Customer service: Japan vs. United States?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Every country in Europe is different when it comes to tipping (I have spent a lot of time in several various countries in Europe, but I have also never been to Finland) but if the waitstaff was as disinterested in providing service as pbbth says, I would have had no problem not leaving them anything at all.

On the other hand, in Spain and the Czech Republic, I was apparently overtipping for entire months at a time, but I felt fine about it as I got great service and even with my “generous” tips, I was still only leaving less than half of what I would have left in a place here in Salt Lake…

42

Customer service in Eastern Europe is absolutely dreadful. I’ve been to Western Europe too, but I really don’t remember the customer service, so it must not have been too bad. But in Eastern Europe…god damn, it’s terrible. I once went to pick something up at the lev store (ie, dollar store) and while waiting at the counter, the clerk got a call from the owner about inventory. Instead of saying, “oh, I’ve got a customer, I’ll call you back in a few minutes,” she wandered off to answer the owner’s questions about what was in stock. After waiting for a few minutes, I just put my intended purchases on the counter and walked off. Communism is over, lady, there’s nothing forcing me to make my purchases here! We have competition now!

I overtipped terribly at restaurants in my town and I do think it affected my service. (It helped that everyone knew who I was, as the only foreigner in town.)

The one time I had decent customer service in Bulgaria, it was at a very nice Armenian restaurant in Plovdiv. I was waited on by the owner himself, who gave me very attentive service. When I complimented him on how nice his restaurant was he told me he’d lived in New York for several years.

43

Regarding poor customer service at Macy’s that’s just Macy’s. IMHO they understaff and they simply do not have a CS culture. If you want customer service in a department store, go to Nordstrom’s instead.

44

I think that’s where Canadians got a reputation for being terrible tippers - we know the waitstaff aren’t living on tips alone in Canada, and we do actually reduce the tip accordingly for bad service. Unfortunately for US waitstaff, visiting Canadians may not be aware that US servers make much less as a base wage (at least, that’s my understanding from all the discussions here). Plus, a lot of Canadians are old snowbirds that think a dollar is a fine tip for anything. :slight_smile:

45

Yeah, that’s the general rule for customer service in Europe; you can also address any member of staff and say “three for dinner?” and they’ll take you to a table or tell you “just sit down anywhere”, but this is any member of staff: only the poshest places have a maitre, and (s)he may not even be the person seating you.

But, as has been pointed out by several other posters whose posts I’m too lazy to search for, the “laissez faire” European version of customer service is seen by some people as “bad service” (whereas you liked it), the “hovering” American version is perceived as “bad service” by others. And within each location there are differences, of course, based on regional and corporate culture or on local management: diner waitresses in the US and homecooking waitresses in Spain went to the same school of waitressing. There’s two stores of the same chain within 15’ of where I’m sitting where in one of them you need to run down the right guy if you have a question (which is bad service anywhere) and in the other one, spending a couple of minutes in an area will have the right person making sure you know where to find her if you need her - guess which one I shop at.

In the words of Jesús Ayala (photographer, now small-town politician, and at the time he said this warehouse worker in the factory where I was a lab tech): “whatever work I’m doing, whether it’s take pictures or move pallets or clean the floors, I do it right. I do it right, because it’s my work and I am the one doing it, and I do good work.”

46

I applied for a job at Macy’s a few years back. One of the requirements of a cashier was to ask a customer if they wanted to apply for a Macy’s charge card.
You had to ask and be refused three times to let the matter drop.

Some customer service. :rolleyes:

47

That explains it well. Waiters weren’t standing right behind us while we dined, but they regularly wandered through the dining area with their eyes roaming all over, searching for anyone who might be trying to catch their attention. In other stores, sales clerks stopped whatever they were doing when you approached them; this is in contrast to the US, where you often have to interrupt a salesperson’s activities to request their assistance.

48

You’re not expected to tip in Finland as a social norm in any way. But if you’re an American tourist, the staff is absolutely willing and in no way surprised to accept your tip. Most places have already experienced American tourists. Most other tourists, same thing.

49

I lived in Japan for 3 years and I would agree, with reservations, about Japanese customer service. There is simply nothing like the attention you get in Japanese store. I miss it. This applies to a lot of things, too–it’s not just convenience stores and restaurants. Taxi drivers, hair salons, baristas, bar tenders… none of these people are tipped and they all do an excellent job. This is what has convinced me, more than anything else, that the idea that tips honestly have an effect on customer service is ridiculous. (Plus, I also hate overly attentive American service, especially at restaurants–I can’t count the number of times since I’ve been back in the U.S. that a server has come by and interrupted an intense conversation with “everyone OK here?” when everything was obviously OK. Once is fine, but I counted around 4-5 times this happened last night. This would NEVER happen in Japan.) People in customer service in Japan are not all women without hope for a career path–there are some no-hopers, but most of them are college students and many of them are male.

However, this certainly does not mean that Japan is just better. As others have noted, it’s part of a culture, and like every culture, there are pluses and minuses. Customer service is pretty good on a low level, it’s true, and everyone will almost always be polite. But just try solving a problem with a bureaucracy, for example, and you’ll soon see that things are far from perfect with Japanese customer service. Of course, there are problems in the United States with such things too–I’ve heard how many people have a problem with Comcast, for example–but if you have a problem with bureaucracy in Japan, oh man. It’s pretty much the worst. You are expected to work within the system, and there will be no arguing. It’s slow, cumbersome, often outdated and utterly rigid, far more than any American bureaucracy I’ve ever experienced.

50

What Giongo said.

