Woolworths pisses me off again

Woolies (Woolworths South Africa) Management may need a fresher on what I’ve dubbed ‘complementary to business skills’ training. In the old days these would have been called soft skills. But there’s nuthin’ soft about ‘em! They’re the lifeblood of a modern, demanding, customer-centric retail environment.

My last blog was also about Woolies. That one referred to the fluctuating and iffy service to be encountered in Woolies coffee shops. Not just be me but by cognoscenti. Their directorate responded appropriately and the matter sounds like it’s firmly in hand. The fatal flaw in their coffee shop equation in my opinion is that the recruitment of the staff and the operation itself is evidently outsourced. Meaning there’s little control over that link in the value chain to which the customer is exposed. That’s never a good thing. As my dendritic mate Roy Blumenthal pithily observed whilst we sat in Woolies Hyde Park coffee shop over lattes last week, ‘For the customer, this IS Woolies!’ So, whatever’s under your roof or associated with you is an inextricably interwoven part of your brand image. Geddit?

What’s triggered this posting however, is that long weekend Sunday morning 16^th April, post my Pick’n Pay Hyde Park shopping stint we head as usual for Woolies Hyde Park for the balance of the grocery shop-out.

The doors to the store are closed – neatly printed signs on the door indicating why - and a manager is standing outside. He says, ‘We have a problem with our system, which will hopefully be up in a few minutes. You can come in if you want to have coffee in the restaurant, or otherwise….’ His voice trailed off. I took that to mean, ‘or…you can wait outside.’ I’m not going to write screeds on it. I’m actually too pissed with them to even bother. But how nice if the scenario had been:

Approach door. Manager: ‘Good morning! Our computer server is down for a few minutes. Would you like to pop into the coffee shop as our guest until it comes up again?’ It was a long weekend Sunday. Not exactly droves of people about. It’s never the idea of a free anything. It’s the thoughtfulness and social skill behind it. So we did the coffee shop thing, paid the unnecessary R 58 and then shopped. Irritating – and this thoughtlessness is happening all too frequently in Woolworths. I wonder if the manager would have thought differently if the coffee shop were not an outsourced entity? i.e. the schlep factor of sorting free coffees for waiting clients? Or does he just not know any better?

Time to re-look management training program modules? And no, I don’t wanna run them, thanks.

Related Tags: Woolworths, Customer Service, Emotional Intelligence, Social skill, Initiative

Comments

[Paul]

Hi Clive

I agree with you for the most part. On the other hand it is a good sign that there was some effort to address the system downtime.

I go to that Woolies Cafe often and I would expect management there to go a little further given the location.

Is this yet another example of mediocrity, I wonder?

[Paul]

Hot on the heels of my comment yesterday, I had a surprisingly good experience at the Woolworths in Norwood. Perhaps not all Woolworths Cafe's are created equal?