I find it creepy. It jerks me right out of the comfortable transaction zone. Just cut it out. Be told.
Could not have said it better myself. I also use the call center employee’s names, or the oil change guy, or the gas station clerk, etc., etc. in this manner.
Conversely, I do not mind if they use my name and generally appreciate the attempt at “personalizing” the service. I do not like when it is obviously a scripted-required step by the business and it is executed poorly by the employee.
MeanJoe
This is what I don’t understand. Within the group {adult}, there is only one form of address. It seems like expecting anything else is looking at it from a child’s perspective, that “Sir” and “Ma’am” are only reserved for people in the generation above you. Once you hit 18, you’re allowed to use them for contemporaries, too.
Bingo. Or worse yet, someone older than me. Why are you calling me ma’am?! I was raised to call you ma’am!
As for people using my name, I hate it. I’m more than a little tired of hearing my name butchered at me, especially since it’s not difficult if you pay attention. I say this because once in a while there’ll be some nice non-Indian who takes a second to read it and they pronounce it pretty close to perfect. I go by a shortening of it anyway so I really feel like it’s an invasion of privacy when they use my full name. If it’s on my papers it’s only because I’m legally obligated to on those papers. I try to tell everybody I interact with to make a note of the short version of it, but they still try the long version.
I only really give my full name to Indians.
I work in hotels and I too detest the practice, it sounds much too familiar to me. I like a simple sir or ma’am.
What I really hate is when you answer the phone it shows the guest’s name on the phone and you have to say “Accounting Mr Smith, how can I help you.” And a lot of times, it’s the wife or someone else.
My last name is very difficult to pronounce and they are like "Mr. Sk…, Ah Mr Sr… Ah Mr Scree… Ah… "
I feel like saying “OK you’ve just MIS-pronounced my name three times, want to insult me anymore?” Of course I realize the clerks are forced to do this.
I guess there must be some validity to it, maybe the people with easy names like it.
Surveys cost money, too. Market research is a broad term that would include either empirical testing or surveying. Since the store is going to track sales anyway, it would be fairly trivial to test multiple greeting conditions. Plus, if this thread is any indication, most people if asked in a survey would say either they don’t like their name used or don’t care.
They have done studies to show that women buy less in retail settings if the aisles are narrow enough that they experience “butt brush.” If they’ve tested that, I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t test a few greetings. Read some Paco Underhill.
I have to wonder if this is the most misused and misunderstood customer service quote after “the customer is always right.”
As others have said, people do like to be remembered, and calling a customer by their name shows that you remember them. Reading their name off their credit card reinforces the opposite message.
Nobody expects the random cashier at Safeway to remember them, but it’s really very rude of the cashier to point out that they don’t know who the heck the customer is. No wonder they hate doing it and the customers hate hearing it.
You know, you may be on to something here. After all, aren’t most top corporate execs still waspy white guys? So to Joe Hill and Ed Baker and Frank Martin, it seems like a great idea. Vijay Uphadhyay might have a different take on it.
I’ll up you one. In Spanish, they’ve combined that practice with “respectful address,” so if the caller is Latin American (s)he calls me “Miss Nava” and if they’re Spanish they use the “usted” form of the verbs; they preface half the sentences with excuse-mes and I’m-sorrys; if I happen to get one who uses “Mistress Lastname” I have to correct them, as they tend to grab the last word in my three-word-lastname as the lastname (either use the whole thing, or the first word). My mother says “Miss Maite” makes her wonder whether Morgan Freeman is going to come drive her downtown in the car she doesn’t own.
It’s like the companies can’t make up their minds whether to be familiar or respectful. And the fact that they start every - single - sentence with the “Miss Nava” triggers my rolleyes reflex: nobody outside of a call center or a hotel reception speaks like that!
At least it hasn’t reached retail yet.
They may have tested it, but that doesn’t mean that they tested it correctly.
And I’ve definitely read my Paco Underhill. He’d probably say that the stores should stop wasting their time and effort on stupid crap like insisting that cashiers read customers’ names off their credit cards. It doesn’t make a bit of sense to let paying customers molder on line while some 16-year-old clerk tries to pronounce some guy’s 27-letter Malaysian last name.
