So answer me a couple of questions.
Who knows more about day to day interactions with customers and how to please them, you the MBA who has never worked a day on a sales floor, or somebody that earns their living at it?
Who would give better input as to the what the policies and procedures that the sales help should follow, the MBA that has no practical experience, or somebody that is in the trenches every damn day?
If you answered the MBA to both questions, I have to ask, do you also tell your dentist, and doctor how to operate? Do you tell your auto mechanic how to diagnose you car?
Face it, the guy that digs ditches for a living knows more about using a shovel than you do. Same with sales people and handling customers.
Or, how about—
You are a waiter in a high class restaurant. The customer orders the fish deal. Your restaurant has never had fish on the menu. You tell this to the customer. The customer gets all up in your face, screaming obscenities and foaming at the mouth, getting flecks of spit all over you. They demand to speak with the manager to have you fired for contradicting them.
The customer, after all, is always right.
:rolleyes:
An MBA probably dreamed up that script. A lot of customers absolutely DO NOT want to be addressed by name in public. I happen to be one of them. And yet, many supermarkets and big box stores insist that the cashiers address people by name, if they pay by check or card. I don’t want someone mangling my name. I don’t want someone calling me Miss or Mrs. Bodoni. There are a few people who address me by Lynn, because they’ve asked me my name. And I don’t want the food server to kneel in front of me to take my order. Worse is the one who sits down at my table. I suppose that if a very, very tall server were to kneel or sit, that would be better than looming over me, but even though I’m very short and don’t particularly care for being loomed over, I dislike having a kneeling or sitting server even more.
That MBA probably doesn’t know about loss prevention, either. S/he doesn’t know about the entitlement whore customers and the scams they try to run. And s/he doesn’t listen to any feedback from the floor, either, even though the business might be better off.
Having an MBA is like being a member of Mensa. It means that you’re capable of getting an MBA/high score on an IQ test. It doesn’t actually prove anything else. It doesn’t prove that you’re competent in that field, and it doesn’t prove that you’re competent, period. And I’ve been a member of Mensa for over 30 years now.
Sort of a variant of Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. People getting degrees and then going out in the world with nothing more than a head full of theories is what has fucked up the country.
Look at it this way if you like.
Go to West Point and get a degree in Military History, and you tend to automatically get commissioned into the Army. That is the equivalent of getting your MBA.
Once you have your commission, you are a fresh hire in the Army. In the real world you now get to run shit. In the Army you are the bottom of the running shit totem pole. You have a hierarchy of enlisteds to make sure you do not fuck up. In the business world it is money and jobs, in the army it tends to be lives.
Now unfortunately in the business world, you get a store general manager with a shiny new degree he wants to play with. He will not listen to his sergeant - equivalent because he has the shiny degree, not 25 years experience working in every position in the store from stock clerk through floor supervisor. At least if you are the store manager, you can actually see what is going on in your store. If you are unfortunate enough to be off at the head office as a low level policy maker, you end up making policies that make no sense whatsoever, and can be detrimental to the customer service aspect of the company.
[this is actually one reason the corporation my dad worked for after he retired from the army started all its managment as trainees working in the plant. I had them rotate through my machine shops with great regularity. They even worked the bleach platform making sodium hypochlorite, and worked in the warehouse loading trucks. By the time they were finished, they could run any department in the plant and were familiar with every job in the plant even if they couldn’t actually do it.]
I decided Julliard must offer an MBA for Broadway Producers - but you decided to go a different direction after graduation. 
No, the MBA does know all this - but to the MBA at corporate headquarters customers are numbers - they look at customers statistically. Unlike the floor clerks, they don’t deal with people as individuals. They find that studies show that customers respond better and have more loyalty when they feel like they are known by the staff - so they say “use their name.” On a subset of the population, this works great. On some subset, they don’t care, on a smaller subset they are actively annoyed. Pissing off the smallest subset to build loyalty in a bigger subset is a trade they are willing to make.
Also, the MBAs at corporate know that there are employees that can be empowered - even floor employees. And employees that you empower at your own risk. It is unfortunate that you’d need to tell someone doing retail sales that they should be pleasant - but unfortunately, not everyone arrives that way. And “pleasant” leaves room for too much arguing. So it becomes a procedures to "greet customers with a smile and ask ‘Can I help you find anything?’ without exception. Because saying ‘If the customer looks like they need help, ask them’ leaves you with some percentage of your staff that says ‘no one ever looks like they need help’ while they stand around scowling. And followup customer satisfaction surveys that say “I couldn’t find anyone to help me.”
(I have used this example before, but we hired a new team of people to work phones - in a corporate building. Now, we didn’t make them dress up to do this job - it was phone work in our pretty casual office environment. We did have to tell them it was appropriate to shower and inappropriate to come to work in the jammies you had slept in. Some people ARE that clueless.)
