A Trip to the Post Office
Every day, regardless of what I am doing, I pay very close attention to how organizations provide service to their customers. Last week I had to pick up a certified piece of mail at my local post office. I would like to share a few observations with you from my visit:
- The line was long. Time was passing very s-l-o-w-l-y. I felt like a kid again looking at the second hand in school waiting for recess.
- There were only two people behind the counter serving customers. Other workers were visible in the building but obviously serving customers must not have been “their job”.
- The worker behind the counter acted annoyed that I, the customer, was disturbing her gum chewing and daydreaming. There was no eye contact, no smile, no offer for extra service, no thank you, just the absolute bare minimum effort mixed in with a little bit of bad attitude.
- The paint was chipping off the walls. It wasn’t fun to be in here and this made the time pass even slower.
What is going on here? There are probably a number of things starting with the entitlement attitudes that unions create, a lack of leadership, poor management at the local level, hiring practices, minimal performance incentives and a lack of customer service training.
To be fair, and put things in perspective, the USPS delivers billions of pieces of mail a year - delivering more than 46 percent of the world’s mail volume. If you were going to personally transport your physical letter from San Francisco to New York I would be impressed if you could do it for less than the current rate of 41 cents. But this article is about the attitude and the personal service received at the counter. I wasn’t there when the postal service started in 1775, but I would be willing to bet that that the personal touch at the local post office has declined since then.
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