I work at a library that specializes in state history and genealogy and we have some patrons who are regulars. When I see them I greet them by name and they seem to appreciate it. Even when they’re not regulars if I’m helping them find stuff I’ll generally check the sign in sheet so that I can refer to them by their name.
The only difficulty I have is figuring out whether or call a female Miss or Mrs.
Odesio
“Miz” probably works (Ms) as I am more than old enough to be married but am not married.
Maybe, but if Joe Hill and Ed Baker are spending considerably more than the Malaysian guy, what’s the right call for a mass merchant?
What’s the counterargument–that stores do surveys, get responses like we see in this thread, and decide to greet people by name anyway, even though it costs them money? Retailers are better at making money than they are at making people happy, because guess which one of those is the business they are really in. What people say they like and what actually makes them buy are often two different things.
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Point taken. But over and over (and over and over), companies do their market research and find that it’s wrong because the study was not designed correctly and/or the results were not interpereted correctly.
One example:
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell described what went wrong with all the taste testing that Coke did before they introduced New Coke in 1985. Pepsi Cola was gaining ground against Coca-Cola. Blind taste-testing clearly showed that people preferred the flavor of Pepsi, so Coke changed their formula to be more like Pepsi. And New Coke was one of the biggest flops in American consumer product history. Why?
They tested the wrong thing. They asked the wrong question. In the blind taste tests, people took a sip of each cola, but the fact that one sip of Pepsi tastes better to more people than one sip of Coke is irrelevant, because they don’t sell soda by the sip. They sell it by the serving. And when drinking a whole serving, more people prefer the classic Coke flavor. It has a slightly less sweet and more complex flavor. Pepsi really pops when you take a sip, but when you drink a whole glass, it can be a little cloying to some.
Fortunately, for the Coca-Cola company, it was immediately and thunderously obvious that people hated New Coke. So they brought back the old formula and all was well. In 2007, Coke Classic outsold Pepsi-Cola by over 60% in the U.S.*
So what does this all have to do with the guy with the 27-letter last name?
Imagine if some market research firm asked me “Do you like it when the employees at your local supermarket call you by name?” I’d probably say “yes.”
I like it when I show up at the pharmacy and Linda says “Hi Elizabeth! How are ya?” and fills me in on the latest chapter of her weird mother-in-law saga. I like it when Marcy and Ates at the cash registers ask after my son and marvel at the fact that he’s in first grade already. I like the fact that Bob the produce guy makes sure to say hi to me, and we sometimes we laugh about the time he tried to give my son a baby banana and inadvertently sparked tantrum of legendary proportions. I’ve been going to that supermarket for more than 10 years, and these people have been working there that whole time. One reason that I like to shop there is that there are people there who know my name.
But does that mean that I’d like it if some cashier in some Safeway in some town that I’d never been to before and will likely never go to again reads my name off my credit card and calls me “Ms. Lastname?” Nope. One makes me feel like they appreciate me as a regular customer, which makes me want to shop there. The other makes me feel like they’re trying to trick me into having positive feelings about the place so that I’ll spend more money there, which makes me less inclined to shop there.
Which brings us back to my original point–I agree that there have to have been studies about this stuff. But were they good studies? Did they differentiate between an employee saying a customer’s name because they happen to know it and an employee saying a customer’s name because they’re required to, even if they have to read it off the customer’s credit card?
It would make sense to encourage the workers in the supermarket to get to know their regular customers by name. That would very likely have a positive impact on sales. I can’t imagine that reading someone’s name off their credit card would be helpful in that regard. In fact, based on my many years working in retail, I’d think that most people really wouldn’t like the cashier looking at their credit card too closely or too long.
Wow, that was a lot of words! I could have just left it at the first two sentences!
p.s. Harriet–if you liked Paco, you should definitely read Blink. I’m sure you’d really like it.
- Cite: Beverage Digest Statistical Yearbook, 2008. If anybody is looking at figures from other sources, please be sure to compare apples and apples. “Pepsi” may refer to a bunch of brands owned by Pepsico instead of just the flagship “Pepsi-Cola” brand. Same thing wtih Coke. And speaking of apples, both brands are rapidly losing ground to bottled drinks that are seen as being more “healthy” than cola.