And of COURSE those MBAs know about loss prevention. Companies have teams of people reading message boards like Fat Wallet looking for new scams. Then they have to balance policy to stop the scam with retaining customer satisfaction for the MAJORITY of their customers who are decent human beings. A lot of analysis and work goes into preventing shrinkage, fraud and loss in a retail operation.
MBAs may be a different class of people - a desire to become an MBA, combined with the training, often creates a class of assholes. That doesn’t make them idiots regarding fraud.
In my experience - having sat in something like middle management my whole life - floor employees see an isolated piece, and in isolation, the rationale for the piece looks stupid. And when educated on the larger puzzle, they weight their piece high because - well, its their piece. Anecdotes rank high, because that is all they really have to work with. And sometimes, they can’t be educated on the reason for the change (we are doing something our rank and file considers incredibly stupid - but we are doing it because there is a large legal issue we can’t talk about. So yeah, about all we can tell them is “it needs to be done this way.”). Upper management sees the whole puzzle - and is making broad decisions that need to affect the pieces. They don’t always appropriately weight the individual pieces either, but they have a much bigger view, and a lot more data.
None of this means that the “suits” should tolerate customers abusing their employees. Or that the “customer is always right.”
Yeah, I forgot that I graduated with my MBA and 28 years of never working a day in my life.:rolleyes:
IRL, MBAs start at the bottom of the MBA pile as well unless they already have significant work and management experience.
That’s actually a good idea. And a lot of large companies like GE and P&G do just that. You join a management training program and go through several years of rotating through different divisions in the company to learn how they work.
Or a class of people who just like business.
So is my secretary.:rolleyes:
An MBA means you are capable of going to classes for two years (while working full time in my case) and completing two years worth of classes in accounting, finance, marketing, operations, management, negotiations, business strategy, and so on.
No, it does not make you an expert in any particular industry.
Having an MBA does not make a bad manager any more than having a degree in architecture makes bad architects. What makes a bad manager is not listening to the people you actually manage.
Most low level employees think their managers are idiots anyway. The reason for that is because the company does not revolve around those people. Managers have to make broad decisions that apply to the entire department or company and there will always be people who don’t like those decisions.
That was mis - attributed and was mine - but yeah. Plenty of MBAs like business. And plenty of lawyers like law. But both fields tend to attract a personality - and both programs can sort of cement that personality. Assholishness is certainly not a universal, but its not uncommon, either.
I can’t find an MBA program listed on Juilliard’s website.
I think the Julilliard/MBA thing is what we refer to as a “joke.”
Really? That’s where I got my GED in Law.
I had a manager overhear this and tell the customer “Good, now you can be their problem.”
A happy customer is a repeat customer. Repeat business means revenue. But a real PITA customer can cost a business. If you’re such a dick that the business is ultimately going to lose money trying to keep you happy, then the business is better off without you as a customer.
Agreed. I have stopped potential customers from coming in simply due to their demeanor on the phone towards my staff. I happen to love taking those phone calls and explaining that if that is how they will treat the staff on the phone, we don’t want or need their business. Have a good day. Shock and silence usually follow. And no, an apology doesn’t make a difference. A tiger doesn’t change its stripes.
Hell, no - the customer is very frequently wrong.
Here’s some of the customer support I’ve had to deal with in the last week (and it’s been a quiet week):
- We should give him a free copy of the software, because our *demo *has limited functionality. (Uh, yeah…it’s a demo, not a free program.)
- He’s “going to sue us” because a 10-year-old version of our software didn’t take new 2011 tax law into consideration. (That’s what the updates we sent you are for.)
- We’re “legally required” to assist him in installing his one single-user license for all 2500 professionals at his firm. (Says it in the name: single-user!)
- We’re incompetent, because our free technical support doesn’t cover our competitors’ (who charge extra money for support) products. (I did actually look up the correct tech support number for her, but still got a complaint.)
- A complaint is going to the BBB because we refused to provide technical support for a product that had already been returned & credited. (I guess good businesses don’t update their customer records.)
Customers who actually are right call us up to ask a question or report a bug, get a solution, and are done. Generally we’ll never hear from them again, unless they run into another bug/edge case with a new version or have a feature request.
I got my Associate’s Degree in Brain Surgery there as well. I minored in Prancing.
Getting an MBA requires certain skill sets. Some of these skills (being able to form and work toward long term goals, for instance) will serve the degree holder well in business situations. Other skills might be useless in the workplace, or in a particular workplace.
When I was young, I wanted to be an artist. I studied art and art related subjects. However, I simply am not really artistically talented. It takes more than just knowing how to mix pigments and how to use perspective to become a great painter. And it takes more than just a lot of practice. All of these things can help a great deal, but taking art courses will NOT necessarily make a great artist if the person simply doesn’t have the talent.
