You Say You Want Service ? : Retailing: There’s really only one way to get service, says ‘customer terrorist’ Peter Glen, and that’s to stand up and demand decent treatment.

Peter Glen, the country’s self-proclaimed “customer terrorist,” is loose in Beverly Center. He’s lying in wait for an AWOL salesclerk in the holiday decorations section of a big department store.

“It’s the most important department in the store right now and nobody’s here! “ he bellows, noting that this is more evidence of The Great Retailing Suicide of 1990.

But Glen doesn’t just huff off. Rather, the author of “It’s Not My Department! How to Get the Service You Want, Exactly the Way You Want It,” waits to see just how long it takes to get some help.

He’s used to this sort of challenge. Indeed, he gets paid $5,000 a day to sample and critique service from the customer’s point of view. Then he suggests ways to shape things up. A New York-based retailing consultant, he’s been at this for 25 of his 51 years, working with such clients as Bloomingdale’s, Esprit and General Foods.

Now in his William Morrow book, Glen has catalogued both the horrors and the triumphs of his customer service surveys in such chapters as “A Nation of Whiners,” “The Rudeness Sweepstakes,” “The Meek Will Inherit Nothing,” “Keep Your Mints Off My Pillow,” “Things an Airline Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “Brain Surgery at Home.” In the book, he provides numerous tips for doing end-runs around potential disasters, such as booking an alternate flight the moment you learn yours has been delayed. (For other tactics, see accompanying story on E5).

Today, in the holiday decorations department, the service delay has lasted nearly 10 minutes. Finally, the clerk shows up and Glen asks where she’s been.

A beatific grin appears on her face.

“Shhhh! Don’t tell anybody,” she says with a finger pressed to her lips. “I’ve been shopping. There’s a $2,000 bedroom suite I want to buy. So I visit it every day.”

It’s never easy when nit-picking Peter Glen comes to call. “He’s a consultant who doesn’t act like a consultant. He doesn’t hesitate to point up your weaknesses and give you a kick in the seat. He’s like that Mennen Skin Bracer commercial where the guy slaps his face and says, ‘Thanks, I needed that,’ ” reports Kenneth Banks, vice president of marketing and communication for Eckerd Drugs, a chain of 1,700 drugstores throughout the Southeast and Southwest.

Glen would agree. He volunteers that many people, his clients included, think of him as an “opinionated (expletive).”

According to Banks, the folks at Eckerd survived and apparently profited from working with Glen, but “it was painful for several people here. A lot of people were outraged.”

However, Banks found that after his colleagues got past the initial sting of Glen’s critiques, they saw “a very insightful, sensitive individual who has keen feelings for the way people feel and how to motivate them. Four years later, our chairman is still quoting Glen.”

In most of the stores that Glen visits, the service is just as he predicts. Nobody tries to provide him with any more assistance than, “Hi. How are you?” At every stop he acts eager to buy, but he has to demand that he be helped.

It’s not easy to miss Glen, who is dressed this day in a peacock blue jacket, matching cummerbund, white tuxedo shirt loose at the collar, white pleated pants and white sneakers. But this spirited, white-haired elf of a man is ignored when he hangs over the counter in an eyeglasses boutique, his body posture silently daring a clerk to get off the phone and wait on him. (The clerk doesn’t budge.)

In a pet store, Glen repeatedly asks why the “patio kittens” are called patio kittens--and not bedroom kittens or kitchen kittens. He rephrases his question three times, giving a young woman three opportunities to say, “I’ll find out.” Instead, she keeps saying, “I don’t know.” When he finally advises her to ask someone else, she comes back with an answer that Glen says is so good it could generate a sale: “We call them patio kittens because it sounds better than mutts.”

In another department store, Glen is so miffed by the prolonged lack of attention that he creates a scene. He repeatedly yells “Help!” until a clerk rushes over.

“I just did not know how long we could stand here without getting your attention,” Glen explains, indignantly.

“Well, I was writing something. It would have been a few minutes,” replies the clerk.

“But if you’re writing, how can you sell?” Glen demands.

“Because I’m doing both,” says the clerk, anger seeping into his voice. “If I saw somebody who needed help, I’d give them help. I didn’t know that you needed help.”

“That’s why I screamed ‘Help! OK?”

“OK,” says the salesman. “No problem.”

