjoyable book compiled by David Nichols. In a 1938 column about driving through western Kansas, Pyle, a popular writer for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, groused: “Twice we stopped for gas, and drove away in a dudgeon because the gas-pump boys were too busy gabbing with the loafers to fill up the tank. We stopped for lunch, and never did get waited on.”
It has been 73 years since Pyle vented his frustration. Gasoline stations took the hint, transforming themselves into “self-service” institutions, while also increasing prices. As for restaurants, today you can still go to some establishments where you have to practically trip the waiter to make him stop at your table to take an order. At such places, it’s a good idea bring a signal flag to get his attention if you want him to refill your coffee cup.
Industry is not alone in disappointing customers’ expectations; government also faces some big challenges, as do large non-profit organizations, both in the community at large and in our own Jewish community.
The other day I tried to find out how new place names are added to official city maps. Department after department transferred my phone call to another department, until eventually I got to the right place. It took a lot of persistence.
So, it’s worth noting when you find places that really care about their customers.
Under Greg Smith, the combined office of the county tax assessor, recorder and clerk was a model of good service. The people at the counter were genuinely helpful. Let’s say you wanted to trace the history of the property you now own, but didn’t know how to do that. The clerks would explain how to use a Grantor/Grantee index to find recorded mortgages and changes in ownership. They’d walk you over to the shelves where the records can be found on microfilm, and even show you how to thread a microfilm cartridge into the reader. And, they’d invite you to return to the counter if you needed any more help. Ernie Dronenberg, the current assessor/recorder/clerk. says service deteriorated after Smith retired, but promises that now that he’s in office, he’ll bring customer service back up to the Smith standard.
Charles Wax, owner of Waxie Sanitary Supply, tells me that customer service is a key reason why the San Diego-based business, has grown to become the largest family-owned janitorial supply business in the country, with over 800 employees and outlets throughout the western United States. He explained that the men who started Waxie – his uncle Harry and father Morris Wax – figured back in 1946 that there would be many competitors selling similar kinds of products. They recognized that they could carve a niche by being the company that could fill orders for multiple janitorial supplies the very next day, no matter where in San Diego County the customer’s business might be.
That may sound easy, but to make that happen required having some thousands of inventory items on hand, a system for quickly finding and pulling products off the shelves, getting them into the trucks, and dispatched on well thought out delivery routes. As the company expanded throughout the West, enlarging upon this type of customer service was a priority.
Wax said from his own personal standpoint, there’s nothing more annoying than when you call a business and you get put into some kind of computerized voice mail maze, never being able to talk to a live representative. At Waxie’s San Diego headquarters, he said proudly, there is a live switchboard operator, who has worked for the company 25 years. Her name is Pat and she not only knows some 160 local extensions by heart, she also recognizes many vendors and customers by their voice.
Ernie Pyle would have appreciated people like Greg Smith, Ernie Dronenberg, and Charles Wax. And, so would the bride and groom in that TV commercial!
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com