When was that exactly?
Explain to me, a Juilliard trained MBA, why I should make important business decisions from the perspective of a non-business educated clerk or other low-level office functionary?
[QUOTE=msmith537]
Explain to me, a Juilliard trained MBA, why I should make important business decisions from the perspective of a non-business educated clerk or other low-level office functionary?
[/QUOTE]
Well, you could avoid blunders like this for example.
In the late 1990s, Safeway, the second largest supermarket chain in the U.S., instructed its store employees to smile and greet customers with direct eye contact. In 1998, 12 female employees filed grievances over the chain’s smile-and-eye-contact policy. What the smile with eye contact was bringing to them from male customers were numerous unwanted requests for dates…
Do you have a job? Do you think it would be OK if your boss screamed and yelled at you all day, called you belittling names, etc. just because it’s a job? As opposed to being a hobby?
Staff costs are real. I don’t see why on earth I should lose quality employees who don’t want to scrape and bow to anyone that waves a five dollar bill (??) under their nose. If you want that kind of service, you need to pay for it and go to places that offer it. Are you going only to high-end places that pay employees a lot more? Or are you another one of the type that complains that the cashier at Wal-Mart wouldn’t take their expired coupons with a smile because “you’ve shopped there for years”? Besides, I think it’s pretty immoral to just throw your weight around with service people just because you can. Acting in an ethical way doesn’t go out the door because someone’s on the clock. Be a fucking person.
Frankly, even as a customer, I don’t want my ass kissed. I actively avoid certain businesses that make their employees do demeaning things or act in a fawning manner. It’s uncomfortable. It’s weird. It’s hard to watch at best. “Can I do anything else to make this a spectacular shopping experience, Ms. Fluiddruid?” <pleading look> Ugh. While I expect some courtesy and professionalism from retail workers just like any employees, I don’t expect someone to kiss my ass. I just want you to tell me where I can find the dish soap without rolling their eyes or who know how to operate the debit card reader with a minimum of fuss. Tell me to have a nice day, great, I’ll do the same and we go on about our lives.
What are they supposed to do? Scowl at customers? Bitches be trippin’
Forget the scowl and kick them directly in the crotch, of course.
I mean DUH!
Because the low-level grunts are the part of the company the customers actually see, and it’s much easier to do your work when you’re not feeling helpless and frustrated because Those Who Dwell Above won’t stick up for you when the jerks are allowed to insult you and treat you like a moron because you’re working in an unglamorous job.
So says me, who has a degree in biochemistry and didn’t appreciate idiots screaming at me that I’m stupid because I don’t know that 30% off + 20% off coupon = 50% off
Well - remember the ubiquitous start in the mailroom back prior to about 1970 … :rolleyes:
And why should you make decisions telling those on the front line actually working with customers when you have absolutely no experience doing the job for one hour?
1 - why should we kiss the asses of customers who are out to scam as much as they can get?
2- why should people working in a closed call center that never sees anything but other employees dress up to work, have to worry about piercings or tattoos? I can assure you that I can audit an account perfectly fine dressed in a suit or in jeans and a tshirt, and jeans and tshirt are way more affordable and comfortable.
3- why should front line employees have to suck up people using obscene language at them, refusing to take NO for an answer or any other multitude of garbage that they are told they have to suck up? They get slammed for metrics and QC if they do not follow a script exactly that has very little to actually do with real life, customers that continue to argue after being told that whatever dumbass request they have is against company rules or even impossible to do.
Why can the bottom of the totem pole employees not actually be treated like rational adults instead of kids locked in a study hall detention? The way to get the best work out of an employee is not to tell them they are worthless bottom feeding scum that are not to be trusted, but to treat them with respect.
Because if you don’t know how the company works, you can’t make important decisions.
