Prepare to get hit on the head with the clue bat people. Your friendly neighborhood Binarydrone has a little news flash for you.
I have tried to come up with some clever purple prose, to sugarcoat the bitter bill of what I am wanting to say here, but I have not the words. So what it comes to is this: Lay off the service sector folks. The reason that they are rude to you is because of the very nature of how our society is run. Whatever brief unpleasantness that you experience at their hands is a pale shadow of the horrors that they must endure.
You simply will not get consistently good service from the service industry until you can have a work force that is paid a decent wage, competently trained and respected by both management and the general public. So sorry. Think of putting up with rude service industry workers as part of the hidden cost for all of the fabulous low low prices that you get.
I have to say, I agree. My mom is a life-long customer service professional, first with the telephone industry and then with the cable industry. She’s been with cable 10 years and started as a customer service manager. She used to bitch and moan about the people that worked under her - unreliable, unprofessional, etc. Then I found out what they were making. $6 an hour to start! I said, “Ma! For that kind of shit money, what do you expect?”
I am the first person to defend customer service people, since I spent so long in the industry myself and I think the OP is complete bullshit.
There is no excuse to be rude to a customer unless they’re provoking you (and even then, it’s debatable). Hiding behind poor pay or “society” is nothing but a lame ass cop-out.
lezers, Excellent emotional outburst, but with very little in the way of informative content. Perhaps you will be so kind as to allow me to expand on my premise.
To begin, I do not think that I would be wrong if I stated that there is a strong sense that customer service has eroded in quality from what it once was, that there was a time not too long ago when the experience of being a customer was a more positive one. One need look no further than the outrage and surprise in many customer service threads here to find support for this assumption.
So, one need to ask just what has changed. The obvious answer is that the customer service worker has seen a decline in real wages (due to inflation) and is now treated more like a disposable commodity. That and the whole “Customer is Always Right” cult.
Ergo, it is a reasonable assumption that if we pay them more and respect them more they will be less rude. Easy!
Not that I am saying that I, Personally, find it admirable for folks to be rude. But I do understand it, and there is a solution.
Well, I can clearly see both sides of this one. I spent years in customer service and even now as a tech support person still deal with it. I also have serious issues with lots of retail establishments and their so called service. To me, and many will disagree with me here, I gave back to my job what I got. If they paid me a pathetic wage, made silly demands, or just generally made working there miserable, my service to the company reflected it. I think in my mind I was trying to let the company know you get what you pay for. Treat me like a valuable asset and let me know I’m appreciated and I’ll give back 100%. Treat me like I don’t matter and I’d pass that right on to my work ethic while I was there.
Dammit binarydrone quit being so calm and logical. It’s really putting a dampter on my rightous indignation.
See, I’ve worked for shitty companies, in a customer service capacity. And bongmaster, I get what you’re saying about giving back what you’re given. Thing is, I took it out on the company, not the customers. The customers haven’t done shit to me, see? Seems a little silly to take out my frustrations at the company on them. For all I know, they could work in customer service too. So not only do they get treated like shit at their own jobs, but they get treated like shit when they go out too! Yay! That makes the world a better place, doesn’t it?
Oh wait, no it doesn’t.
No matter how angry I was at the company I worked for, I never took it out on the customers (unless they were begging for it). I was more creative. I either told off the bosses and quit (as a hilarious comedian once said, “Burger King don’t talk to McDonalds…”) and found a less crappy customer service job (trust me, they’re out there in spades) or figured out some way to make my time there less hellacious.
IMHO there’s just no excuse to treat customers badly with no provacation. They’re not the ones treating you like shit. They don’t deserve it.
I want to get out of customer service, nopt so much because of the company I work for, but because of the continual stream of abuse I suffer from customers. I am not allowed to respond in kind, I may not even terminate a call, under any circumstances.
So this one is for the customers: screaming at me will not help. Personal abuse will not help. In fact, approach me like that and you will get the absolute bare minimum of service. i will not offer any additional help, I will not do anything I am not absolutely obliged to do. Nor will I wish you a good day.
I worked retail for close to three years. You want to know the extensive customer service training I got? “Don’t yell at the customers. Well, don’t do it too much. And try to look happy.”
And to ruminate a little, the rude customers got the absolute bare minimum I could give them without getting fired. The nice ones? I’d drag the whole store into helping them if I could. And that happened two or three times when the customer didn’t actually know what they were looking for–but stayed NICE about it–and I’d have four or five people running around looking for stuff like that.
I think that I am essentially in agreement here. In the scope of things, it almost always costs nothing to be polite and it is almost always a better idea. This goes for customers as well as employees.
I do Tech Support. Let me state that a little differently; I am well-trained, friendly, knowledgeable, polite Technical Support Professional. I will never ever belittle you, I will solve your problems rapidly and move heaven and earth to make sure that you have all of the tools that I can give you to succeed with the software that my company has sold you.
And yet it never ceases to amaze me how horribly rude and angry a lot of the folks that I talk to are. They get on the other end of the phone with both guns blazing, and even when it becomes obvious that they are being competently helped they simply take this as their due, never thinking to thank me or apologize for how horribly rude they were being.
And I can take it. As far as this job is concerned I have an almost Zen like mastery of letting that stuff go, part of the reason that this is possible is because (considering the economy) I am paid a fair wage, and more importantly I am treated with respect by both my bosses and the folks that I work with. If that was missing, I can tell you that continuing at my current level of performance would be a lot more difficult and seem a lot more pointless.
I think that here’s a flaw in your arguement, BD. If you pay the same people more money, it will not guarantee that they will immediately become better employees. But if you hire people at a higher starting salary, you’ll get more prospective good employees applying for your jobs.
