Terry Prone: Resolving a customer's whinge should be a source of great pride

You welcome a complainant, engage with them so they get it off their chest, solve the problem, and thank them for bringing it to you 

Staff don't like being told of service failures but customers need to feel they are being listened to.

This day last week, my column appeared in this newspaper, giving out about the customer care system at Brown Thomas.

Within hours, a response arrived. I’ll get to that. First, though, let’s deal with the fall.

I fell, OK? I didn’t “have a fall”. It is important that this be stated, early on. Old people have a fall. You overhear their daughters talking to other daughters in the supermarket about Daddy having a fall. Or Mam. They never describe their teenagers as “having a fall”. It’s an age-specific problem.

Youngsters fall, fall over, and fall down (especially if drunk). Older people have a fall. One way or the other, falling is not a good idea, once you’re over 60, because you’re more breakable.

But then, nobody plans a fall, other than a gymnast executing a Fosbury Flop onto mattresses, or an actor doing much the same thing.

For the rest of us, a fall is a surprise. And an unwelcome one.

So heavily and so suddenly did I fall, that my entire head filled up with white-hot, bright-light pain. I couldn’t yell because I couldn’t breathe. Unspeakable, the agony. It seemed that the only bits of me left working were my ears, which reported a vehicle starting up down the other end of the underground car park under our offices where it all happened.

No, you can't help me...

That meant the possibility of being seen in full collapse by the driver of that car. Even worst yet, it opened up the possibility of being offered help. Help, when you’re blinded with pain and trying to work out which bones have broken, is not helpful at all.

Similarly, if you have an asthmatic attack, you do not need some kind soul offering to fetch you a drink of water. Go away, you think, if you’re the faller or the asthmatic. I’ll mismanage this on my own.

In that spirit, I took the only action open to me. I slid under my car to hide from the potential helper, whose vehicle headlights swept past me like we were in a thriller and disappeared, leaving me in the dark looking up at something vaguely related to the exhaust pipe of my own car.

Once the screeching pain died down a bit, I slid back out, now confident that nothing holding me together was broken. I dragged myself into a standing position.

Our landlord, committed to energy saving, has this lighting system that is triggered by movement, so I was suddenly bathed in brightness and had a mad urge to bow. If I could have bowed, which was doubtful.

Swelling, pain, and bleeding obviated that possibility. Plus I was filthy.

Luckily, the woman in the dry cleaners could be relied on not to ask questions, even when presented with a suit that looks like its wearer used it to clean chimneys.

Getting home, limping into the house, I discovered a law of nature: cats prevent self-pity. Dogs don’t. Dogs empathise and lick you, looking up at you with those big regretful eyes as if they’ll never get over how hurt they know you are.

Canine sympathy contributes to your conviction that nobody suffers like you do, whereas cats aren’t much for sympathy. Or empathy.

Or patience, even. If you’re alive, you’re there to feed them. If you’re dead, pretty much the same, even if you do it more passively. 

You get over yourself quickly, when you have a cat. When you have two, rehab is even faster.

I fed them, had a shower to sluice the dirt out of my wounds, and got into jeans, which was a mistake, because of knee swelling.

In fairness, I had considered wearing something loose and comfortable, like a toweling robe, but Harvey Weinstein has brought the toweling robe into such disrepute, jeans seemed the better option.

Opening the computer, I found that, only a couple of hours after my brief but impassioned stinker appeared in this paper, Brown Thomas had responded to me.

Joe, who didn’t seem to have a surname but belonged to the customer care team, was the one who fixed everything, sent me a voucher for €85 which, legally, he didn’t have to, and mildly asked me to return the out-of-date vouchers, rejection of which had provoked my original snarl.

Joe was at pains not to provoke me further about returning the vouchers, adding that if I preferred, Brown Thomas would arrange to pick them up via An Post. I posted them to him the following day.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Later in the week, a letter arrived from Maeve Higgins, the senior PR manager, reminding me that it was she who had contacted me back in April 2020 promising to honour the vouchers I had disinterred.

Pointing out that a new card should have changed hands before I arrived in their Grafton Street store and attributing no blame for why it didn’t happen, (although I figure it was my fault) she cheerfully went on: “At Brown Thomas we pride ourselves on excellent customer service — to rival Nordstrom’s — and doing the right thing for each and every customer…”

Principle of customer service

This reminded me of a principle of customer service my company helped Feargal Quinn build into Superquinn’s superb system.

Having gone spy-shopping for him in several stores, I noted a behavior common to most of the employees working the desk where shoppers brought their whinges.

Staff would compete to find any available task more urgently demanding than the shopper in front of them. If one was on their own, they would fix the shopper with a stare of mixed resentment and terror and ask “Yes?” in a way that meant “No”.

A meeting with the staff involved revealed that they truly dreaded complaints, even when the complaints weren’t physically off-putting, as happened when a shopper was complaining that their chicken was “off” five days after purchase and produced the stinking evidence to support their case.

Staff were rightly proud of where they worked, and dreaded being told of service failures.

Then Feargal Quinn bounced to his feet and made an impassioned speech about complaints being free research and an opportunity to create committed life-long customers.

The staffers got the free research point after a bit, but he was much more enthusiastic about the other point.

You welcome a complainant, he told them, you engage with them so they get it off their chest, you solve the problem, and thank them for bringing it to you.

They feel confirmed, they love the shop forever and tell at least half of their friends. (The employees looked as if they weren’t sure the complainants had any friends but agreed to try it out.)

It worked. It always does. Especially if the customer isn’t 100% in the right, as was the case with me and Brown Thomas.

But at least I didn’t bring BT a chicken five smelly days the worse for wear. Just a set of gift vouchers long past their best.