I went to the Lambton Quay branch of New Zealand Post so that I could arrange a courier of repaired laptop to my son in Christchurch. I went at what I expected would be a quiet of 11 o’clock, I knew the branch often had long queues at lunch time, by long I mean up to fifty people and almost out the door on to the street.
On a previous occasion where I’d waited over an hour to be served, I’d written to the national customer manager who assured me they were looking into ways to speed up serving customers, it didn’t appear that hiring more staff was one of them.
So on this occasion I was pleased to find only eight in the queue and two people serving the customers, and only fifteen minutes to get to talk to someone. They even had a guy who was sitting right in front of the queue ignoring it, get up after ten minutes and help at the counter. Unfortunately I got pointed back to the shop area at the front to get a bubble wrap, and had to wait in the now much longer queue for about twenty-five minutes.
So I’d have thought a wait of fifteen minutes was at the upper end of what you’d want to keep a customer waiting for, but to make the customer go back to the end of the queue and wait forty-five minutes in total is surely poor customer service.
They need to look at their process for starters, why should you have to wait in the queue twice for the same transaction. And on top of that, they need to look at the staff numbers they can bring to peak times, I know you can’t always predict a rush but this branch never seems to have enough people.
Next tiem I want to courier something, I think I’ll go somewhere else.
