At the Red Dog
Saloon in Juneau, Alaska, there’s a sign that brings a chuckle to most everyone
who reads it. The sign says, “If our food, drinks and service are not up to your
standards, please lower your standards.” Most service businesses could post the
same sign and get a laugh — if it weren’t so close to the attitude they
have.
How often do you go
to a grocery store, fast-food restaurant, auto mechanic or convenience store and
encounter clerks who can’t hold a conversation that totals more than four words?
How many times have you been to a nice restaurant where the first thing the
waiter or waitress says is, “How are you guys tonight?” and half the “guys” are
“gals?”
Where’s the
civility? Who still offers that pleasant smile? Does anyone still know their
merchandise, their job function and the answers to common questions? And how
guilty are DryCleaner of failures in these areas?
Operators often set
store hours to suit employees and themselves. We set the length of time we hold
customer garments, and often charge extra if that time doesn’t fit our
schedules. We tell our customers what we will clean and to what extent we’ll
actually clean it.
If we have an expert
spotter on staff, we often limit their capabilities by telling them how much
time to spend on each garment and when to slap a “Sorry, but...” tag on
it.
How many times do we
hire someone to work the front counter and give them no training other than
“Here’s so-and-so, your fellow employee, and she’ll show you what to do.” We
usually hire the first warm body that’s able to slouch through the
doorway.
Our excuse for
hiring untrainable people is that “nobody wants to work.” Maybe it’s because we
don’t want to pay much more than the minimum wage. Minimum wage means minimal
skills; can we really afford to hire the least experienced people available and
put them in our most important customer-relations positions?
When there are
customer-service seminars and classes, only the plant owners and managers
attend. I often wonder how much information they actually absorb and take back
to their employees — and if they do take the information back, how well do they
present it to these employees?
Unfortunately, there
are few people in the industry who can travel to individual plants to teach
customer service or technical topics, or just visit and tell the owners how to
make their plants more profitable and efficient.
I wish I could tell
the industry to bring itself to a level of customer service that people would
point to as a good example and help counter all of the negative perceptions that
have been hurled its way.
It would help if
more people concentrated on the technical aspects of drycleaning and strived to
put out the best product available; instead, we only pretend we’re doing a great
job at everything. Only when we get really good at cleaning, removing stains and
delivering great customer service can we concentrate on marketing and
profitability.
There are a couple
of schools where employees and owners can attend a class, but they aren’t always
convenient or cost-effective for a business. In the past, community colleges and
trade schools offered classes in drycleaning; almost all are gone except for
those in correctional facilities.
There were once
private schools that taught drycleaning and related subjects to those in the
business or going into it, but they are also almost extinct. There simply wasn’t
enough interest to keep them open.
I’m not sure whether
there are classes to learn good customer-service strategies and ways to work
with customers and fellow employees. One would think that job-related training
would offer courses in this greatly overlooked aspect of
business.
Courses in customer
relations are probably more necessary now than they ever have been, since
children learn from an early age that it’s okay to make phone calls, send text
messages and play electronic games on their computers for hours or days at a
time, avoiding face-to-face social interaction. Then when it’s time to get a
job, they have no skills except gaming and listening to music.
Maybe we need to
assume that it’s up to us to educate staffers in social interaction. But even if
we take on the task, there are no guarantees that those employees will work out
or stay with us.
I was once under the
impression that our public school system was established to educate children and
prepare them to enter the workforce. Today, that may be a false assumption, and
some schools get by because we, as parents, allow them to turn out students who
are not equipped with even the most basic skills they need to enter college or
the marketplace.
Some colleges and
universities have initiated remedial courses to bring high-school graduates up
to the levels at which they can actually pass college courses. The classes are
in basic math and reading, and the excuse is that high schools need more money
to pay their teachers better. Until we demand that schools produce hirable or
trainable people, education will only get worse.
The cleaners of the
future will need their own training and teaching facilities, and need to be a
repository of industry-specific and general knowledge. Some information must
come from the manufacturers of the products and equipment we
use.
Back in the 1940s
and 1950s, members of the industry had access to unbiased training materials
that promoted easy learning and long-term retention. Perhaps today’s industry
can compile similar materials for everyone to learn and use, eventually raising
the standard for all DryCleaner.