How One Employee Can Poison Your Process

A real life story from our most recent visit to one of the most customer service oriented business on the planet, Disney World.

Briefly, our 6-year old daughter is autistic. Among several of the challenges she faces due to her condition is that she is easily overwhelmed by the noise and confusion caused by your typical Disney attraction loading area.

As a well thought out, and frankly, most generous solution to these sorts of issues, Disney has long offered what they call “guest assistance passes” to their special needs customers. In essence, if you stop by their guest relations desk and explain your situation, be it an autistic child, a member of your party in a wheelchair, or a handful of other conditions, Disney will issue you a pass that is meant to help you and your party skip the otherwise complicated if not impossible lines that most customers use.

Bottom line: In our case, and for those familiar with Disney, these special passes function as universal “fast passes” and allow us to skip most of the long lines thus preventing our daughter from melting down and disturbing the experience of the other guests around us. Believe me. You think a 40 minute wait to ride Peter Pan is tough? Try spending those 40 minutes in line next to my family. Not a happy time for anyone.

We’ve been to Disney World, using this system, over the last four years at least 30 times. It is one of the few places on Earth that reaches her, puts a genuine smile on her face, and has, frankly, given us some of our happiest moments we have ever had as a family. Without the generosity of the special guest assistance pass we would not be able to go to Disney World. It simply would not work for us causing more stress than happiness for us and for those around us.

But now we come to the issue of one employee being able to poison, in 30 seconds, an otherwise amazing effort of satisfying the customer over 48 months.

Written in small print on the back of these passes it indicates that Disney reserves the right to require holders of said pass to acquire typical “fast passes” for attractions that offer the service in order to be moved to the front of the line. Those words have been on these passes for years. We’ve used our pass, literally, hundreds of times. Not once have we been challenged to produce these passes. We’ve appreciated that we’ve been given the courtesy of not having to be forced to deal with our “special situation” while living in the fantasy world that is Disney. However, Andromeda (her real name), Disney’s customer service representative working their counter on Sunday afternoon, decided that it was her responsibility to throw this fact in my wife’s face during our most recent visit and frankly scare the hell out of her.

It isn’t a completely unreasonable request. I’ll conceed that. But I only wish it was possible for me to explain to my 6-year old daughter why we had to wait four hours before we get to ride Peter Pan because that’s when our “fast passes” become good. And, no, we can’t ride Winne the Pooh right now because it also needs a “fast pass” and they’re actually sold out for the day and we can only have so many sets of “fast passes” at a time anyway to The Jungle Cruise is out as well…

Despite years of fantastic customer service, treating us with respect, and understanding how providing us a bit of privilege with a universal “fast pass” to allow our experience and the experience of those around us to be as wonderful as possible, Andromeda decided she needed to point out to my wife that rules are rules.

She also exhibited a complete lack of understanding to the fact that the existing “fast pass” system was completely inadequate to resolve our issue showing no knowledge of how the system works given the realities of time but that is just a sign of further poor training. She actually thought that most “fast passes” become good within an hour of being issued… Not even close sister.

As I said, I truly wish we were a typical family. You wouldn’t believe how long the line would be that I’d stand in to be given that privelage…

Our family pours, literally, thousands of dollars into the Disney company each year because, in exchange, they provide us with one of the few experiences that makes everyone in our family happy at the same time. We are respectful of this fact and, thus, are respectful of those around us and try hard to not abuse the advantage of our pass.

Because Andromeda decided it was her responsibility to point out the letter of the law, instead of respecting the spirit of the law that every single other Disney employee has been willing to accommodate us with over the last four years, we started our day at Disney World with a decidedly sour taste in our mouths and a fear that it could honestly be our last visit.

In the end, I convinced everyone to forget that Andromeda even existed. We took our pass from her, headed into the park, and used it as we always had. And, thankfully, everyone else we interacted with at Disney World that day continued their customer first policy and provided us with the service we needed to make our day as magical as possible. No questions asked. Business as usual.

Yes, the rules do exist as Andromeda felt it necessary to point out to us. But, somewhere along the line, some people much wiser that Andromeda, realized that whenever possible, these rules are meant to be broken and only enforced in extreme cases. Cases that, in the last four years and dozens of visits, we’ve never actually seen exist.

Your lesson?

No matter how hard you work at customer service, your best customer can throw all of that good will away with the first negative experience they have with you. If the enforced rules at Disney World had changed as Andromeda had pointed out to us yesterday, it would likely have been our last visit to Disney World for several years to come. That she felt it necessary to play enforcer with us instead of just doing her job of filtering and distribution, Disney nearly lost a valuable family of customers.

Thankfully we had faith and realized that one idiot does not a change of culture make. And we were right.

Thank you Disney World for giving us a place to make our otherwise lost little girl so happy. Oh and Andromeda? You might want to ask for a little more training. You don’t understand Disney customer service.

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Cover photo provided by Savannah Grandfather