Service means not saying "Sorry"

Just before Christmas, I upgraded my Mother-in-Law.

Let me rephrase that: I upgraded my MILs tech equipment: nice new laptop (from Asda!) and, most importantly, I signed her up for a broadband account. The main motivation for this was a) so she could stay in touch with her new Granddaughter and b) the pangs of guilt I felt whenever I saw her struggling with the previous kit I'd gifted her: my ancient Pentium II and dial-up...

I chose the broadband offer from the PostOffice because: the advertising campaign seemed targeted at the older, less tech savvy generation, and was a simple, no-frills offering (so my MIL wouldn't be spammed with 'why not try whizzbang x upgrade every other day).

Having sent off for the kit, it duly arrived on time. My brother Gary, who is a techy too and more local to her went to configure it. To cut a long story short, this took 3 sets of service calls each with a 48hr configuration delay. Net result was that MIL missed the first sets of photos of Evan's first few days. Now Gary, like me, is something of a firecracker when it comes to 'losing temper with rubbish call centres'. The story he relates to me is just one of poor service, that general malaise that seems to afflict most parts of our life these days (my term for this is a "Zero-pride Culture". This wasn't done, that wasn't done, blah blah blah. My MIL would simply never have got the service running had she been on her own on this. She would have been paying though, as the one thing they didn't mess up was the payment.

All through this of course, everyone is very apologetic. How pointless.

Prior to forging my 'glittering' career in technology, I worked in the hospitality trade, and was, for a time, a Room Service Manager for a 5-star hotel in London (In-Room Dining they called it. Yes, it was that posh.) Those days taught me about service, and in particular one manager and mentor would have summed up this issue: "The essence of good service is never getting into a position where you need to apologise." I can only speculate on what he must think of the hollow recorded apologies used by the train companies...

Don't apologise. Get things right. Demonstrate an apology through action.