Wednesday 5 August 2009

Untrained telephonist

What irks me is when people in the front line of the service industry do not put their heart into their work. Maybe it's due to attitude or maybe, it's due to a lack of training given to such personnel.

Take, for example, my experience when talking to the telephonist at one of the most popular hotels in Kuala Lumpur yesterday afternoon. Between 6pm and 7.30pm, I may have called them about five times to make enquiries about my room reservation.

For the first four times, the telephonist kept connecting me to either 6111 or 6112 and each time, the extension line kept ringing until I was asked to leave a voicemail. I did, on one occasion.

Now, my questions are these: (1) why wasn't the telephonist aware that there was nobody at either of the two telephone extension lines? (2) why connect me to Reservations when the Reception was perhaps better at answering my enquiry? (3) why hasn't anyone responded to my voicemail until this morning?

On my fifth try, I was so exasperated that I asked the same telephonist to connect me to someone who would answer the phone. Ta-dah .... finally, she realised it and passed the call to someone who picked up the line.

It made me wonder how many people had called up the hotel and faced the same problem with this telephonist. Maybe I should just talk to the HR manager there.

3 comments:

Jeffrey Chew said...

Don't waste your time. Go for another hotel.

stephen said...

This is the classic "passing the buck" until it totally exasperates the caller who gives up eventually or so they hope.The telephonist cum miscreant didn't reckon on a persistent caller ,aka you.Hopefully a call to the HR dept will recalibrate him/her to the perils of redirecting calls to absent personnel.Thing is at their pay grade, jobs are numerous and few would clamour for one.So they know there's no much the hotel can do.

H e n r i c k said...

Same as streamyx, the call will always in busy mode regardless of what time you call. And you get 'jackpot' when they actually pick up your call.