Customer Focus

A story about a forgotten plastic gym pass, and about why being treated well for our own money is still a rarity when it ought to be the norm.

Most businesses and professionals face their customers with the back of their heads.

You feel it almost everywhere. In the private sector and in the public one.

But when we deal with officials and civil servants, the endless humiliation and waste of our time at least looks logical. Government offices have no single ultimate beneficiary; they have corruption at the level of one small back room. So the chaos and the bureaucracy there make sense to us.

And you’d think that in the world of business it would be different! There, customers come voluntarily and hand over their money of their own free will. They have a choice. They can go to a competitor. In theory there should be service and good treatment… After all, that’s what grows the business and the revenue.

But how many companies and professionals can you recommend to other people without a shadow of a doubt? A handful, if that. Why is that?

Today Nastya and I went to the gym where we train. Nastya had forgotten her plastic membership card. Yes — in the 21st century, with apps, text messages and spreadsheets, some businesses still run on plastic cards.

At the desk, the receptionist tells us in an indifferent tone: if you don’t have the card, you have to pay either for a replacement or for a single session. Paying 80 hryvnia (about two dollars) is no problem for us, but something in me bristles at that attitude towards customers. In one second they could look up my wife’s active membership by her phone number and let her into the session.

I ask the young receptionist whether she understands that treating customers like this will lead to having no customers at all. She looks back at me blankly, without comprehension. I have no further questions for her — but the club’s management, by keeping staff like that and enforcing rules like that, is doing itself enormous damage. I paid the 80 hryvnia, and Nastya and I went off to train with a bad taste in our mouths over the complete absence of any service.

It’s now clear to me why the club’s staff would occasionally message me on Viber asking me to renew my membership a little early, because they were having some sort of financial difficulties. I wouldn’t be surprised if, with that approach to their customers, they go out of business altogether.

I think you run into the same thing regularly and everywhere.

The moment a business or an individual professional turns to face its customers, a queue appears immediately. Being treated well for our own money is a rarity for us, when it ought to be the norm.

That’s why most businesses here close down. People don’t understand elementary things and treat their customers with contempt.

Do you run into this kind of “service” too?