We have two salespeople at our company. One has long, long years of experience in sales, but that experience isn’t necessarily related to what we sell. He never talks to anyone else in the company and doesn’t even work in the office, he only comes in for sales meetings. The other is younger than I am, but works right in the middle of the office floor, regularly communicates with both departments, and makes an effort to understand the process and get the other department managers involved.
The former habitually gets us asshole clients who waste a significant amount of our time on petty bullshit and special requests. He promises them the freaking moon without regard to our actual scope of work (because ‘the customer is always right’), and our clients that come from him are always pissed off and disappointed because they think we can do things that we simply reasonably cannot do, are not equipped to do, and never said we could or would do (other than through the sales guy). They’re usually huge accounts, but that only exacerbates the problem because that’s that much more work that has to be done for them.
The clients that come from the latter sales guy are smaller, but almost always understand the scope of our business because he talked us up properly. We may get only a trickle of work from each client, but they’re super low maintenance and there’s a lot of them.
The sales guy who made an effort to understand our business has done more for the health of the company than any one person I could possibly name who’s worked here.
I don’t think the claim was that a janitor should be on the management track. But I think it is valid to claim it’s beneficial if the person to be upper management does come up through the business’s operational structure. e.g. engineer to chief, to eng. manager, to VP, to CEO, yada yada. Not that the C-levels need to know or be involved in every minute detail of the day-to-day stuff, but surely you can see that it might be a great asset if the people who make the decisions guiding the entire company actually have knowledge and experience in what the company actually does. Otherwise you get people like Dan Akerson, John Smale, Ron Zarrella, and not to mention the Jack Welch disciple “Minimum Bob” Nardelli (who never met a business buzzword he didn’t like.) None of which had an automotive background (some even w/o a manufacturing background) and proceeded to drive their companies into the ground by following the usual MBA playbook of analysis, metrics, and pretty much anything except building better products which more people would want to buy.
And I translate it as “The customer is spending the money which is vital to your business, whereas the customer can probably do without what you’re selling, or find it more readily and with less hassle somewhere else, if you can’t be bothered”.
So each party can decide not to take shit (if that’s how they view a contentious transaction), but the ultimate loser is typically the business.
For some reason, business owners get this more readily than their employees.
Because the customers that pay your company are paying you for the work your company provides. Guess which part of the company ACTUALLY DOES the work the customers are paying for? Hint, it AIN"T the managers.
Honestly, I can’t even believe you said that. Julliard’s reputation (except for snobbery) just dropped a couple of notches on the internet.
Some customers are tougher than others but are still worth the money to deal with, sure. It’s tough for the front-line employees, but yeah, they’re getting paid to do the job, so they should do it.
But there is a point where a customer hurts the bottom line because they take too much time or resources to deal with. Where telling a customer to get out and not come back actually allows you to make more money than trying to satisfy them.
Regardless of how far down the maintenance continuum that breakpoint may be, it does exist. So unless you define customer as ‘a person I am willing to serve’ in which case anyone on the other side of the breakpoint is de facto not a customer, ‘the customer is always right’ can’t be true.
I don’t know. Frequently business OWNERS understand that some customers aren’t worth having. Doing retail sales (what we’ve tended to talk about here), the retail clerks often KNOW it. Its often the middle managers who don’t see the forest for the trees.
Best Buy did a lot of work on trying to figure out which customers were good customers, and which customers were bad customers about ten years back. Has to go with that Angel Customer/Demon Customer book I pointed to. The other word you are looking for regarding Best Buy would be “customer centricity” - lets figure out how to make our good customers better customers and our bad customers go away. Lots of business articles at the time, probably still searchable through the wonder of the internet.
REASONABLE customers should be made to be right - even if policy needs to be stretched a little to accommodate them. GOOD customers - profitable customers - should be made to be right even if you have to take a small loss this time to make them happy. But as has been said over and over again, very often the customer claiming that “the customer is always right” is the one trying to return a dress with sweat stains on the armpits, or a big screen TV the Monday after the Superbowl, or trying to use expired coupons that the retailer can’t get reimbursed by the manufacturer for, or sexually harassing your employee. The customer who buys only your loss leaders on coupons, abuses your staff and annoys your other customers is a liability - not an asset - to your business.
