Officeworks Managers

I’ve talked about the errors in catalogues and the customers. Now it’s the turn of the managers…

Example 1: On “Officeworks FM”, the pre-recorded music and announcements broadcast in Officeworks stores, you will notice promotions for things such as fly-bys, catalogue requests and the like. You may even notice that at the end of these there is the friendly tag “Ask a friendly Officeworks team-member for more information”, or something similar. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you actually asked a team-member? Most of them wouldn’t know. The fact is, the team-members are simply not taught about the things mentioned in Officeworks FM. I asked a manager about ordering a catalogue once. They said two things that disturbed me. First was “I don’t know” and the second was “You’re the first team-member who’s asked me”. The fact is that Officeworks should train its team-members better.

Example 2: Once a customer came in saying that his chair was missing some casters. No matter, it happened that this particular chair had a lot of returns, owing to a faulty back mechanism. I asked a manager if I could use the excess casters from the faulty chairs. Sure, I was told, just tell the customer that some machinery damaged the chairs. That’s right. A manager told me to lie to a customer to deceive them about the quality of the chair that they had bought. Of course I didn’t. I went out, got the casters and then told the customer that we’d had issues with that particular chair. I also told him to get that chair back quick smart if he had any problems.

Example 3: We got a touch-screen information kiosk, sponsored by Canon. When a customer wanted to use it, I didn’t know the password. Neither did the manager on duty. So there was a kiosk that nobody in the store could use… great!