Customer Service

I don’t go shopping very often, but this year I have noticed when I have gone shopping that there has been a big decline in customer service. It seems that companies and stores are not caring as much about customer service as they have in the past. I am not sure if employees were required to take customer service classes, but it seems that companies and stores are not stressing enough to their employees how important customer satisfaction really is. My recent experience was when I went to one of my favorite stores, J. Crew and was kindly greeted by a sales person as I walked in. I walked towards the jeans section and was greeted by another sales person who was organizing the jeans and saw me sorting through them trying to find my size and yet didn’t help me. I finally found the size I wanted and walked to another section of the store and found two more girls folding sweaters and talking to each other and neither of them offered to help me even though they saw me looking for my size! I finally went to the dressing room to try on the clothes that I had found and the girl in there helped me find the right sizes. I finally found what I wanted and went to the register to pay and mentioned to the cashier that I passed three sales people and no one asked if I needed help finding anything except for the girl in the dressing room. He deeply apologized and said that he would talk to the manager and bring it up at their weekly meeting. I noticed at every register the employees were asking each customer if someone had helped them and I asked the guy who was helping me if they kept track of everyone’s answers and discussed the numbers at the end of the month? He sadly said that they do not, but that it was something they should do. In my opinion every store should care the most about customer service. That is how each store survives. Each store should make it a point to keep track of each customers experience in the store and try to improve upon them. They should have a few standard questions that they ask at the register and input the answers in a special program that keeps track of the answers and tallies the information so the store managers can track the progress of the store. Who knows, better customer service could drive more people to actually shop in stores instead of online.