I’m not surprised since it’s a school of performing arts, not a business school.
I wasn’t born yet, so no.
Because a manager has a big-picture view that the individual line worker may not see.
Because that is what you are paid to do. If you don’t like dealing with customers, there are jobs that are less customer facing.
I suppose we can debate the effects of style of dress on performance. But what does it matter? At the end of the day, EVERY company has some standard of dress (even if it is just wearing pants and a shirt) and someone will take issue with it.
Bottom line, they are paying you to be there. Dress how they ask you to dress.
I’m sorry you are having difficulty. I would be happy to assist you, but first I would like to ask you a couple of questions in order to better serve you:
Why do you care what strangers say to you while you are acting as the representative of some company? It’s not personal. And you must realize 90% of the people who call you will be pissed off about something.
The problem in your particular profession is that it is not a “rational adult job”. That is to say, it is not a job where companies are looking for employees to provide complex, creative solutions. They are looking to provide a consistent level of service (even if it consistently bad).
Lets say you are able to get one on one with a customer and really get deep into their issue. From a big picture management perspective, you may be making one customer super happy, but by spending so much time with one customer, you may be making 5 others pissed off because they have to wait in the que.
I don’t disagree that we are moving away from the “work your way up from the mailroom” style of climbing the corporate ladder. Although it’s not like working in the mailroom teaches you anything about marketing or finance. And it was generally still expected that you had to get your degree to move out of the mailroom and then your MBA to move into upper management.
I think it is harder to “move up” from anywhere these days. I see how top companies recruit and all they care about is school name, company names and buzzwords. It’s more about “branding” than actual knowledge. Companies don’t promote from within, they hire MBAs out of investment banks and management consulting firms.
Here’s the thing: nobody is talking about mere customers. For the most part, customer complaints are about bastard hellspawn demon abusive wastes of life that are known as customers only because they aren’t being paid to be in the store (although they’re sure trying to be). They aren’t anywhere near the same thing.
Meh. You don’t have to have worked retail to treat people with respect.
I understand the phrase to mean “don’t disagree with what the customer chooses.”
You are a waiter in a high class restaurant. The customer orders a fish deal, and then asks for a glass of red wine. You don’t tell him that he should drink *white *wine with fish. Not unless he actually requests your opinion.
I suppose “the customer is always right” is fine when we’re talking about irrelevant bullshit.
No, but it helps you understand what they do go through every single day of their minimally paid life.
There is nothing like having to punch in, go t work and immediately have some entitlement whore of a cow with a dress that has sweat stains under the arms trying to return it ‘because it doesn’t fit’ a day or so after New Years or some other holiday. She will bitch you out because “she paid cash” and you are only able to give her store credit so she stands there swearing at you, screaming, yelling and pouting until some poor supervisor comes over and gives her not only the money but a gift card to get her to shut up.
Meanwhile Some other entitlement whore customer trying to demand that we honor a coupon from last year and her demon spawn of a kid who has been running around ripping clothing off hangars, and smearing chocolate all over the fixtures without any supervision by momzilla. If you have the temerity to tell her spawn to stop ripping clothing off hangars and tossing it around, she will turn into the nontouchyfeely attacky tiger mom from hell and screech at you for having the nerve to say anything to her pwecious snowfwake.
Once you have managed to get her and the demonspawn out of the store, you get some shady looking people coming in, going around in pairs and doing the classic one person distract the other person stuff things into their pants, or even just a grab and run. Great, now loss prevention will ream you out over the cash transaction and gift card, you will lose out on any possible bonus because it is based on how few payouts are done and how many nasty comment cards you will get, and the light fingers of the shoplifters.
You should really find a way to sit and watch near customer service sometime …