About now, many of the people who have been in London, or anywhere else in the country, celebrating (or perhaps escaping from) the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, will be counting the cost, mentally reviewing the experience, and wondering whether it was worthwhile. It’s likely that most of the people who travelled around Britain during this past four-day weekend will have had some sort of customer experience somewhere, whether it be at a motorway services, on a train, in a restaurant or fast food outlet, on a bus, in a hotel or guest house – the opportunities are endless. Now is the time that those customers will be deciding whether or not they would repeat the experience. Would they willingly travel with that train company again, stop at that motorway service station again, use that particular hotel or restaurant brand again?
Chances are, most people wouldn’t. We have become used to perfunctory customer service levels in the U.K., particularly at busy times, and we seem oblivious to the reasons for it, and how to change it to a more professional and engaging experience.
Also around about now, senior managers and directors in all of the organisations mentioned above, and many others, will be back at their desks, perhaps after enjoying a four-day break from work. Their front-line employees and perhaps their line managers and supervisors will have been working their fingers to the bone over the weekend, but how many senior managers and directors will have been visible, supporting and even helping their people at this very busy time? There will be a very small percentage. And it’s likely that those teams who are supported, visibly, by senior people will have more engaged employees and may even have managed to surpass customer expectations.
Let me tell you a short story from my own experience to illustrate the point: In the early 1990’s, during my days as a front line employee on the railway, I was working a Sunday shift. Most of us used to hate working Sundays, but we did it, in those days, because there was an extra payment. I worked the buffet car on a busy train from London to Newcastle – the train then went on to Glasgow. On a Sunday, I worked the buffet alone, with more than four hundred passengers on board, queuing from two different directions. I never saw the end of the queue, just got myself prepared as best I could and kept serving, hoping that everyone would have been served by the time I had to close the buffet to get off the train. I tried to smile and be pleasant to people, but it wasn’t always easy, especially when they took a long time to make up their minds what they wanted. I had asked for another member of staff, but my manager had told me that there wasn’t any money in the budget, despite the fact that I was taking over £1,200 on my own. Remember, this was in 1994!
One particular Sunday, the train was late leaving London. There was some sort of blockage on the line and we sat on the platform in London, waiting to depart. I opened the buffet and started serving. After a while I realised that we were soon going to be an hour late, and we hadn’t even left London yet. I began to worry about how I was going to make the train I worked back from Newcastle. Then I realised that I was going to have to do a free refreshment issue to everyone on the train – this had, quite rightly, recently been introduced for all passengers when the train was an hour or more late. Just then the buffet door opened, and one of the Directors of the company put his head round. He was a friendly sort of chap, I had met him once or twice before.
‘I was just wondering if I could do anything to help’ he said. I was flabbergasted. I had never been offered assistance by a senior manager or Director before in all my years on the railway – I had been there since 1979. I asked him if he would mind helping me give out the free teas and coffees for a while, which he willingly did. In the end, he stayed with me until the queue had disappeared and helped me tidy up before he went back to his seat.
That was eighteen years ago, and I have never forgotten it. For the next few weeks, I would do anything for that company and its customers. Why is that sort of behaviour from senior people not regularly practised in businesses everywhere?