Customer Service... Malaysian Style!

The soft-serve ice cream at Ikea is just absolutely fabulous! Today after a hard-days work (studying... haha), I decided to reward myself with one. :) As I arrived at the Ikea food counter, there was a long long queue there. But for my ice-cream, I was willing to wait. Hehe...

There were about 15 people standing there waiting to make their order. Most of them only want to order a curry-puff or the ice-cream or the hot-dog, so it shouldn't take long. But it did. And you know why? There was only ONE counter open. I wouldn't be complaining if they only had one staff on duty at that time. But no... there were at least 4 people working. One poor soul was the only person manning the counter. Another was an ice-cream 'specialist' whose job was to fill those yummy ice-cream cones. OK, I'll give them points for promoting field specialising. Spread the work out, and make it a well-oiled machine. Brownie points!

But what were the other two doing? One was a back-room 'specialist'. Lord knows what he's doing in the backroom! I could see him through the door, but can't tell what he's handling in there. The 4th person was in charge of another counter that checks out other packaged food items. But the thing is: they share the same check-out counter. Now my concern is with THIS 4th guy. He was just standing there LOOKING at my extremely long queue. Then he looked away, and started using a cloth to CLEAN HIS HANDPHONE. Why can't he just walk over, open the other vacant counter and help out his fellow man with the crowd??

I think it's the attitude of most customer service providers. No one wants to do extra work. If it's not my job, I'm not gonna take initiative to help out. Keep out of other people's way. Why volunteer to do more work when I'm not getting extra pay for it.

Something similar happened in the Langkawi airport about a month ago. Our flight back to KL was delayed about an hour. But when that hour was up, there was still no news. My friend who actually works for MAS went to the counter to ask about the situation. All the lady said was "Saya tak tau (I don't know)". That made my friend pissed off. He called the KL office immediately to ask for himself, and found out that the flight was going to be further delayed another half hour. This lady's job was to provide details about the flight and CUSTOMER SERVICE to passengers. Yet she didn't even try. More importantly, she didn't even care!

That's the point, I guess. When you don't care about your job or what you do, you just can't be bothered to do more. A job becomes routine... something to get you through the day... to get you that monthly paycheck. Now that isn't living, is it? :)