Having an MBA doesn’t mean that the holder is necessarily a bad manager. But it doesn’t mean that having an MBA guarantees that the person is a good manager, either. All it means is that this person has managed to pass a certain set of courses. And there’s a certain type of person who thinks that because s/he has an MBA, and the salesdrones on the floor don’t, that s/he knows better than the salesdrones. And what I’m saying, and what a lot of other people are saying, is that having some experience on the floor might help the MBA holder know whether the salesclerks are bullshitting him or her. See Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss. This guy attempts to manage engineers without having any engineering knowledge…which is laughable in a comic strip, but which can be disastrous in real life. My husband told me about his new job goal yesterday. He’s supposed to write and install a program by the end of this month. However, his bosses haven’t decided just what the program is supposed to do yet. But it will be my husband’s fault if the program doesn’t do whatever it’s supposed to do.
I love working in an industry where the ultimate goal of the “sales force” is to serve as many judgement impairing chemicals as possible to customers and then have them be the bouncers problem.
I’m the bouncer.
I just had to deal with a customer today who; returned a heavy item, parked in the fire lane right outside the door to unload, left her van in said fire lane while shopping for over half an hour, and got a parking ticket from a cop who was in the parking lot for another reason. Naturally it was our fault and we had to “do something” about the ticket. First she wanted me to cancel it, then she wanted me to reimurse her the fine, and finally she agreed to settle on a gift card. She didn’t get any of that. Yelling that it was somehow our fault & that I wasn’t doing my job didn’t help (other than making her the butt of jokes after she left earshot). Her reaction was not unique. Every week or two somebody get’s ticked in our lot; usually it’s for parking in one of the handicapped spots without a plate or placard and comes in complaining & expecting us to “do something” about it. What are we supposed to do; have few hadicapped spots? Of course the really fun part is watching people stupid enough to try & pull this shit with the cops. 
That always brings out the crowd.
Hmmm. Offer to break their legs for them?
The thing is, libraries have these documents called “codes of conduct” that are posted publicly near the entrance of the building in most cases. They dictate the behavior that is expected from patrons and what will get patrons kicked out. Having worked at a public library at the lowest end of the hierarchy, I can tell you that, though I was giving good customer service, I was by no means obligated to kiss the ass of a problem patron because I was working for tax payers. The folks who check out items, then try to renew them half a dozen times after they’re overdue are the folks who cost us money in the long run because they lose materials and keep those materials out of the hands of other patrons. They also tend to be the nasty, demanding, “Oh, you must be new” sneering folks who run other patrons off with their bad behavior. Eventually they are trespassed because they cause enough problems, but those problems have to be documented violations of the code of conduct in order for the person to be trespassed.
You would be surprised at how often I would be able to give an accurate/correct answer for person #2 and have them be baffled that I knew it. Normally those folks are asking for a popular title that has a lot of circulation. Regardless, they’re pains in the ass to deal with most of the time because they’re often the person who won’t wait in line when the line is 10 people deep because “it’s just a quick question” or let their kids run wild and tear the children’s department (or the reference shelves) apart. 90% of the time, if there was an issue, I was given free reign to deal with it. Why? Because I spent a month in training during my first month so that I got a good feel for not only the policies, but how they played out on the floor. 90% of the time, I didn’t need a manager to handle issues; when a manager was requested, I would go and get one, and brief them while still in the back workroom on the situation. 90% of the time when a manager was called, it was either to override something I couldn’t control or to tell the patron what the policy was and the reasoning behind the policy. 10% of the time, it was the patron getting the policy bent for them because of special circumstances that did not generally undermine the policy structure.
Eye contact makes a BIG difference between flirtation and friendliness for a lot of men. Having worked in customer service as a female of a very female build, I can tell you that 40% of the male customers I greeted in a friendly manner thought I was flirting with them. Occasionally, this would be in the form of “so, would you like to go out for coffee sometime?” and similar requests for dates/phone numbers that had to be rebutted with “I’m sorry, I’m married/have a boyfriend/don’t date customers” to get the point across. There are a lot of folks who are dumb about what counts as a signal of flirtation and what is just someone being friendly.
In some ways, it has to be a balance. You have folks who just cannot be trusted to do what’s expected of them in a customer service situation-- how often do you have people who are huffy at the idea of having to, you know, help others when at work? What about folks who have an extremely strong black/white system of doing stuff? They’re not likely to be able to deal with the “gray area” stuff in a way that’s going to be effective, and there’s a world of potential problems when everything is gray area. That said, because of those folks, the folks at the bottom of the feeding chain in the average big box store/large corporation aren’t going to get a lot of leeway to make their own decisions. It’s sad, but true.