Maybe There's Hope for Customer Service

One of the reasons I started this blog was a place to vent.  Sometimes about stupid thing or frustrating sports teams, but often about bad customer service.  And part of why I invested in a restaurant many years ago is I was so disappointed with the terrible service in restaurants that I felt if you could actually run a place with a brain and treat customers well, you'd succeed.

Monica have had some unbelievably bad experiences with people attempting to render customer services. Too many to list but here are a few examples.  Monica ordered a hamburger without the sauce that usually comes on it.  When it came with sauce she sent it back and they wiped the sauce off the bun and sent it back to her.  We checked into a hotel and they gave us a key to the wrong room -- a room where someone was already checked in and Monica walked in on the couple.  Fortunately they were sitting on the bed watching TV.  And recently we tried out new house cleaners.  You'd think people would want to make a good first impression to win your business.  They called to say they'd be there between 2 and 3; that's a big range but OK.  At 3:30 they called to say they were leaving Mercer Island and they arrived about 4 PM.  I understand some technicians (plumber, electrician, computer repairman) could have a job be larger than they expected and run late.  But how does a house cleaning job blow up and run over by two hours.  We needed the house cleaned, but these people were "fired" before they ever started.

However, I'm glad to say that we've seen a few examples of good customer service of late which somewhat restores my faith in humanity.


(I thought I wrote about this before but can't find it.)  Monica and I dined at Ruth's Chris Steak House in January.  While nothing was so bad that we were really upset or I asked for a manager, we weren't exactly wowed the way we should be for fine dining.  The only real problem was that Monica's fillet was undercooked then when they "fixed" it, the butter sauce made for a very crispy outside.  I know from experience it's tricky to cook beef exactly right, but when you have "Steak" in your name you should get a steak right 95% of the time.  Other things were minor and fixed as best they could at the time. 
However, on the way home it dawned on us that they had problems with our table, our drinks, our salad, Monica's steak, and dessert.  I send a nice but unhappy letter to the general manager to let them know about our experience.  I got a phone call from the GM two days later who invited us to return on the house, much more than I asked for.  Awesome.

And just this week. Expedia has a new "Priceline-like" feature where they'll sell you a discounted hotel without revealing its name.  The downside is you don't know exactly which hotel you get and you can't cancel or change the reservation.  I booked two rooms for our upcoming trip to Vancouver using this process.  In reviewing my confirmation, I noticed that somehow the date got entered as 9/11 which is not what I needed. I called Expedia to ask if there was anything they could do since it was human error -- and I wasn't trying to beat the discount system.  The customer rep called the hotel and they were gracious enough to cancel my reservation and refund a non-refundable payment.  I'm not a once a month traveler, but I do use Expedia several times a year and they now have a very happy customer.

Monica made a massage appointment next door to the place where she works out and told the front desk person, who may be the manager, that she'd be coming from a workout.  She'd done this before and it wasn't a problem.  When she arrived, she apologized for being sweaty, and her massage therapist made some sort of snide remark about it.  Monica decided to walk out since the guy apparently wasn't comfortable giving her a massage.  At first I saw his side, but as I think about it, when I got for a massage they suggest I use the steam room or sauna first, so many people come a bit hot and sweaty.  Anyway Monica told the front desk what happened at left.  Later that night, Monica got an email from the manager apologizing for what happened, letting her know that therapist was no longer employed, and offering her a free massage if she'd like to come back.  I think that's more than they needed to do, but they turned Monica from someone who will never come back and tell horror stories about the place into a likely regular customer... and one who will bring friends.  And it cost them the price of one massage.

Day 10, Monday

Took it easy and slept late.  Didn't do much.  Yay, me.

Met a friend to play poker for an hour at Parkers.  Had never played there and not a bad place.  Then met Monica and friends at Bell Square for dinner (Cheesecake Factory) and some browsing.  Good news is we had great service.  Bad news is I figure I get service like that once a year and we still have six months to go.

Tomorrow is Cocoa's birthday. We don't know how old he is.

