The cold season struck my house and I was at a local pharmacy picking up some cold medicine. I picked up what I needed and headed to the checkout line.
Up ahead of me in the checkout line was someone who had worse problems. A guy wearing construction gear was buying some gauze and tape. He had his bloody arm up in the air. He got to the front of the line and the checkout clerk started asking him if he would like to fill out an application to get a pharmacy loyalty card. Poor guy is bleeding and wants to buy his stuff and tape himself up but this clerk wants to talk about filling out forms. Was this clerk blind? Could she not see that saving a couple of cents on his purchase wasn’t the guy’s prime concern right now? Couldn’t she intuit the poor man’s situation and help him get on his way?
Unfortunately this is not something rare or just limited to checkout clerks. Too often when talking with business professionals, with contractors, with other salesmen I get the same type of treatment. People just going through the motions of doing their job and not really getting a feel for the other person’s situation.
We’ve instituted procedures, scripts, and ways of doing our jobs that take out most human thought and decision-making out of the process and taken the individual out of the equation. Why have people if you’re just going to make them act like robots?
On the other hand I’ve been mildly amused and somewhat taken aback whenever I get praise from a client or potential client for “listening” and tailoring solutions to meet their needs. I’ve always been somewhat shocked by this and thought to myself that I hadn’t really done anything special. As it turns out maybe I had done something special without knowing it.
As I see it if you are in a position where you meet the public in any fashion whether you’re a salesman for a company, or a technician or even just a checkout clerk, part of your job description is to interact with the public and engage in an interactive give and take that actively tries to meet the client’s expectations. You don’t just read from a prepared set of responses or follow set procedures. You need to think, react, and maybe be a little proactive and actually think through a situation.
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