Happy Customer
I wanted to comment on a recent pleasant bit of customer service I experienced last weekend.
Being an entertainment lover, I often find myself down at the local video rental store to check out the latest video game releases (for either myself or my son, who is also an avid video game player). My family and I headed out to Family Video, where we recently got a membership, to check out what the store had in stock, and since we hadn't gotten familiar with how the store operates yet.
Well, we were the only customers in the store on this particular day, and the store clerk greeted us very friendly as we entered the store and began browsing the aisles. After about 5-10 minutes of scoping the shelves, we noticed that the store was offering discounts for multiple rentals, so we grabbed a couple video games and headed up to the counter to check out.
The friendly store clerk happily scanned the games and also removed the discs, placed them in a computer desktop tower disc drive, where I noticed the young lady clean the discs with a chemical before placing back in the box and giving them to us. (I had never seen staff in a video rental store do this before, and sometimes the discs are loaded with fingerprints, smudges and scratches..) She gave us our discount on the games, and informed us that they have a weekly "featured" new release movie for 75 cents if we were interested.
For 75 cents, when some of these new movie rentals are $4-$5, we grabbed up the movie too. (Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell, we hadn't seen it yet.)
The clerk then told us that we could extend our half-price rental period another 30 days for a nominal fee. (First-time customers, as my family and I were, get half-price rentals for the first 30 days of their membership.) Although we passed on this special for the time being, it's nice to know that you can continue to rent movies and games there for half price for a small fee, which ultimately results in a nice savings on rentals down the road. (Especially for us frequent renters.)
Now I know it was this young lady's job to mention all of these discounts to us, clean the games, bag them up and take our money before we left. She could have done all of these things and left it at that. But it was nice to see how she handled her customers in a way that was courteous and professional. It was apparent she wanted to make us feel like happy customers who would soon return to their store after we left the building. And you know what? With customer service like that, I think we'll be going back there in the future.
Between saving money, good customer service, and getting three games and a movie for like $8 (where else can you get that kind of a deal for all this entertainment?), we left the store knowing this is how a good video rental store should be operated.
The clerk who helped us that day didn't have to necessarily go that extra mile to make sure we were pleased with our service, but she did, and if all of the staff in the store treat their customers like she treated us, especially during busy hours, they should have a good business on their hands.