twodoebs

Regular twodoebs readers will know that one of my favorite sources of material is airing my gripes with customer service.

Today, though, I'm happy to share a very positive customer service experience. Over the weekend, we visited the Giant Eagle supermarket at Camp Horn road. As we stood in a very long checkout line, we decided to take advantage of the down-time and send a message about our dissatisfaction with the constant waiting to pay for our groceries. We filled out a web form and pressed send, assuming the message would disappear into the abyss of un-acknowledged customer service complaints.

This morning, though, before either of us were even at our desks, we received a message from Brandon Miller, the Guest Service Group Leader for that store. His message said--in its entirety:

Greetings Matthew:
I wanted to shoot a quick thank you for your patronage and also bringing the issue of lines and baggers to our attention. The checkout situation at this store has been a constant area of focus for our management team with staffing and scheduling. The store has been a huge success and has greatly exceeded the projected volume at it's construction back in 1998. Unfortunately, the initial layout of the store left the front-end with "scan-and-bag" registers, and not enough of them to boot. Despite the pleasant surprise of the volume of this store, we have unfortunately inconvenienced our customers in lines. These registers are the reason that we do not have baggers scheduled. The layout of this type of register makes it safer and easier for the cashier to bag, but they are only able to accommodate a bagger for short periods of times during emergency situations. Part of the remedy for this was to try and add some self-scan registers to offer a "pressure relief valve" in case of staffing issues, like call-offs or back-to-school times. The Self-Scan experiment has been met with modest success.

The good news is that the store is scheduled to undergo a major remodeling project in the early months of 2011. Though this will temporarily disrupt some of the flow of our store, it will ultimately provide an additional 4 check-out registers to help alleviate the long lines. I have not yet heard if the remodel is to include the removal of our "scan-and-bag" registers and replace them with registers that are set up to safely accommodate baggers. As the hollidays approach, I anticipate that we will be made more aware of exactly what is in store for the Camp Horne Giant Eagle.

Thank you again for your understanding. We are working to try to find a solution in the mean time. If I can be of any further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact me.

First, this was a very prompt response, which was impressive. B, it was nice to get a message from somebody who actually had some connection to the store, rather than just a flunky at a call center. Finally, I appreciated their honest, fact-based response. No marketing-speak, company-line, there's-nothing-wrong mumbo-jumbo.

Does his response mean that Sweet Kati will avoid a 20 minute line when she's back there this Sunday picking up our weekly allotment of groceries?--probably not. But at least she'll know why the problem exists, that there are people out there who are actually trying to do something about it, and that the renovations in early 2011 bring new hope for a permanent resolution.

Giant Eagle, we salute you. Brandon Miller, thank you for your message--job well done.