Glen walks away, mocking the clerk. “No problem.” Then he adds, “It’s a big problem. . . . He is completely enraged, offended and he sold nothing.”

It’s pointed out to Glen that the young man must do something right. He is wearing a badge on his jacket proclaiming he was a top salesman of 1989.

The author is unimpressed: “It said 1939!”

Glen does find some good service in the Beverly Center. He praises the good-humored clerks in a card shop. And in a branch of a well-known athletic shoe chain, he notes that the sales clerks are trained to always stand near the front of the store and can be fired if they are caught sitting down, chewing gum or committing other sins of service.

Glen acknowledges that Beverly Center is reputed to be one of the most prosperous retailing meccas in the country. Situated between Beverly Hills and Melrose Avenue, it is well known as L.A.’s hippest mall. As for its service, Glen allows that it’s “not worse than any other place, but it’s not as good as it could be.”

Says Larry Beerman, Beverly Center’s general manager, “Given the thesis of his book, I’m not surprised that he could come to that conclusion. You can find examples of bad service anywhere. . . . Beverly Center is a very successful shopping center that didn’t get that way by giving out poor service. We’re continuing to see sales increases over last year.”

Why does good service seem to be harder to come by these days?

“Nobody gives a damn. Nothing is anybody’s department anymore,” Glen contends, between bites of swordfish. (Before embarking upon Beverly Center he successfully challenges a fancy restaurant across the street to serve lunch in 20 minutes start to finish. He’s delighted and tells the waitress: “We thought you’d say, ‘It’s not in our image to feed you in 20 minutes.’ ”)

“We live in a ‘service economy,’ but there is no service,” Glen continues. “Servers don’t serve. And customers put up with it. They don’t expect service, and they don’t get service. It’s certainly because clerks are not well-paid and because they don’t work on commission. Also, management tolerates it. That’s a very important factor. And it’s because people have no pride in their work. But the root is that they don’t care about themselves . . . . They are allowed not to give a damn by management and they are allowed to not give a damn by customers.”

Glen’s solution is for service providers to study the customer, anticipate and meet his needs--and then get out of his face. And he counsels that attitude adjustment is free: “You can be sick. You can be in all kinds of trouble. And still do your job and have a good time.”

Even at what many people (authors anyway) consider a loathsome job--book promotion. Before he set out on his first coast-to-coast publicity tour, Glen was forewarned it would be an ordeal.

“I thought about it and decided yes, it will be strenuous to be in a different city every day and be clever and witty and charming all the time,” he says. “Then I realized, I’m going on a tour of this whole country--as a sort of celebrity until proven otherwise. This is what I asked for!”

The son of a Michigan clothing manufacturer, Glen started his career running the firm’s factory outlet and also worked selling goods to other stores around the country. In all his years of retail consulting, he estimates that he’s reached about a million listeners in talks and seminars.

Until the book.

“Last week I talked to 13 million people (through various media appearances and interviews),” he calculates. “I figured out it would take me 120 years to reach that many people at my former rate of speed.”

In his book, Glen offers a chapter he calls “The Worst Service Story I Ever Heard.” It is the tale of an airline passenger sick with diabetes and cancer, a man whose legs had been amputated along with his hips and tail bone.

In the course of the man’s trip, Glen writes, a cabin attendant was so clumsy lifting him into his seat that his pants fell off, exposing him to other passengers. The airline lost his prosthetic pillow so he couldn’t sit up during the flight--or during the next four days of his trip. As a result, the man developed bleeding bedsores.

For three hours after the plane landed, baggage attendants couldn’t find the man’s wheelchair, which had been mistakenly abandoned in an elevator.

On the man’s return flight, his plane was delayed for 6 1/2 hours. He and two family members traveling with him were finally booked onto another flight and advised that all the special arrangements they’d made would be honored if they’d just hand a computer printout to the gate agents. But, because the plane was booked solid, the family’s bulkhead seat assignments were not honored and the man was left teetering on a cart on the plane while the rest of the passengers boarded.

When the man’s daughter protested this treatment, she was told, “If he’s that sick, he should be in the hospital.”

A lawsuit is pending.

What can be done to ensure that such scenes don’t happen again?

Says Glen, “Managers should give individual responsibility (to employees). They should reward individual action. They should promote individual pride. They should discipline individual sloppiness.”

