Public Image Limited
Page 79
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HAT SORT of image do ur customers have of you? 1 you provide them with insport in £25,000 worth coach beautifully turned I — and driven by a man th cloth cap, braces, and ro days' stubble on his in?
Or do they see your 5,000 coach in the street or read your advert in the cal paper — and come thing to your depot to book 14-day European hire only find that your office is parated from the street by a rtholed yard which after avy rain gives your piesea the appearance of a terday moated castle?
My point is a simple one. ere is more to operating aches than just operating aches. You might have the st coaches in Britain. The best lintenance. The best drivers. It you need the best image to with them; you need to inire customers confidence. Why do you think banks and lilding societies have such Jsh premises? Many respectle building societies have scure names which would inire little confidence if they erated from a little wooden ack in a potholed piece of isteground. By spending aney you make money.
Try to look at your office with a eye of a stranger. Look at the 'tidy piles of paper. At the ps containing the dregs of sterday's tea. At the 1976 aatre posters. At the greasy full of windscreen wiper Mor bits.
It will cost you absolutely thing to tidy up that mess. What's the floor covering e? Nice clean easy-to)intain tiles? Carpet tiles (perps oil-stained from the .eman mechanic's boots)? Or tatty old bit of discarded ing-room carpet?
You may laugh — but you know that these things do happen. And if they're happening in your office, your image is suffering — and with it, your business. How many quotations given to personal callers do not bear fruition as actual private hires?
So, be ready to spend a bit of money to keep your office in the same condition as you keep your coaches.
The same can be said about your drivers. You pay them a lot of money (even if they don't always think so!). You give them coaches to drive which are probably worth more than the houses they live in. Yet you allow them to drive looking as if they had just rolled out of bed into their driving seats.
A uniform need not be expensive .— and it need not look like a uniform, The days of military smartness and uniform caps are over. All that is needed is a blazer and a couple of pairs of flannels. It's a good idea to buy a blazer which matches your livery; and you can even have a simple motif made up as a badge to be sewn on the breast pocket. Obviously you cannot afford to buy clothing for part-timers — but you can still insist on standards of appearance equal to those of your full-time staff.
What does all this smartness achieve? As well as building up your image it encourages your drivers to have pride in their work. Who will deny that they feel better when dressed smartly than when dressed for digging the garden?
Having introduced the thought of drivers having pride in their work, let me now touch on the thorny problem of job satisfaction.
No — don't stop reading just yet; l'm not about to expound any high-flown theories. But job satisfaction can play an important part in your image.
I'll never forget one driver I knew who wasn't very happy in his work. He went out on a private hire job with a threeyear-old vehicle which, even when it was new, hadn't really merited the description of "luxury coach".
The company had a few dual-purpose type vehicles which were available for stage service and contracts but doubled up as private hire coaches when necessary — and it was one of these this driver had.
On top of this, the full-time cleaners hadn't made a very good job of sweeping it out and this driver's attitude to his work was such that rather than give it a quick brush-out before leaving the depot, he simply shrugged his shoulders and took the coach out as it was.
When he picked up his party, he started by apologising for the "old" coach and for its not being cleaned properly. What a start to an outing! When the trip was over, the organiser had a list of complaints — real and imagined — as long as your arm, including unfounded allegations of bad maintenance.
The point of that rather long story is that the driver's attitude caused a lot of customer dissatisfaction and lost the corn-. pany a client. If the driver had brushed his coach out and said nothing to draw attention to its dual-purpose nature, there would have been no trouble.
So job satisfaction is important, even though most people never consciously think about it. There is no formula for providing instant job satisfaction. tech individual who works for you might get something different from his job — one man will be in it only for the money, another for the freedom from constant supervision which coach driving provides, Yet to get satisfaction from their work, all your staff will have to see you as a good employer — ready to listen to and act on their complaints (which, though trivial to you, can be very important to them); not holding an inquest every time somebody spends 5p more on their expenses than you had anticipated (which doesn't mean you have to throw money away either); taking disciplinary action which is fair and is seen to be fair (every company has its barrack-room lawyer ready to stir up dissatisfaction at other people's expense).
We've come a long way from the original theme of this article — image. Or have we? Too many operators think that image consists in having a fleet of smart modern coaches. But there's much more to it than that: premises, staff attitudes, stationery, publicity material, even the way your telephone is answered. And it usually costs little more to promote a good image than a bad one.