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March-April 2006
Saying it with roses
Members at Westpac’s Palmerston North Broadway branch covered their entire office with roses during last year’s National Customer Service Day. Branch delegate, Gill Evans, said she came up with the idea as a way to cheer people up:
“Morale was not that flash at the time. Everybody was a bit down with the way negotiations were going.”
Evans remembered one time when she had been feeling down and a friend had told her to ‘take time out to smell the roses’.
“So, that became our theme; ‘taking time out to smell the roses’ and build a bit of morale up – flowers always do that. As soon as you walked in you could smell roses right throughout the branch. Every desk, porthole and window was filled with roses.”
The Palmerston North staff, members and non-members alike, had a wonderful response from customers for their efforts, with many immediately seeing the link between fair working conditions, pay systems and the customer service provided at the end.
The National Day of Customer Service was part of a public campaign to warn that Westpac’s pressurised pays system could result in less focus on customer service in the future. Customer support for the campaign showed that many of the public want the service they receive from their bank to be pleasant and personal rather than driven by sales targets performance pay.
