Like many parents I’m sure, I was frantically trying to locate a Nintendo wii for my boys less than a week before Christmas… I won’t bore you with the details of how many stores in numerous cities that I contacted with the hopes of finding this illusive video game console, but I will tell you of a standard response that I received from almost every store that I called. After the clerks would tell me of the bad news… that they ran out, sold the last one, etc., I posed the question “do you know when more will be coming in”? Almost exclusively, the reply was “they don’t tell us - or - they don’t give us that information” Granted I may be over-critical because I’m tuned into the good and bad of customer service, but who is “they”? By the clerks responding in this fashion, doesn’t it shout that they are not in fact a part of the organization, but rather an “insignificant” of the corporate structure? I then began to wonder how much stronger those organizations would be if they empowered their employees with simple everyday information, especially in times of National crises’ like a shortage of Nintendo’s! With a standard response that went something like this… “a truck will be here Wednesday, all I could tell you is to try back then” 1) The clerk got the customer off their back in an efficient way, exercising good customer service and not looking like “just a clerk”. 2) The company by arming their clerks with this canned response, now has more than “just a clerk”. The customer will probably still end up without a Nintendo, but they will still have a good feeling about that company, and buy into the idea that the “clerk” really is an “associate” or “team member”