I attempted to get a gift receipt at the Walmart self-service checkout. I hit the gift receipt button, checked the item I wanted the receipt for — and nothing printed. When I asked the clerk, she sent me to the service desk to wait in another line to retrieve what I needed.
While I was there, the clerk told me that “she’s been getting a lot of these requests from customers” and that my problem was that I did not hit the “apply” button after making my suggestions. I asked her how I would know that. “I’m just trying to be helpful,” she said.
No, helpful would be putting a sign on the registers letting people know that before they had to wait in line to learn about it. Helpful would be to automatically print gift receipts for every item over $X during December. Helpful would be to have an actual human working the checkout line.
I hear from my clients that customers are crabbier than ever. Perhaps it is because there is less service and more reliance on the customer to figure it out themselves. You can have a true competitive advantage if you operate your organization from your customer’s perspective and become proactively helpful instead of pointing out where they failed after the fact.
