Is service important?

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like good service.  I certainly do.

I love walking into my favourite coffee shop and hearing them say, “The usual, Michael?”  I’ve been visiting the same music store for over 25 years.  They know me, they know what I like.  I enjoy walking into my Harley dealer and being greeted with a smile.

That’s why I was really surprised and disappointed with a bad experience with a Harley dealer while on holidays recently.

Harley-Davidson dealers each offer a range of “individually branded” t-shirts.  These are normal H-D shirts embellished with the dealer’s own unique design.  Some, like Hacienda Harley, in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Warr’s, in London, England, have really great designs with special artwork.  Others, like New York Harley-Davidson, are very basic indeed.  But we still collect them!

Earlier this year, we visited Rome, Italy for a holiday.  You can imagine how impressed my wife was that the most important thing for me was to get a t-shirt from the local dealer.  Not!!

Rome has two dealers – H-D Roma, and Forum H-D – within several blocks of each other, and soon after arriving, we headed to check them out.

The first, Forum H-D, didn’t even stock dealer-branded shirts.  “No Forum H-D back-prints” was the sign plastered round the store.  The chap in the store was pleasant, apologising and offering me other stuff – caps, patches and so on – but t-shirts it had to be, and I dispiritedly left the store, American Express card intact.

The second dealer, H-D Roma, ranks as probably one of the rudest stores I’ve ever visited.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but their stock was poor, and their attitude was far worse.  The woman staff member completely ignored us for 15 minutes, then went on to make it quite clear that I was an imposition on her day, and that she would prefer it if I just went away and stopped bothering her.

Funny way to run a business.

You may read this as simple whining about a bad shopping experience, and on the surface, you’d be right. 

But my point is this.  We all ride Harley-Davidsons because we choose to.  Harley-Davidson recognises this and their corporate marketing keeps giving us reasons to do so.  They tell us that we’re important.  They tell us we’re elite.  They tell us that we stand apart because we’ve chosen H-D.

They spend a lot of money doing that, and incidents like those above don’t help.  In these difficult times, Harley-Davidson should insist that people who represent them lift their game.  We want to be treated like someone who’s valued, someone who’s important.  They’ve told us we are, and the delivery should match the rhetoric. 

They’ve told me I’m special.  I’ve chosen to believe them.  Now I expect them to treat me that way.  Every time.