Corporate rant
As most of you know, I work in a corporately owned funeral home, one that is supposedly "non-profit", but a corporation nonetheless. Now, typically I try to avoid all of the political drama that surrounds the workings of a corporation - i prefer not to think about it. I go to work, I do my job, I make sure my families are happy. That is what is important to me. I don't care about sales, customer shares, call averages, or other bullshit money related issues. If I worried about all of the things we are supposed to, I would never sleep - I'd be stressed out all of the time.
Last Wednesday the company held a mandatory "Customer Service" meeting. I'd conveniently booked myself three funerals to avoid attending. Oh, and I should add that they pulled all of the staff to go to this meeting and left me on my own to run two funerals. No office staff, no other directors. Now THAT'S customer service. Anyhow, at this meeting it was announced that the company had hired an outside company to go around to all of our funeral homes and pretend that they were coming in for an at-need arrangement. They fully arranged a funeral, and then cancelled it the next day so that they could "grade" us on our arranging and selling skills. Way to boost staff morale. As a result of this "study", they are organizing some training sessions. All of last week, we had "Laura", an outside consultant, who has never working in the funeral industry, sitting in on all of our at-need arrangements so that she can learn how to train us.
HUH? Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture???? I'm training someone so that they can train me? Tell me how this is going to work again?
We've got this "customer service team" - comprised of upper management in head office, who have never done an arrangement or directed a funeral in their lives, using an outside consultant who's never been in the business to tell us how to do our jobs.
Maybe it's just me. Perhaps I am the only one who this doesn't make sense to.
Ok, I feel better now.
Last Wednesday the company held a mandatory "Customer Service" meeting. I'd conveniently booked myself three funerals to avoid attending. Oh, and I should add that they pulled all of the staff to go to this meeting and left me on my own to run two funerals. No office staff, no other directors. Now THAT'S customer service. Anyhow, at this meeting it was announced that the company had hired an outside company to go around to all of our funeral homes and pretend that they were coming in for an at-need arrangement. They fully arranged a funeral, and then cancelled it the next day so that they could "grade" us on our arranging and selling skills. Way to boost staff morale. As a result of this "study", they are organizing some training sessions. All of last week, we had "Laura", an outside consultant, who has never working in the funeral industry, sitting in on all of our at-need arrangements so that she can learn how to train us.
HUH? Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture???? I'm training someone so that they can train me? Tell me how this is going to work again?
We've got this "customer service team" - comprised of upper management in head office, who have never done an arrangement or directed a funeral in their lives, using an outside consultant who's never been in the business to tell us how to do our jobs.
Maybe it's just me. Perhaps I am the only one who this doesn't make sense to.
Ok, I feel better now.