Can I Help You?

OR

Last week when I was in Best Buy I had an unreal customer service experience. I had sent my camera to Geek Squad to repair damages. After waiting 2 weeks for my camera back and had a special event I was excited to take pictures at, I turned on the camera and the camera was not repaired, but actually did not even turn on. The Geek Squad had actually broken my camera more ... As you can only imagine this does not happen very often and the staff was unprepared with how to handle the situation. Long story short and to spare this blog another venting session, I have never experienced worse customer service in my life.  In order for them to look up a receipt and allow me to purchase a new camera took TWO HOURS. 

The reason why I mention customer service is because the people who work for a service or company represent the company. These people are the company image and are what keep costumers returning. In a very literal sense, the workers are extensions of the company, and therefore media. When a person has a bad experience, everyone is going to know about it, but not necessarily when there is a good experience. This is the emphasis on training and importance of customer service skills. As mentioned before in an earlier blog post, humans have an instinct to believe anything they hear until proven otherwise. In the Halloween horror story chaos article, “Invasion from Mars” the public thought there was a terrorist invasion- in this situation everyone is now going to believe that Best Buy could use an upgrade on training their company representatives. With this generation’s rapidly growing technology, ie. Facebook, twitter, blogging, the opinions of other people matter a great deal because they are publically mass broadcasted across the web. It is important to know that you are reading the OPINIONS of other people. Many businesses if they are written a complaint letter or tagged in a bashing twitter post will actually reach out and compensate the customer to show their devotion to a positive experience at their store or with their service. 

The point of the matter is, workers are the media to businesses they represent and the image they portray is extremely important. They give and receive information, and a customer’s entire perception is often dependent on it.