Customer Service and Front Desk - The silent and most often "unrewarded forgotten" sales team of the business

Most businesses spend a huge amount of money on their sales team. They train them and incentivize them. But then, they forget a bunch of people who are customer facing and who are actually responsible for more than half the sales. The"Service Staff". It is this sales team who can actually make or break your business particularly in these days where advertising costs are high and companies are relying more and more on social media and word of mouth to get and keep the customer.

Dubai has for long been famous for bad customer service, but it got away with it since someone higher up came out quickly to soothe ruffled feathers. But they have got complacent as well thinking that where will the customers go, particularly in the medical industry here. I have had such a bad experience with Prime Medical Centre recently here in Jumeira. Their doctors are fairly good, but the front office is terribly disorganized, and overbook and double book and basically make you wait for over half an hour, even if you an appointment. Remember, they are only a clinic and handle no medical emergencies. So I see no reason why a patient who has bothered to make an appointment, is made to wait for half an hour. This has happened to me not once but four times in a row because the front office staff had either forgotten, or were overworked, or understaffed, or whatever. My point is that the business has not only lost a loyal customer "me" but, I will probably now tell all my friends and everyone else not to bother going there. So they have lost future sales which they have to invest very heavily in to get back. The problem is that the attitude is to fire the guy who did this, not fix the systems. If you cannot get the service people motivated enough if you overwork and underpay them this is what happens, and businesses will have to wake up to this stark reality sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, we fail to acknowledge in our whole lives, that the little jobs matter, in the big picture, and those who understand and appreciate that, will pip the others to the winning post.

 To finish this with a happy story, I wonder if you heard of a restaurant called "Maanvaar". It is a restaurant in Karama serving Marwari food, started by a person from Jodhpur India. "Maanvaar" means hospitality in Marwari. It started as a six-table restaurant. It was literally a hole in the wall but the food was yummy and we converted many a skeptic. But perhaps, more than the food what brought people there in droves was the hospitality and the service. Every waiter fed you with joy and every customer who left came back with a few more. Today, that restaurant has expanded to twenty tables, they do parties and catering and they have a special sweet shop which sells Marwari sweets. For a niche Indian cuisine restaurant to do so well without massive advertising and deep pockets, stands testimony to the oft-repeated mantra if you take care of your customer they will take care of you.