Glen’s own Worst Beverly Center Service Story comes, of course, where he can least afford it. He strolls into one of the mall’s two bookstores and asks for his own book by title.

The first person he talks with tells him, essentially, that his inquiry doesn’t fall in her department. She recommends that he see the person at the information counter.

The information counter attendant finds the title on microfiche and says it should be with the marketing books. It’s not there, nor is it in the “New Releases” section.

“It could also be jammed deep in the business section,” Glen advises, telling her that he knows that the book is supposed to be in every branch of the bookstore chain this week, selling at 25% discount and displayed with other “New Releases.”

He is invited to come back and check again in a week.

“I can’t. I live in New York,” he replies.

Dejected, he leaves the store. But on the way out, Glen’s publicist discovers the book, buried in a display at the entrance to the store.

“I can’t believe it! They don’t know what’s in their (store).” Now Glen wants to see the manager. “This is an outrage,” he says, describing what happened. “Your employees do not know where anything is.”

“Well, we’re having a book signing right now,” the manager apologizes.

“Is that an excuse? ‘We’re having a book signing right now’?”

The manager tries a different approach: “This must have just come in.”

“So what?” yells Glen. “Why would they tell me, after checking the microfiche, that it’s with the sales and marketing books, which is a lie. Why wouldn’t the clerks or even the managers look at the front of the store from time to time?”

“I doubt if they would lie to you,” says the manager. “It’s not like we’re trying to trick anybody.”

“Just thought I’d mention it,” replies Glen.

But isn’t there a nicer way to get things done? A more diplomatic way to get the same results, something less on the order of Bart Simpson and more like Bill Cosby? Doesn’t Glen ever think back and say, “Gee, if I’d done this a little differently . . . .”

“Yes,” he says, acknowledging that it is possible and preferable to get things done without being a pain. But he contends that, if you have to, it’s better to be irritating than to swallow the insult of lousy customer service.

“It is astonishing how people won’t fight,” he observes. “They’ll just do anything rather than fight, including giving up their souls and their property and their seats and their rights. . . . And that has a lot to do with the real epic tragedy of service in this country, which is a country that doesn’t work, a budget that can’t be balanced and banks that don’t work and telescopes that can’t see and bombs that cost $170 million each and land 150 miles west of their targets.

“We (expletive) up everything. How about the graffiti that says, ‘If you are over 18 and you can read this, you must be Japanese?’ ”

Instead of settling for mediocrity, Glen wants people to start fighting back, even if they make a few enemies in the process. He claims it’s healthier for them.

“Every time you as a customer get an insult and you swallow it instead of spitting it out, you get another ulcer,” he warns. “The most ulcerated people in America are the ones who are the nicest. They’re the ones who put up with the most.

“I think it’s wrong. I don’t think you should be nasty and give other people ulcers. I think you just demand your rights.”

Glen’s Tips for Service

GETTING YOUR DOCTOR TO SEE YOU ON TIME: “You go to your doctor and you say, ‘Dr. Fox, I am the customer and I hate waiting. You always make me wait. How can we solve this? I can be your first patient of the day. . . . I will calculate the average amount of time that you make me wait and I will always come that many minutes late to my appointment, or I will charge you for my waiting time. . . .’

“If that doesn’t work, tell the doctor that you are going to change doctors, and ask him how much he values your business. He may tell you that he has a waiting list a mile long. Then you must decide if it’s important enough to change doctors.”

GETTING A REFUND: “When you go to a store to get a refund, or when you have to call an insurance company because you think your bills are all wrong, prepare for battle. . . . Arm yourself with everything: correspondence, receipts, even tape recordings if you’ve got them. If you prepare as if you were going to defend your life to a jury, with facts, passion and determination, you might cut your waiting time in half. Let them know the faster and more efficiently they do it, the sooner it will be over.”

GETTING INSTANT SERVICE: “Just go into a store, and when you find that you can’t get help, just stand there and scream the word (help) as loud as you can. You will see people come running who haven’t moved in years. . . . Screaming help at the top of your lungs . . . confronts the situation, calls a halt to routine and starts alarms ringing everywhere. You get attention, suddenly and completely. . . . They will sing to you, if that’s what you want, or anything else you want, as long as you don’t do that again.”

From “It’s Not My Department!: How to Get the Service You Want, Exactly the Way You Want It”