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Posts Tagged → customer

Giant Food’s punishing self checkout

Does Giant have self checkout to punish its customers? To prove that loyalty takes a long time to undermine?

It’s miserably time consuming, it never works, it hangs up, people standing in multiple lines waiting for help from a single clerk. Giant thinks they’re saving a few pennies in labor cost. But the truth is that Giant is following a traditional path to failure.

By building up customer loyalty, and then giving them less and less, many businesses have milked quality, alienated customers, and then crashed.

Another sign of cheapness is Giant’s slow conversion of name brand foods for its own generic label. But I don’t want Giant’s mediocre quality food. I’m willing to pay for better quality.

Capitalism 101 says our family begins shopping at the Wegman’s on the West Shore.

Despite digital technology advances, actual humans are necessary

Digital technology is amazing, no doubt about it.

Yes, it enables all kinds of speed in research and communications.

But the internet has also inspired a “digital wall” response to basic inquiries that used to be handled by people answering phones.  You cannot just pick up a phone and ask someone a question, any longer.  Instead, you must navigate a maze of circular questions and answers and phone tree options, long before you get to hit the star key or number one and talk to a person.

eBay is the prime example of the digital wall.  You cannot get real customer service at eBay.  eBay’s digital artificial intelligence is supposed to satisfactorily respond to all customer issues, but it doesn’t.  It is a failure.

One online commenter says “It is easier to talk with the Pope than to actually speak with a person at eBay,” a sad but true fact that I myself have learned the hard way.

Here in Pennsylvania, the Tom Ridge Revolution for responsive government is looong over.

Remember how back in the 1990s, Governor Tom Ridge opened up Pennsylvania state government with a crowbar and a box of dynamite, and got the scurrying inhabitants of the many faceless concrete government buildings in downtown Harrisburg to actually view taxpayers as “customers”?

Maybe you don’t recall that time, but it was refreshing.  Suddenly, state workers at most agencies were required to actually answer the calls of the taxpayers they serve, and to act professionally, and to help resolve problems.

PennDOT was at that time a notoriously labyrinthine experience, kind of like the Vatican, one might guess, in that if a taxpayer was fortunate enough to find an IN door, they might spend a day shambling down shuttered halls with closed doors with jargon printed on them, searching yet more for the answer to their government-inspired problem.

The workers there at that time could not have cared less for serving the public, and no one took any initiative to make them serve the public, until the Ridge Administration arrived.

Then, PennDOT was required to post phone numbers, email addresses, have customer service representatives on call, so that no citizen had to waste their time trying to make sense of the bureaucratic maze while to trying to meet some official mandate.

After all, if the government is going to require something, then the government absolutely must provide the means to achieve that.

Well, now PennDOT is back to its bad old ways.  The foolish young punks running the disastrous Corbett Administration into the ground at Mach 4 wouldn’t know a damned thing about customer service or taxpayers, for that matter.  PennDOT has been allowed to crawl back under a heavy cloak of secrecy and impenetrable darkness.  Go ahead, call PennDOT.  Try to reach a human being through their main portal:

“Call 1-800-932-4600 (from within PA) or 717-412-5300 (from out of state). You can also send an email through our Driver and Vehicle Services Customer Call Center, or write to the following address:

Riverfront Office Center (Driver and Vehicle Services)
1101 South Front Street
Harrisburg, PA 17104-2516
1-800-932-4600

Oh, you will hear a human voice,  which right off the bat asks you that if you want to continue in English, “Press One.”  Imagine my surprise when I just held the line, did not press one, and was shuttled off into yet another maze of foreign languages, as if just wanting to encounter my own government in our native language was something we should have to ask for.

Anyhow, the phone options in English are another maze of options and circular loops.  One answer gives the locations of  service centers, but saves providing you with the hours for each one until the very end, as if you might actually recall which service center was “one,” “two,” or “three.”

This is the very essence of Bad Government.

Government absolutely must be responsive, open, transparent, or it is illegitimate.  If it cannot serve its citizens and taxpayers, then government has failed.  Once government has failed, it cannot hold citizens to a higher standard.

Governor-elect Tom Wolf faces a Republican legislature, which is not likely to go along with his tax-and-spend approach to government.

Well, here is an opportunity that is guaranteed to make Wolf a hero among all citizens: Force government to open up again; get our taxpayer-funded bureaucrats to be responsive, or get out.  No more digital walls for the people who pay the bills.

And maybe Wolf can talk to the owners of eBay, and persuade them to provide real customer service, too.

Toyota: What the Hell Happened?

What the hell happened to Toyota?

Toyota was once the world’s flagship car and truck producer. Since my wife and I married over 20 years ago, except for one Subaru Forester, new Toyotas have been the only vehicles we have purchased. Overall we have been very happy with those purchases. Until now, when we joined a growing list of unhappy Toyota buyers.

A couple of years ago, Toyota experienced odd problems with cars taking off on their own, crashing, and killing the occupants. Some of those occupants can be heard crying, screaming, yelling to Toyota and 911 dispatchers as they unsuccessfully struggle to control their vehicle. Toyota sales plummeted. Significant inward analysis followed.

Enter the Toyota Tacoma, Toyota’s premier pickup truck. Tacomas have developed a loyal following, and an aftermarket add-on industry (bed extenders, cow pushers, roof racks, etc.) second to none. I myself owned a 2002 Tacoma for over eleven years and it performed flawlessly. It reinforced my brand loyalty.

But now, if you go on tacomaworld.com and other similar websites, you’ll see a growing chorus of buyer dissatisfaction. Tacomas apparently have been rushed to market without the kind of research and development necessary to work out the bugs. I myself can tell you my own very recent experience with the new Tacoma.

It has been a deeply disappointing experience. The brand new Tacoma I purchased is flawed, and despite four visits to Faulkner Toyota (the first within days of driving it off the lot) to have it fixed, the problem persists. The truck is not merchantable. It should not be in the channels of trade, and yet here I am, another unhappy Toyota Tacoma owner.

Attempts to get customer satisfaction have resulted in arguments, outright lies by Toyota dealer employees, vague promises to fix the truck over the next month. A month? It has already spent nearly as much time at the dealership as it has spent in my own possession, and another month is said to be needed to possibly resolve to the problem. May I say that I paid cash for the truck, and I perhaps unreasonably expect a brand new vehicle to perform flawlessly.

So here we go, watching Toyota self-destruct its last remaining stalwart vehicle. Very sad. Very sad, indeed. What happened at Toyota? No one seems to know.

For me, the Nissan Frontier is looking like my likely next pickup truck. On Consumer Reports it ranks much higher than the Tacoma with owner satisfaction. To Toyota, my lemon purchase is but one small statistic. To me, this experience is practically a change in lifestyle.