That is quite true. I have an unusually good memory for numbers, and when I worked retail and was required to do X number of credit card applcations per day, I was inclined to type in a social security or credit card account number after just glancing at the card, or put the whole thing in in one spurt rather than having to have the person say it in short blocks. But eventually I had to stop, because my ability to do this made people very uncomfortable; it heightened their fears of a cashier stealing their identity. Glancing overlong at a credit card is likely to do the same thing; many persons will think the cashier is trying to memorize the information for nefarious reasons.
Green Bean nailed it.
I love that my doctor knows not only my first name (because it’s on the file that the nurse hands him) but also that I *loathe *it and prefer to go by my middle name – which he also knows.
I love that the cute little goth chick in the $tarbucks knows my drink when I walk in the door and chats me up about her new baby.
I want to pimpslap the old biddy that stopped herself from handing me my receipt to say “thank you…<mispronounced name that any native English speaker could pronounce>.”
When a call center monkey insists on using my name every five seconds, I ALWAYS end up saying “look, I know you’re supposed to say my name, but honestly, I’d just prefer ma’am or even hey you, ok?”
Plus it’s just a weird way to carry on a conversation. Do you really interject your friends’ names into sentences when speaking? I can talk for hours and never address anyone by their name. The only time I can think of when I’d say someone’s name out loud is if I’m trying to get his attention. I’m not trying to get anyone’s attention if we’re standing right across from each other, or am asking you questions about my cable bill over the phone.
QFT. I think that lonely people who just don’t get enough human interaction would eat up being called by name. However, many of us are just trying to buy our groceries as quickly as possible, or get our meals served to us in a timely fashion (whether or not the server is ordering for us), and just want to do this without the cashier or server having to do some ritual that Management has decreed. I do want the cashier to look at the back of my card to see if I’ve signed it, and ask for ID if the signature’s worn off. I don’t want my name announced to the whole line. I don’t want the food server to introduce himself, or kneel down to take my order (Dear OG, but that makes me uncomfortable), or do any of the other little gratuity-inducing tricks that are recommended.
At one restaurant, I know the names of the servers because I eat there frequently enough. The names are printed on the tickets. I know that one of the waiters is worried about his little brother getting in trouble with the law again, and if there’s no one else around, and I ask about it, he’ll tell me the latest installment. I don’t ask if there’s others around, because I know that he’s ashamed of his brother’s problems. He knows that I genuinely like him, and I believe that he genuinely likes me, above and beyond our diner/server relationship. But this didn’t happen all at once. Our liking of each other came out of the fact that I eat there often, he’s often my server, and we have talked and interacted for about 20 years. One of us makes a comment about current events, maybe, or the weather, and the other responds. Sure, I appreciate him knowing my name. But he didn’t get it from a credit card. He got it because he asked me who I was, after serving me for some time. I imagine that the other servers know who I am because he told them. And he’s one of the reasons I go back to that restaurant, he’s part of the atmosphere. That’s not something that a research company is likely to learn, although the owner knows it very, very well indeed. She’s told me that there’s a gazillion Mexican restaurants in Fort Worth, and she can compete on the food and prices, but she really wants to be a family restaurant, a place where people love to come for the atmosphere as well as the food.
I’ve noticed this trend and I’m halfway between like & dislike.
Like: Mr. Lastname. As in, “Here’s your card, thank you Mr. Lastname”.
Don’t like: “Hi <glance at id> Belrix. How are you today, Belrix. blah blah Belrix blah blah.”
I’m the customer, not your friend. Be respectful, not friendly.
Honestly, a lot of you all are sounding like bitter people who just look for a reason to be annoyed. I always call customers by their name if I know it, and it always seems appreciated. Now granted, I work at a printshop as opposed to a gas station. There are often jobs that I’m working with a customer with for days. It’s nice to build an aquaintanceship if you’re going to be going back and forth with someone. And I think people feel more comfortable that you’re going to give them what they want if you seem to be interested in them as a person as opposed to an invoice number. I’ve received many glowing reviews over the years and customers will walk up to greet me in public, so it can’t be offending them that badly.
I always start out calling people by their last name until a level of comfortability has been reached between us. If anything, people are annoyed that I’m calling them by their last name. I get a lot of “Mr. Doe was my father’s name. Call me John”. I don’t know, maybe it’s a cultural thing. I live in a small city in Kentucky with a lot of community involvement where people actually try to know each other
Did you post this in the wrong thread by accident?