After my complaints last week about a Starbucks manager refusing to exchange a defective CD, I received 3 phone calls from different customer service folks at Starbucks (one of them was the ‘entertainment’ manager, and I’m not sure what that means) apologizing and offering to send me a replacement CD. All proclaimed that the manager who wouldn’t exchange the CD was not operating from Starbucks policy (although I never quite learned what that was, so I’m not certain if indeed it wouldn’t happen again to someone else).
So, thank you for making it right, Starbucks.
But here is the bigger story: every person in every company IS the company. So that manager, that one woman working in one tiny Starbucks in an out-of-the-way town outside of Austin, has created an international stir (i.e. my post), with the possibility of giving her company a bad name .
Obviously, they need to be doing better employee training. How can they make sure that their employees are on the same page? How can they be certain that each employee in the franchise chain – every single solitary employee – IS STARBUCKS. What do they need to be doing differently?
And what can we all take away from this? How many of us forget that we each represent our company brand – that the web has a very long reach, and there is nowhere to hide anymore?
As we enter a new decade, never forget to serve your employees as your first clients. And make sure they know how to serve your audience. Because without serving each of us and each of them, we have nothing.
