Retail can be good. Sometimes.

[geekinstinct]

I had an extremely fantastic sales experience today. I AM NOT BEING SARCASTIC. Good retail experiences are so rare for me these days that I wanted a permanent record to prove that sometimes, just sometimes, retail workers and customers can get along brilliantly. If only the world worked like that all the time. Sigh

Comments

[kirei_seimei]

Glad to hear that you had such an awesome retail experience... especially in an electronics store, because I feel exactly the same way: often, as chicks, we get automatically dismissed as not knowing anything.

I've always enjoyed receiving good customer service, no matter the retail industry (bookstore/computers/jewellery/coffee!), but it wasn't really until I worked in the cafe earlier this year that I realised both how easy and how hard it could be to give to people. But most of the time I just pondered how easy it was to say hi to someone, treat them like they know what they're talking about, just care about them as a customer for anywhere between 30 seconds and five minutes... and how annoyed I started to become when I felt that people weren't living up to even basic customer service levels.

As you might expect (Japan being the land of politeness), service standards here are quite high. Lots of polite language is used toward customers in any/every circumstance (though most of it goes way over my head!). That said, I have to admit that I've not had as awesome an experience as you did with the printer. And to your lovely Clive Peeters salesman, I tip my hat. To provide such awesome customer service (and in your second language to boot?!). I hope they know what a keeper they have there =D

[geekinstinct]

I tend to think that its much easier to give people excellent customer service when they are being excellent customers. From my experience over the past few years, there are not too many of them. People seem to forget that their server is a human being, and thus treat them as little more than robots, at best, who are designed to do whatever they want for the joy of serving them. In that environment, its extremely difficult to maintain a commitment to providing excellent service. Just as an example, I was so shocked to be asked how I was recently after my usual "Hi, how are you?" greeting that it literally did not register what they had said and it took me a couple of moments to respond. No one asks the server that! It was so bizarre, and it really shouldn't be such a rarity.