Boise to Salt Lake City

A pretty unevenful day. Easy drive. It rained most of the AM, but the sun came out in the afternoon. We're staying South of Salt Lake City but drove back into town to eat at a Brazilian restaurant. Very tasty food; even the rattlesnake sausage.

On a side note, XM radio is pretty cool. I really didn't think I'd like it -- it came with our new car -- but I was able to listen to the baseball games (Cubs) as we drove yesterday and today as well as always having the same stations even though we're 800 miles away from home.

Traveling Adventures

The first in a series of posts about our trip to Los Angeles.

While Monica like planes and works for the largest aviation firm in the country, she hates flying, mainly because she's claustrophobic. On the other hand, I generally enjoy flying. I like being away from all your worries for a few hours and being able to read a good book or do a crossword puzzle. Also I find it a bit surreal that in a few hours I can get from to Seattle to someplace warm and sunny or to see family that I think of as so, so far away (or both). However since 9/11 and Robert Reid, flying has changed and we find ourselves on the same page some days. Wednesday's trip to LA was one of those days.

Our flight to LA was scheduled for 6:30. I called United at 4 and confirmed the flight was on time. When we arrived at the airport at 5, we were told the flight was now scheduled for 9 PM and the plane had mechanical problems and was still in San Francisco. When we arrived at the counter, we found they were moving people to the Alaska Air flight which was great. (If ever you're on a flight that's delayed more than an hour and it's not a weather issue affecting all flights, do anything you can to get on another flight. One hour often becomes two which becomes three which becomes a cancelled flight. Since they were already moving people, I knew this flight was going to be cancelled.) Unfortunately, Alaska's flight was at 8:50 PM and they couldn't transfer Monica's first class seat to a first class seat on Alaska, and they weren't very accomodating. Though really their failure was to keep "looking into it" rather than to clearly say that there wasn't a first class seat on ANY plane going from SeaTac to LA that night. After talking with them for at least 30 minutes and my running back and forth to the Alaska counter, I figured out the best we could do was get seats on Alaska and be on the wait list for first class upgrades for $50. After United transfered our ticket over to Alaska, we went to the Alaska desk and got a better seating arrangement in 5 minutes than we had in 45 minutes with United. (8A and 8C, no one in between and on the wait list for first class).

Unfortunately our adventure was just beginning. Because we now had paper tickets, we got selected for extra screening when passing through security. That was annoying but OK aside from someone forgetting she had a bottle of water in her bag. With a couple of hours to kill, we decided to have a sit down dinner an Anthony's. Service was slow; it took forever to take our order and bring my glass of wine. The bread (which was $2) arrived about a minute before our meals. Finally after we had finished and were thinking about dessert, we sat for 15-20 minutes and no one came by, not even to clear my plate. I saw our server a couple of times but apparently, she was too busy for us. Finally, I added up our bill as best I could remember, left cash on the table and walked out.

So we got to our gate and learned there were two no shows for first class; however Monica was third on the wait list. But the flight there was fine and we had plenty of room. There was a bit of delay taxiing to our gate and finally we made it to baggage claim at 11:40. We got our bags and went to catch the shuttle to Enterprise which runs every 5 minutes. After waiting a bit, and seeing other rental car shuttles pass, Monica wondered if Enterprise was still open. Having picked up cars at 2AM, I hadn't thought about this, but I called and found out they closed at 10 PM. Oh shit! It looked like there was a shuttle to our hotel, but it turned out the one that comes by every 10 minutes actually goes to a different Four Points. So finally we grabbed the Avis shuttle -- after confirming they have cars -- and figured we'll just get a car there.

We got a car and got going, but we wound up with a minivan and paying 3 times as much as our rate with Enterprise which is why I didn't rent from Avis in the first place. We loaded the car and got ready to go. But when I turned the key, nothing happened -- no noise, no lights, the car battery is dead. At this point we could only laugh. I went back, got a different car, picked up Monica and the bags and ten minutes later we were at our hotel. Fortunately our room was available though we had two double beds instead of one king; hard to care much about that after this day.

We wound up getting to bed about 2 AM and had to wake up at 7:45 to get to Paramount Studios for the tour the next morning. Off to a great start...