Japanese people are on average very driven to perfection. From what I’ve read, this is a result of the Japanese viewing the world and everything in it as 未完成 (mikansei, incomplete). From a book I own: "Unlike most Westerners who have been conditioned to stop trying once arbitrarily established standards have been reached, there are no inbetween acceptable standards as far as the Japanese are concerned. They have been programmed to continuously strive for improvement upon improvement, with no end in sight. . . . This is the concept expressed in the equally pregnant term 改善(kaizen), meaning ‘continuous improvement.’)

Note that while this may lead to superb customer service, the typical Japanese customer in turn expects perfect service. Japanese are very good at finding small faults or flaws, in merchandise and people alike, a phenomenon called 棚卸し(tana oroshi).

51

That is the thing though, the service wasn’t bad. It wasn’t overly attentive or anything but it wasn’t bad. Any time I had a question they were happy to answer it, they hunted down english versions of menus for us, and helped us find products in the store based solely on gestures and my rudimentary Finnish skills (I learned what seemed like quite a lot before we left and turned out to not be very useful at all) when they didn’t speak much english. They just didn’t fall all over themselves to anticipate our needs. I feel like they earned the tips I gave them even though they weren’t expecting them and they didn’t meet the American standard of service.

After I got used to it I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was to be left alone until I needed something. Now that I’m back in the states it is actually a bit annoying to have waiters at my table for what feels like 1/3 of the meal or having service reps at retail stores follow you around and knock on the dressing room door to see how you are doing.

52

Can you point me toward more info on this? Google keeps feeding me refernces to annual stockroom inventory.

53

Exactly. College students make great customer service workers. Generally, they are working the job for spending money, so they see the job as kind of a fun thing that makes their lives better. It’s generally an optional thing for them, they aren’t forced into it. If you are choosing to do something, you are going to be more enthusiastic and give it your best.

Compare that to your average American customer service worker, who is doing it because they have no other choice and is in a situation where their job really isn’t covering their needs. Someone who is worried about childcare and health insurance is going to be a little less enthusiastic about a poorly paid job than someone who is using it to buy fashionable clothes and fund their weekends out.

54

Your search results may be taking the words a little too literally. An appropriate translation for 棚卸し is ‘taking stock’ in the ‘to evaluate or measure’ sense. Basically, it’s the act of perpetually gauging competence or performance.

55

As a teenager I worked in a toy store. We had a Japanese man come in wanting to buy a doll for a relative. He would not buy a doll until we took the doll out of the box and demonstrated what it did. I had to get the manager’s ok to do that, the packaging on most toys is fairly difficult to get into and to put back. That’s a big difference from the “grab-now-worry-later” mentality of American consumers.

56

The book I quoted from states that the word is mostly used in its literal sense these days, which is “lowering the shelf,” so you can like take inventory. That led to the metaphorical usage of ‘taking stock’ similar to what we have in English.

The book’s name is “The Japanese Have a Word for It: The Complete Guide to Japanese Thought and Culture” by Boye Lafayette De Mente. I highly recommend it for everyone with any interest in Japan.

57

I had a bit of a better experience in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and some of the nicer places in Sofia. The customer service that I didn’t like was mostly in the UK and Germany.

58

I’ve had fairly good experiences in both Bosnia and Sofia. But in Bosnia, I was a tourist and was in places more used to dealing with foreigners and it’s not surprising that the customer service wasn’t bad. And Sofia is on a different level from the rest of Bulgaria, economically, socially, everything is just of vastly higher quality there.

But if you leave the cities…it’s a VERY different story. At least in Bulgaria - I never had the opportunity to get off the beaten path in Bosnia. (I was only there for about a week.)

You know where they have some MAD attentive customer service? Turkey. You can’t even step into a shop without them offering you tea. I went to the same restaurant a few times in Selcuk (where Ephesus is) and after they recognized me, they started offering me special foods that weren’t on the menu and giving me extra cups of tea. Just because. And then if you act surprised that they’re being so attentive, they say “Turkish hospitality! Turkish hospitality!”.

59

Good customer service isn’t complicated to achieve. It does, however, require genuine effort and investment by the business owners. Hire people who have the social aptitude and demeanor to make people feel appreciated, train them on how to act and deal with difficult situations, train them to actually be able to do their job, give them sufficient support that they can give their full attention to customers when needed, and pay them enough so they’ll stick around long enough to make the investment stick.

The more common model is hire warm bodies (that’s the majority of the applicants you’ll get for minimum wage, and the manager has to hire someone FAST, because he’s covering the holes in the schedule on top of his base 50 hours) given an absolute bare minimum of training, including maybe a half hour on how to deal with customers, drop 20 hours from the stores scheduling budget, (so everyone has to do an extra half-person’s job), give them a long checklist of additional stuff to get done ‘between customers,’ leave them with no supervision, and then act surprised and hurt when they leave you for a competitor who gives time and a half on Sundays, starting the whole cycle again.

Obviously it’s not always that bad, but many employers would rather try to improve customer service by lecturing bad employees, rather than actually spending time and money to help them improve, or hiring good ones in the first place.

If your employees can’t make a living at your job, you can’t expect them to act like it’s a career. A part-time job is just not going to be people’s priority in life. And very few customer-service jobs are not part time.

To be fair though, a big investment in customer service really isn’t worth it in many businesses. Ignoring restaurants, c-stores, and the like, given the choice between higher prices and bad customer service, and lower prices and complaining about bad cashiers, an awful lot of customers will take the latter.

–
It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools. And a worse engineer who blames his raw materials.

60

I’ve never had that happen at Macy’s.