Who Cares?

We’ve all said it, we’ve all felt it, but how much money could these two words and the attitude behind them be costing your business? For the past couple of weeks, one of my business partners has been trying to reserve a block of rooms at a hotel for an event that we have coming up. The gentleman at the hotel that was handling the room arrangements would not take his calls or call him back. For weeks he tried to get in touch with this guy. It wasn’t until he the receptionist found out that the rooms were for Watch Dog Contractor Service, a company that is in the business of reporting complaints, that my partner got a call back from the hotel. Perhaps they were afraid that we would post a complaint about them on our website. Well of course we won’t do that because that’s not the type of complaints that we post on our website. But we are going to call them out in this article. I’m going to hold off on mentioning the name of the hotel because the event hasn’t been held yet and I don’t want them to try and get their revenge on us by putting itching powder in our sheets.

Obviously the man at the hotel didn’t care enough to return our phone calls. But what makes employees so apathetic? Are people really being paid so little nowadays that they can’t be bothered to do their job? How much money does behavior like this cost employers on a daily basis? I haven’t done any research on this but I would be willing to say LOTS! Employers go through so much trouble to keep their employees from stealing from them, only to watch their money walk right out the door when employees have a “who cares?” attitude.

Another example of this occurred when we tried to order pens for our company. We ordered the pens from a company called National Pen Company, who someone else referred to us. We requested that all of the pens be a specific color and design and we paid for our order. A week later, when no pens had arrived, we called to check on their status. When we asked to speak to Chase Hatchett, who was handling our account, you would think that we had asked to speak to Santa Claus. As a matter of fact it probably would have been easier to speak to Santa Claus than to this guy. We never did get to talk to Chase, all we got was an email explaining that the color pen we wanted was out of stock and our choices were either lose our money, wait months for the pen to become in stock, or get a different color pen. Needless to say we weren’t thrilled about these options. But even more annoying than the options was the way they were delivered to us, in an email. Here we are, a company, a new company but a company none the less, who orders hundreds of t-shirts, pens, and other marketing material, who could give this company thousands of dollars of business, and he couldn’t be bothered to give us a phone call. Just an email. Thanks a lot Chase. Next time we place an order with your company we will leave you with our cell phone number and you can just send us a text message to let us know that you can’t fill the order. Or better yet you can just Tweet it and we can read it on your Twitter page. Ok, now I’m being ridiculous.

I wish that instead of reading this you could hear it read in the voice of Andy Rooney from 60 minutes. That’s the tone that I have in my head as I am writing this.

What’s the solution to this behavior, this apathy that drives profit down and drives customers crazy? One option is to have robots replace humans in all customer service jobs. I don’t know how you feel about that but don’t worry, I have some other suggestions. Profit sharing and commission based programs seem to provide a powerful incentive for employees to do their best. A friend of mine recently shared with me his experience as an employee of two different companies which supports this suggestion. He said that when he worked for a concrete company on days when it would rain he and the other guys couldn’t do much work and didn’t really make any attempt to do any work because they were paid hourly so it didn’t matter to them that the company as a whole was losing money when they weren’t working. However, when he worked as a delivery driver for an electrical supply company he was always concerned about how much work was getting done. Why? Because they had profit sharing. So when the company was losing money, he was losing money.

We got our pens and we got our hotel rooms but we won’t be doing business with those two companies anymore and we will continue to talk bad about them whenever we get the chance. Not because there was a problem with the rooms, not because the color pen we wanted was not in stock, but because when we called about these issues someone, in an office somewhere, under their breath or out loud or even in their head said “Who Cares?!”