Tag: Service

The Story Of My Life.

That friends, is the current story of my life. This post has been in the making for quite some time and when this cartoon appeared the bulb went on about the timing.

Bar a few times, I have lived away from my father for more than half a century. What I knew of him from before that, and what I have seen of him on and off since then, did not prepare me for the situation that I am now in.

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”
– John Bright

That about sums up my father’s personality. In retrospect, I should have anticipated his behaviour pattern, with all the theoretical knowledge that I have picked up in my career as a Manager. I still do not know what prompted me to invite him to come and stay with us, though to a large extent it was Urmeela’s idea that we do. I have been used to being appreciated for whatever I did for her throughout our married life and Ranjan does the same for whatever I do for him.

In my father’s case, it is just out of the question. It is his right to get service from me. He is just not conditioned to appreciate or thank his children or his late spouses for anything done for him. The blue blooded old fashioned patriarch. But let some thing that does not please him happen, then it is his right to criticize and sulk.

It is something that I can handle by and large and I am quite unaffected by his behaviour, but there is an added problem. He is hard of hearing and will not wear his hearing aid. I have to shout to get him to understand what I say. I suppose that this distorts my body language or whatever, and he goes off into orbit when that happens. Now, this is something that I am unable to handle. I have simply stopped communicating with him unless he wishes to talk about something and I refuse to shout and he is forced to lip read or wear his hearing aid.

I suspect that Salam is clairvoyant. He has given me another cartoon to suggest a possible frame of mind for my father.

I am sure that this post must ring a lot of bells with readers with similar people in their lives. It would be interesting to share some thoughts on how they handle the situation. I welcome comments and advise.

Service as a way of life in business and personal life.

"Everyone has the power of greatness. Not for fame but greatness. Because greatness is determined by service." – Dr. Martin Luther King

I posted a blog a few days ago on my personal experience with customer service from two different news papers.  This set me thinking about why this matter was so important to me and I realized that it was due to my having come through the experience of managing customer service during my active management days.

All of us have experience of good customer service and bad customer service, as we are all of us, customers for all kinds of goods and services and shop frequently in shops, malls, online, supermarkets etc, as well as visit salons, restaurants hotels etc and use the services of cable tv provider, phone connection provider, electricity connection provider etc.

In quite a few of these situations, we are helpless as we have to deal with monopoly government institutions and the less said the better about those.  Unfortunately however, one keeps coming across poor customer service in private sector situations too, like in some banks, credit card providers shops etc.

Having seen both sides of the fence for a long long time, I believe that this is a topic worth blogging about and invite discussions.

What does a customer want from a vendor of goods or services? He looks for the right quality, the right quantity, at the right price, at the right time and at the right place. To a large extent, these will be the areas that will influence a customer from being loyal to a vendor or otherwise.

We shall look at each of the items separately in a series of future posts.