The cost of a satisfied customer

It was the Nike Run Taipei 9-km event this morning. As I had managed an average of five hours of sleep over the past week, I was incredibly tired and only awoke about ten minutes before the race's starting time. When I finally arrived at the starting line, it was already 20 minutes into the race. And it was a cold 11 degrees Celsius, and drizzling too, and my body had barely even warmed up. Ah well... but I stilll ran anyway. :P

The race itself was rather uneventful. It was the usual straight route from the Taipei City Government Building to the Presidential Palace and back. I got back in 49 minutes 47 seconds. That was a bit slow, but acceptable. What really disappointed me was the post-race logistics. When I crossed the finishing line, it was a messy horde of 9-km race finishers and 3-km fun run participants who had yet to be flagged off, all in the same arena. When I got to the stall that distributed free isotonic drinks, the volunteers manning the station were already packing up; they had already run out of stock. *gasp*

I had joined a few Nike training runs prior to this race. At each training run, I chalked up a "point" on my Nike training report card which entitled me to swap the "points" for freebies at today's race. And so, after my run this morning, I went over to the relevant booth to claim the gift. It was a logistics nightmare. First, the volunteers at the booth asked for identity verification before they would accept the validity of the report card. Thankfully I usually run with my ID, so I could let them match the name on my ID against their database. But not everyone in the queue had theirs with them. After all, there were no earlier announcements by the organisers that runners had to bring their ID along. This led to delays. Second, for some reason unbeknownst to me, the volunteers' database showed that I had less "points" than what was indicated on my report card. This happened to many other runners as well. This discrepancy in the number of "points" led to further delays. Third, whenever there was a fussy and argumentative runner in the queue, the volunteers did not pull the person to one side and try to talk things out, and thereby let other runners in the queue claim their gift. Instead, the volunteers engaged the belligerent runners as they stood in the front of the queue, thereby jamming up the entire gift collection process. Fourth, all the volunteers appeared to be sharing a single hardcopy version of the database, which unfortunately got wet because of the light rain. When the ink began to smudge and when the paper become soaked and tattered as one volunteer passed it to another, it became so much more tedious to refer to it. This meant further delays.

As a result of all these, a number of incensed runners were turned away by the volunteers for either not having proved their identification or failing to convince the volunteers that it was the database's error for omitting their attendence at the training runs.

In my opinion, the volunteers should have just handed the gifts over when the runners produced their report cards. First, since the volunteers kept the report cards after the swap, no runner could use the same card to swap for gifts many times over. Second, the chances of a runner forging a report card are low, though admittedly not zero, which means that a very large percentage of those queuing to claim gifts were genuine participants in the earlier training runs. The volunteers should have closed one eye and allocate gifts to these runners commensurate with the "points" indicated on their report cards and not the volunteers' datebase.

Doing so would have led to many happy runners, satisfied with Nike for organising such a great run and being generous with its gifts...even if a few fraudsters managed to mix into the crowd and cheat the volunteers of some Nike wristbands, socks or dri-fit T-shirts. But even then, the cost of a few T-shirts pales in comparison to the cost of losing customers in the form of a stream of upset runners who were told to leave the booth either empty-handed or with gifts that were less than what they had truly deserved. I think their frustration and bitterness would eventually hurt Nike's business with them. It's not worth it.

I got home at 8 am, and slept under layers of blankets. When I got up again, it was 3 pm in the afternoon.