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The experience of the disappearing staff who rarely speak
(This is a post by guest blogger Paul Adams, who I introduced here. -mh)
The UK postal service often attempt to deliver things to me when I am not at home. They leave a cardboard slip, which I must take down to my local postal sorting office to reclaim my item. Nine times out of ten, this is my experience of the postal office:
There are no visible staff. So I must ring the bell located on the counter. I hear a bell ringing in the background but receive no other feedback. No staff appear within a minute (a long time to wait behind a counter, especially when you are late for work) and I end up ringing the bell again, and again, until someone appears. They take my slip without uttering any words to me. They disappear behind the wooden panelling in the photo. Sometimes they reappear within a minute. Sometimes they are gone for up to five minutes. They rarely ask me to show them I.D., and then hand me the package without a word.
This is a terrible customer experience because the postal service have forgotten about the basics:
- A waiting customer is more important than any task which is not related to other customers in the office.
- Staff should smile and be courteous and polite.
- Staff should inform customers if there might be a wait: "It might take me a few minutes to find your item, but I'll be as quick as I can".
- Staff should reassure customers that they take their privacy very seriously e.g. by checking that the person collecting the parcel has not found the slip on the street.
These experiences raise some other interesting questions about the postal service:
- Do they properly train their staff?
- Do they care if their staff are happy?
- Do they care about their customers?
- Why do they continually try to deliver things to me when I am not at home?
- Why is the sorting office closed from noon on Saturday to Monday morning?
you hit on it... creating a good employee experience is key to creating a good customer experience. you can try and force the latter without the former, but i suspect it won't be particularly successful.
One problem is the disconnect between who's paying for the service and who's receiving it, and the fact that the postage is paid in advance. If postage was paid on delivery, they'd make sure they got it to you with a smile. Of course, that wouldn't work (who would pay to receive junk mail?) but the whole system doesn't motivate the mail service to offer great customer service at the moment.
Come to think of it, the service at my post office where I buy stamps is usually pretty poor too, so maybe this is a training problem. Perhaps service will smarten up as Royal Mail's monopoly is eroded and customers have more choice.