Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Good Morning, How May I Hate You?
There have been a couple of very crankypants blog entries in the Ire-O-Sphere lately, decrying the abysmal lack of customer service in Ireland. I’ve by and large taken them with a hefty grain of salt, because let’s be honest: if we don’t have something to be indignant about here, we’re left with very little conversational fodder beyond “scoop?”
Anyway, I stand corrected. I have just had the worst customer service of my life. I rang for a cab this morning to take John to the airport and was told by a number of companies that they didn’t know what time they could get here as traffic was “very heavy in the city today.”
OK, a tad worrying but fair enough; I booked one for 9:10 and asked them to do the best they could.
At three minutes past nine, when John is stuffing things into a laptop bag whilst still in his boxers, the cab begins laying on his horn. I go out and tell the driver, parked in a clear curb zone on my totally empty street, “He’ll just be two minutes, you’re a bit early, okay? Thanks!”
Three minutes later we walk out and… no cab.
So I ring to be told that the driver couldn’t wait 10 minutes because he didn’t want to block the road and they were busy anyway because there was “very heavy traffic in the city today.” After arguing about the difference between three minutes and ten, the meaning of booking times, the inflexibility of airplane departures, and the definition of very heavy traffic if you’re not from Knocknafeckingnowhere, I hung up, completely appalled.
This perversely reminded me of the very best customer service I ever received, at a Hilton hotel in Nashville. (Don’t ask.) I unpacked my bags before a dinner engagement and attempted to de-travel a white linen frock with the hotel room’s iron. It was an excellent iron, which promptly smeared some sort of steaming hot black sludge right across my dress.
I called the front desk clerk, who apologised and put me through to the hotel manager, who also apologised. But he did more than that: he came up to my room, escorted me to the car park, drove me to the local shopping mall, bought me a new dress, and carried my shopping bag back to the car.
I still have the dress, although I can just about get one thigh into it these days.
It is true that customer service here is not like it is in the US, though I suppose I really didn’t take note because my standards had already been lowered by seven years in the UK, where customer service is simultaneously both bad and not in English. I didn’t really mind that my Irish phone company lied to me about phone and broadband installations, that my WiFi provider makes me pay my service charges in unmarked small denomination bills delivered by carrier pigeon, or that I know to shut up and be grateful because we’re lucky to get any service at all an entire quarter mile from the city centre.
But it does mean you take more notice when you actually get good service. The women at The Berries on MacCurtain Street not only make the best damn coffee in Cork, but they are absolute stars to boot. The women at LA Bagels on Oliver Plunkett Street were similarly fab when I used to get my coffee there. The people at DigiWeb (the web hosting bit only, mind) actually ring you back and have half a clue what they’re on about.
After that I’m pretty much out of examples.
Oh, and the other half made it to the airport in record time. There was no traffic.
19 Dec 2007
| In: Crankypants + Domesticities + Ireland |