You’re assuming that the low pay causes these people to be rude, where I think that you get rude people with low paying jobs offers. The difference being that the solution to the problem in my line of thinking is to attract better people to the job, while the solution in your case is to give the people you have raises.
LordVor, (or can I call you LV?)I don’t think that the two scenarios are mutually exclusive. Give the folks that are already there more money and realistic performance goals, fire those that are unable to meet those goals and at the same time hire people at higher salaries.
That being said, my realistic take on this is that the consumer will not stand for this. In order to pay more to the worker, at some point we pass the cost on to the consumer (I do not for a moment think that the bloated CEOs and stockholders will take a cut in earnings).
What I think will happen is that we will continue to disrespect the working class while exploiting them for cheap labor and then continue to bitch when we suffer the logical consequence of that action.
Another thing that I just want to throw out there: Why is it laudable when the store owner is a good capitalist and attempts to get the most labor for his dollar, but contemptible when the worker attempts to be a good capitalist the least labor for the most money?
Because the worker is (for all intents and purposes) hired for the job knowing what will be expected of him. I’m not talking about those instances where all of the sudden, the worker’s workload is tripled with no increase in pay, I’m talking about most normal circumstances, where the worker is told what will be expected of him when he’s hired.
If the worker takes that job and agrees to be paid a certain wage for a certain amount of work, then he is then obligated to perform that certain amount of work, no more, no less. He can’t decide, 6 months after he’s been hired that his employer is giving him the shaft and cease to perform his agreed upon duties. He’d be breaking his “contract” and should be fired.
I think it all kind of evens itself out, though. For example, I won’t set foot in a dollar store or any similiar store unless I’m willing to be treated like crap. I’m not an unreasonable person, I realize that the service there is not going to be on par with that of say, Nordstroms. If I don’t feel like being treated like shit, I’ll go to Nordstroms, where they pay their employees better (still treat them like shit, I used to work there actually, but hey, the pay was good) and in turn, the employees are generally pleasant to be around.
Walk into Walmart, expect the opposite. Of course, you’re paying more for the better service, but like what was said earlier, someone’s got to pay for the employee’s better salaries.
All of this aside, even though I expect to be treated like shit in WalMart, that doesn’t make it okay for an employee to do so, when I am polite to them.
Reminds me of the old cartoon series Super Chicken. Whenever Fred the cowardly lion complained about almost getting killed, Super Chicken would respond, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred!”
In any event, your argument is disingenous. It implies that people who take low-paying service sector jobs are choosing from among a wide range of alluring prospects spread out before them. C’mon, lezlers, you know better than that. They’re taking the job under duress – they need money for food and clothing and stuff.
And promises made under duress are not binding. After all, if I were to point a gun at you and say, “You must promise me that you will always address me as Evil Captor, Sex God and Wonder Guy Extraordinaire!” you might make such a promise, but as soon as the gun was gone, I suspect that your interest in making such pronouncements would disappear with it.
Thus, as soon as employees are free of the duress of trying not to starve, they lose interest in fulfilling the unreasonable demands that are placed on them for the pittance they receive.
I beg to disagree. It would be completely fair and reasonable for said dissatisfied employees to take out their unhappiness on the ones who have placed these unreasonable demands on them – namely, their employers. If I as a customer enter an establishment and politely attempt to avail myself of the product or service that the business offers, how have I earned rudeness?
As lezlers so reasonably pointed out,
I do my best to treat everyone I encounter in public with courtesy and respect. Why should someone else be granted a pass on extending the same courtesy to me, just because they’re on the clock? If I’m rude, fine, let me have it. But I don’t deserve surliness when I haven’t offered same. It’s simple etiquette.
And not that it should give my opinion any weight one way or the other, but yes I have worked in service jobs. I had 17, count 'em 17 jobs during my tenure in college, and weren’t any of 'em glamorous.
First of all, I will 100% agree that simple etiquette has fallen too much out of fashion. As I have stated, being polite almost always costs nothing, and is the better way to go.
I must, however, take exception to the statement above. Simply stated, the worker would be foolish to “take out their unhappiness” on those above him that control the means of production. That is economic suicide.
Simply stated, rude employees are the logical (and some might argue deserved) consequence of our current system. On the one hand, we have the workers that are getting poor treatment both from the bosses and as often as not from the customers. These feelings have to go somewhere. On the other hand, we have the business owners that, for all intents, only care about the customer as much as is necessary to separate them from their money.
In this system, the worker is going to get away with everything that he can in order to make himself feel better, and to make up for the gap between what his labor is worth and what he is receiving for that labor. As I have stated before, this is really just a hidden cost of goods and services that depend on cheap labor in order to give the customer low prices.
Binary as a fellow (former) support technician I read your posts with interest, sympathy and, though I hate to say it - great relief. In the 13 years y’all got me on the other end of the phone, I never said a rude word to anyone, helped thousands of people, got cookies for Christmas, and yet…
And yet, I’d rather shovel mule shit for the next 20 years than ever have to tell anyone again to allocate more memory, restart without system extensions and call me in the morning. The problem was not how much I was paid, or that management was unsympathetic or even unresponsive. The problem is that some time in the last decade or so, rudeness became acceptable, and when things are going wrong, even preferred. I’d get a bad call and wonder “does your mother know you behave like this?” Of course I realized that my astonishment was, for the most part, better kept to myself.
Shine on, my friend. I’m heading out to the porch for a mint julip. This brief trip down memory lane has me all verklempt.
Oh please. I know what tech support people make. I was one myself. I made $90,000 a year. I know this because a customer told me so. And he was positive of this.
