We expect politicians to put their foot in their mouth. They have all done it. Bush #2 “I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe – I believe what I believe is right“, and, “I hope you leave here and walk out and say, ‘what did he say?‘ ”
Hollywood stars manage to do it the most. Like this doosey from Alicia Silverstone the American actress and star of Clueless, “I think that Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.”
We all just sit back and laugh at the idiocy.
But when it happens in business, especially my business, I do not laugh… Not even a smirk or chuckle.
Last week I got an email from the virtual assistant company I use to answer the phones for my carpet business (BTW, if you are a cleaner, email me, I will tell you who they are)
There was a problem with the way they scheduled one of my clients appointments. Here is the quote from the OWNER: We thought our newest Agent was ready to handle your account. Unfortunately he is not as he has botched this one. I went to call her and the agent did not get her phone number. I attempted to email her; however, the agent didn’t get her email address. She will probably call us on the 21st asking where the tech is and why he is not at her home. We will smooth the situation over with her then.
While not exactly putting her foot in her mouth, this was one of the dumbest things I have heard someone say in a while.
Let’s break it down:
- You put an untrained employee on my account and then passed the blame onto that unfortunate soul.
- How can you attempt to email, if in fact there is no email address?
- You are admitting that you are going to intentionally piss off one of my clients by waiting until the day of service to wait for the client to complain that my tech is not at her home. How pray tell will you smooth that over?
Dopey, Dopey, Dopey
So I had to tell her how to do the job that I had hired them to do and that they were supposed experts in.
- Did you check the incoming call log?
- Did you listen to a recording of the call?
- If either of those failed, there is this really big place that has tons of personal information called the internet. Did you check there? Yellowpages.com? Flakebook? Google?
- FedEx?
Had the answering service been my business I would have done numbers 1 thru 3.
If those failed, I would, at my expense, FedEx a letter overnight to the client apologizing for the mistake and asking for her other contact information.
All too often, hands get thrown up in the air by employees and vendors as if to say, “Well I tried, what else do you want me to do?”
As my friend Dan Kennedy always says “They all go lame”.
