Fantastic, money-grubbing customer care at state hospital carpark
All the pay-machines at the hospital car-park broke down yesterday but people were not allowed out. They were made to stand in the blazing sun for an hour while a lone cashier handled all payments manually.
Yesterday all the payment machines for the state hospital car-park broke down. Instead of raising the barriers and allowing drivers out free of charge because the problem was theirs and not the drivers’, the administrators sent hundreds of people out to the cash office at the perimeter of the building, which was manned by a single cashier.
A reader has emailed me about his experience.
Maintenance staff stood at the machines scratching their heads, sending everyone outside to the cash office, in which there was just one cashier. It was the peak hour for people returning to their cars because visiting hours had just ended. A large crowd stood outside the cash office in the blazing sun and heat, with absolutely no hint of shade, waiting to be served. I waited just under an hour.
We couldn’t leave. Our cars were being held hostage. The verbal abuse hurled at the security staff just cannot be repeated.
My advice to the management of the car-park is that they need to have some form of backup plan for system breakdowns like this, and punishing their customers by making them stand in the peak summer sun – or anywhere at all – for an hour should not be one of them.
If they didn’t have enough cashiers to cope, they should have simply lifted the barrier and let people out without paying. That’s what is done when the system breaks down in a privately-owned car-park. They don’t trap their customers inside by holding their cars hostage while forcing them to wait for an hour to pay.
The company which runs the state hospital car-park succeeded in squeezing out every bit of revenue with no regard to their customers. And because it isn’t working for a private-owned building like a hotel, but for a government hospital, it received no orders to let people out.