Corporate America vs. Joe Worker - Education, Customer Service and Respect

A recent customer survey indicates that 70% of clients are willing to pay a higher price to have good customer service and 60% of clients will not return to a store where they feel they have been treated poorly. The National Association of Retail Stores immediately published their recommendations for their members on how to avoid devastating effects of poor customer service. These recommendations are:

The employee comes first. The employee must feel that he/she is an important part of the organization to be able to treat the client appropriately.
No fixed phrases. Employees must have empathy to be able to give good customer service.
Empathy starts at the top.
Employees must have the freedom to resolve the customer’s needs.

You mean the person interacting with the Customer is qualified to do something? They are not just warm bodies repeating senseless phrases over and over again. That earlier morning meeting, “Go super Target, go!” cheerleading meeting is less important than understanding customer’s needs? How can this be?

Well I guess Target and Walmart can shut their doors tomorrow morning, they are already dead they just have not realized it yet. In a sector where Joe Worker is the equivalent of slave labor and executive management feels that the employee working with the client is not even worthy of earning in one year what the CEO makes in one hour, it is hardly possible that these companies have a future. I have long sustained that business models that play on the lowest cost / lowest quality model are failed businesses, like Target and Walmart. To make their profits they keep squeezing the employee until there is no more to give. The end result is always that the employee, who is the heart and soul of any business, just does not care.

Corporate America’s solution to the problem is to source foreign labor willing to work for slave wages. Walmart has already been convicted of using illegal immigrant labor and Target will soon be just another example of corporate shortsightedness as their practices to actively recruit illegal immigrants in Texas will become public knowledge.

Since there is a ray of hope that our government may actually enforce immigration and labor laws the corporations now have a new motto. Americans are stupid. We need more L1 visas because Americans did not study in school and are completely unprepared to do their jobs. With University Tuition up over 5,000 % in the last 20 years I would think just the opposite. The retailers are also supporting the North American Alliance, Amnesty and guest worker programs. Just think, if labor costs were to increase the executive management may have to reduce their average $4.1 million annual salary to say a pittance of $1 million. Poor executive management and think of the poor investors who may see earnings per share drop 1% while they are at the highest levels ever reached. You mean they will have to be content with just a reasonable return on capital. This is socialism, class warfare against those poor souls who made money, Sacrilege!

C’mon Corporate America, wake up and smell the roses. If your clients have little or no disposable income after they pay for rent, it is hard to spend money on all the things you sell. Perhaps it is true that our Universities have not prepared our MBAs. If they cannot understand this simple rule, perhaps they should be doing something else.

Tags: Politics Corporate America Corrupt Politicians War on the Middle Class Border Security Port Security Illegal Immigration