I am at doctor’s office for my annual check up.  I chose a desi doctor for comfortness.  Number one, I saw couple of people getting treatment without insurance just based on things like ‘i am sureshbhai’s neice’.  Doctor apparently has been educated in india and no doubt is smart.  However, office is poorly equipped.  medical assistant asked me to sit in a high school desk to take my blood pressure.  Can you believe that?  In a freaking high school desk? 

I have experienced such horrible customer service experiences at lot of desi owned businesses.  Lets take example of Indian grocery stores.  They are often crowded, dirty, disorganized, and don’t get me started on the cashier who doesn’t know the meaning of the word, “hello” or don’t know how to simply smile.  Have you noticed how small the aisles are?  And of course lot of grocery still in boxes on the floor that should be in the storage? 

It makes me wonder how the hell can you run your businesses and make money along the way.  Why are these businesses filled with customers despite the bad service?  Why do we all still go to those dirty stores and restaurants and give them our business?  We go to those stores because we have low expectations from desi businesses.  So when a cashier doesn’t smile at us or a stores are dirty we don’t make it that big of a deal.  We simply say to ourselves, it’s a desi business, no big deal.  We tell ourselves it’s just like India and we simply smile and walk away.  Why don’t we demand good customer service from these businesses?  I think we are encouraging such a behavior by giving them our business on daily basis and not even bringing it to their attention.

From a business standpoint, customer service is not their top priority because they are still receiving business without it, so why waste money?  I don’t think the cashiers are even trained on the customer service.  So part of the problem i believe is, these are small, locally owned and operated stores.  The skills to run the business has passed on from one generation to the next.  So we have brought the experience of running a business in India to the States and thus things haven’t changed.  No need to clean the stores and train the cashiers and teach them to simply say “hello”. 

Back at the doctor’s office, one hour passed since my appointment time and all i have gotten done so far is blood pressure.  I see my doctor talking to other patients on the phone when he is with a patient in a room.  How rude and disrespectful is that?  I simply just wanted to walk out.  I finally got a chance to see the doc after hour and 30 minutes passed my original appointment time.  After one week i called the office to learn about my results and was told they would call me back, which never happened.  I heard back from them after 2 weeks and were supposed to fax me the results of my test, of course they haven’t done so.