Archived Do you honestly care if the guest have a great experience?

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seasonal

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Apr 4, 2013
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I was working today, and after servicing guest, i got to thinking if i cared if the guest found the items they were looking for etc..... Now for me, it depends on the guest. If the guest comes up to me and ask where something is in a nicely manner, depending on the situation i'm in, i would walk them to the section. You asked me nicely and didn't have a grouchy attitude. NOW, if someone comes to me, asking where something is with a attitude ( this does happen), i usually just tell them where the item is and wouldn't care if they found it or not. Thoughts?
 
its exactly like you said to. i don't not want people to have a good experience, its just if you're gonna be rude to me, why should i go out of my way?
 
I'm all about the golden mean.
I treat people the way I would want to be treated and I even keep in mind that sometimes I'm not the best customer in the world.
So yes, I do want people to have a good shopping experience because if I walk into a store I'd like to be treated that way even if I'm a bit dazed or a touch grumpy.
Now if I'm an outright asshole?
Than people have every right in the world to brush me right off.
People like that don't get to expect anything but their own behavior reflected back at them.
 
This^
I remember watching my grandma treating every cashier/waitress/cleaning person/trash collector with kindness no matter how they treated her. She told me "You don't know what happened at their house that morning so you give them the benefit of a doubt."
Sadly, most guests seem to be entitlement queens who were yesterday's spoiled brats.
Their worldview seems to be "It's all about ME & MY wants!"
 
A couple of years ago around Christmas a woman was really hateful to me. She made me cry. It was so embarrassing. Then a few weeks later she came in and found me and apologized. Her husband had just left her. I'll always be glad I was nice to her even when she wasn't nice to me.
 
If a guest is moderately polite and doesn't treat me like the scum of the earth for working in retail, then yeah sure I'll put in an effort to make sure you have a good experience. However, I don't reward bad behavior. Guest servicing is kind of like babysitting imho
 
Now, with individual surveys out, all you can is smile do & help the guest.

How can they do the individual surveys? This is the first I've heard of it...
My store mgt has mentioned at every huddle. It's a nightmare. Then you ask the mgt for copies of the surveys & not available? I had asked the stupid question, should it impact the tm preformance scores? No answer from mgt.
Doghouse for me.
 
Depends. For the most part, I do, because I don't wanna punish the good, considerate guests because of the bad ones. I imagine what I'd want if I were the "guest." Unless the guest is a dick. If they're a dick to me, gotta be one back. Sometimes I do the whole kill em with kindness bit. Sometimes it makes them realize they have poor manners. Sometimes it doesn't.
 
More likely the cashier since they'll have their TM tied to the receipt.
 
Our Vibe score is red, my STL is on a major "talk to every guest you see" tear right now.

I don't want the guests to have a poor experience, because if they do, there's four other Targets and a couple of Walmarts in less than a five mile radius. At the same time, I don't want to hover around guests and be their personal shopper. Most of the time I will lead them to whatever they are looking for, if it's in the department I'm working in. If it's on the other side of the store I will tell them exactly where to find it. I have had a few guests that wanted me to lead them to the product, show them each product, and then answer all of their questions about the differences between them.

There was one guest last week that was furious that we were out of shopping carts, he emptied my smart cart onto a shelf and took it. He probably filled out a survey too.
 
I'm on flow team at a 7:30 store, My team lead wants us to write a vibe card EVERY time we help a guest. Watched someone during that huddle write 3 of them during huddle. Can not wait to see how hard this backfires.
 
I honestly do feel bad whenever we dont have things a guest is looking for. If they are nice about it I will try to help them look for it and even suggest other places to go if we dont have what they need. If they are a downright asshole though, i dont care at all.
 
I want guests to be able to get the Easter candy they want, but my ETL log decided to stop backstocking HCDY since last month. We have about 10 pallets of candy in the back, some at the top. Sure I can look through all the ones on the floor, but I still might overlook something.
 
I see a lot of retail workers who play the "If you aren't shitting friendliness out of your asshole, I don't care about you" card. Its really childish in my opinion, someone might be having a bad day, or maybe we screwed something up for them (I've seen countless scenarios for customers to be legitimately annoyed).

Just treat people nicely, and remember the golden rule.
 
I've been working at Spot for a long time and in a restaurant before that and in all my years of working the service industry there has probably been less than half a dozen guests who I have had a serious problem with. Even then the majority of those are outright scammers. I can only remember one actual guest who got me to step away from the transaction. She was attempting to return an Opened Ps3 because she didn't like the Rating of M on one of the packaged games. I barely got one word out of my mouth before she lunged (literally) forward and started screaming about how her son had Asperger's and if he played violent video games he was going to shoot up his school. I called for the LOD and backed as far away as I could (back when we had a service desk) and said "Ma'am, I can't help you. You are going to have to wait for my manager." Thankfully we had a TPS at the front door and he stood directly behind the guest the entire time the ETL was handling her. The ETL went in my opinion way above and beyond by saying she would exchange it for any other item in electronics, but the guest refused to do that and wanted a cash refund (she paid credit.) After being told that wasn't an option she stormed out saying she was going to call corporate. We never heard from her again.
 
I've been working at Spot for a long time and in a restaurant before that and in all my years of working the service industry there has probably been less than half a dozen guests who I have had a serious problem with. Even then the majority of those are outright scammers. I can only remember one actual guest who got me to step away from the transaction. She was attempting to return an Opened Ps3 because she didn't like the Rating of M on one of the packaged games. I barely got one word out of my mouth before she lunged (literally) forward and started screaming about how her son had Asperger's and if he played violent video games he was going to shoot up his school. I called for the LOD and backed as far away as I could (back when we had a service desk) and said "Ma'am, I can't help you. You are going to have to wait for my manager." Thankfully we had a TPS at the front door and he stood directly behind the guest the entire time the ETL was handling her. The ETL went in my opinion way above and beyond by saying she would exchange it for any other item in electronics, but the guest refused to do that and wanted a cash refund (she paid credit.) After being told that wasn't an option she stormed out saying she was going to call corporate. We never heard from her again.

Yeah those ones always boggled me.. How can they expect cash when they never paid cash in the first place? Heck if they want the refund that bad we can put it on their card, but that doesn't even satisfy them...
 
I've been behind the register/counter long enough to gauge the difference between someone distracted by circumstances/having a bad day & someone simply being a jerk.
In the case of the former, I'll try anything to make their day better or get them back on a better footing.
In the case of the latter, they'll get a bare minimum of courtesy.
Parents have always been told never to reward bad behavior by children or risk turning them into adults with bad behavior. With the Vibe & Be Bold crap, we seem to be rewarding bad behavior on a large scale & destroying profit in the process. We're churning out increasingly rude consumers who hold corp by the cajones because of their bad choices (promotional flops, site crashes, security lapses, etc) & corp - desperate for sales - continues to cater to even the most outrageous guests. As a result, TMs have become punching bags from both sides: rude guests with ever-increasing demands & corp leadership who continues to strip away any vestiges of meaningful/decent employment.
 
I would say yes and no. I will do my absolute best to treat you as kindly and respectfully as possible but if you have a nasty attitude I am more than likely not gonna go the extra mile for you. Everyone has bad days, I don't have the right to take my bad day out on you and you shouldn't have the right to do the same to me.
 
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