Yesterday, a Club Mahindra executive called to say she is the assigned holiday planner for us and wanted to know our plans for sight seeing. I told her that we have our own plans and that we were actually here to do some work and not do the sight seeing much. She then wanted to meet us sometime to which I agreed. Her next few questions put me off … Is this your first stay in a Club Mahindra resort ? How long are you staying here ?
As a person who is assigned to manage my holidays wouldn’t you check my history ? That’s the least amount of preparation before calling a guest. I find this attitude everywhere – a customer has to constantly provide details of things he has purchased, follow up on service, carry his/her vouchers …. If I have to do everything then what are you, the “service” provider existing for ? Either make every service as self service and reduce my cost or provide a bare minimum basic good service. And be prepared, don’t expect me to feel thrilled if you are unprepared and disorganised.
Club Mahindra is just an example, almost every hotel, resort or service establishment expects “you”, the customer to be prepared, and they do what is convenient for them. Its very sad to see young executives joining the workforce and being completely unprepared. Even if you want to make “just” rice, you still need prep, figure out if there is rice in stock, whether you have a working pressure cooker or rice cooker, water and details of when the rice has to be ready. Without any of this prep, on lucky days you may get rice. Young men and women waltz into an Organization and expect everything to be ready for them to start working, but forget to do their own prep. They come to interviews without preparation, and land up late on day one of their first job…. Even more sad is to see organizations still keeping these executives !! The flip side is also true, organizations don’t prep enough to onboard new executives. Forget prep for onboarding , they don’t spend enough time recruiting the right people.
I notice parents hurrying after their children to get them ready for school. Start training your child when they are young on the value of preparation. Let them get things ready for school from their grade 1, they may miss a few things the first few times and let them face the music, that’s part of the learning and then teach them how to keep things in such a way that they don’t miss anything. Invaluable lessons in prep. Unfortunately parents do all the prep but don’t spend time developing the skill in their children.
Preparation makes life simpler and frees up time for doing many things, while being disorganised makes you waste time and helps you to waste others’ time. And service organizations will lose customers.
I agree, this is true for almost ALL service providers.. telecom, banks, broadband, car maintenance and the list is long. Outsourcing can help cut costs and also customers, if quality of service is not controlled.