Why you arn't ever going to get good customer service

The BBQ Pit
21

There is definitely a need for better training. Corporate America is convinced that there’s no point in investing in training for low level jobs. The official reason is that there’s no point in it, because “turnover is so high”. People will often leave almost as soon as they’re trained. But in many cases, your new employees are not in their very first job ever. They’ve worked for other companies before they came to you. If all companies provided good training, all companies would have better trained employees, no matter how high the turnover.

IMO, high turnover is just a handy excuse. They don’t want to provide training because they honestly believe that anyone who has to accept such a low level job must be too stupid to learn much of anything, so why even try to teach them anything.

22

Sven, I couldn’t agree more- if management treats you like crap, find a new gig. One of the reasons I see for this is that you can no more hire good efficient managers for 12 bucks an hour than you can hire and motivate good employees for five bucks an hour.
Trouble is, a lot of people put up with the crap and don’t walk, granted, often because there aren’t alternatives. If all the employees of the local Burger Mac split, over and over again, maybe the upper management will get the message and hire competent managers. Unfortunately for economic reasons, a lot of people can’t just walk away from a fast food gig. Don’t know if there will ever be anything thact can be done to change that.

b.

23

Just read Mr. Visible’s post. He mentioned “treat(ing) my input as inherently useless.” Good point. This is another result of the management assumption that low wage workers are all stupid. It’s assumed that they are not capable of providing any useful information about the company’s frontline operations. Ideally, frontline employees should be told to inform supervisors about what customers are complaining about, what customers are asking for that isn’t available, what items are selling so well there’s never enough to last all day, etc. Instead, supervisors and management not only don’t request this information, they disregard any such information that an employee might offer. They just assume input from the bottom is worthless.

24

lezler’s point is a good one to consider for anyone who is job hunting. When I had an employee in my soap studio, I paid her $7.50/hour and she picked her own hours–as long as the work got done, I didn’t care if she worked early or late, short hours or long. Plus, we became good friends and had a hell of a lot of fun, AND she learned a fun, if not particularly financially rewarding, craft.

25

Then you’d probably be completely cool with selling me your new car for $500, right? Because it’s stupid to equate cash worth to value, right?

26

When I was a custom framer at a corporate chain, I made $7.25 an hour; this would have been an alright–i.e., living, albeit barely–wage if they had ever lived up to their promise to guarantee me 30 or more hours a week.

But sometimes I’d get 19 hours a week, sometimes 22, 25, etc., and yet they always expected me to be available if they SHOULD need to give me the 30+ hours I was told I’d be getting. They were always cutting back hours and raising productivity standards. My immediate supervisor would shrug and tell me that these were the hours he’d been given for that week; he had no more control over it than I did.

The store manager would say the same thing; the “corporate office” sent him the hours he could allot to the frame shop, and he couldn’t increase them without corporate office approval.

The regional manager, or “corporate office clone,” would just smile a lot, make vague promises, thank me for “doing my best!” and go back to whatever pod he crawled out of.

When I was bartending, this topic came up…and a guy who was the general manager of a large corporate chain–think “Best Buy” type of place–was drunk enough to admit what we all already know.

He said, “I’d always promote an ass-kisser over a hard worker. If you promote the hard worker, you have to replace him…I’d much rather promote the ass-kisser who wasn’t doing anything anyway, and who won’t have any problems doing exactly what I tell him to do. A hard worker is usually someone who takes their job seriously, and wants to have an opinion. He’s much more valuable to me on the floor, where he’ll get stuff done. An ass-kisser wasn’t doing anything on the floor anyway, and he’s more valuable to me in management, because he’s much more replaceable on the floor than a guy who works hard and really does his job. Those are hard to find.”

Despite the fact that pretty much everybody at the bar wanted to kill him, the guy was just admitting the Corporate Policy we all already know about. The only reward for working hard in corporate America, and taking your job seriously, is the ability to continue doing it, so you can make the morons in suits look good for hiring you. They’re gonna keep you there as long as you let them; meanwhile, your moronic, lazy coworker is the one who’ll skyrocket right past you on the promotional ladder.

Anyone who denies this is probably in management; for the rest of us, it’s just another day on the job.

27

Perhaps it’s a difference in attitude. From my first job as a petroleum transfer specialist on through various other careers, I tried my best to reserve my vitriol for supervisors and management, if they were deserving of same. The customer didn’t hire me for wage x, so why should I treat them with indifference? Maybe mine was the only smile they’d seen that day. A kind word goes far to lift people’s spirits, and hey-wouldn’t you like a sincere eye-contact-thank-you over a 99 cent burrito or a three dollar magazine?

I entered major corporate America as a service technician for a bank equipment company. The pay was decent, and the training was good. Bankers can be picky stinkers, but they’re paying big bucks for what we sold them. The bank’s customers were the ones I wanted to choke.

Scream at me because you forgot your PIN and the ATM ate your card after the third try. It’s also my fault that you managed to hit the drive-up drawer that was sticking out of the wall of the building with fluorescent paint on it-they can be so stealthy those drawers. Yes, it was my fault that instead of using two bags, you used one, and stuffed it till you could barely zipper it closed, and forced it into the night depository, jamming the damn thing, and keeping other customers from making their drops. Yes, that is my fault.

It is also my fault that you didn’t ask for a replacement of the first safe deposit key you lost, so that when you lost the other one, we have to drill your box. No, there is no master key to those boxes. If there was, would it really be ‘safe’ deposit? It was also my sly trick to force you to disregard the instructions on the kiosk, and drop your cash into the empty hole, followed by the cannister. We like having the turbine suck in $400 and expel green confetti.

Despite encounters of this type, I smiled, said thank you even though other words came to mind, and eventually became a suit, a manager of a four state territory! In that position, I defended the hard working people in the uniform, fought for good raises, canned the slackers, and balanced the P & L. After 10 years, the beancounters paid me back. We were “downsizing” an effective term for combining my region with the adjacent one. It probably made fiscal sense, as that manager was a bobblehead who never wanted to piss off those above, even though his people had no devotion to him.

My only satisfaction is that I met a lot of good, talented people, worked hard and earned every penny, and saw the beancounters run the company into the ground within another 10 years.

Some corporations do suck, but we don’t need to lower our personal standards while working for them. :wink:

28

Amen

29

Geez, post something that’s 100% true so we can’t even ARGUE with it willya???

lol.

And right on.

PS. I am one of those customers that will demand to see the manager, or will snag him MYSELF if something is going wrong. I refuse to take it out on a poor, and OBVIOUSLY undertrained employee.

Also, I will “dress down” ANY retail store manager I see “dressing down” a hapless employee in front of me.

And I mean DRESS DOWN, I will give them a SCREAMING FIT, if I walk around the corner and cross some manager screaming at some poor employee. I will interrupt RIGHT in the middle of a manager’s tirade with an ICY and IMPERIOUS “Excuse me??? (haughty sniff included) I am a CUSTOMER, I do NOT have to be assaulted with you SCREAMING at this poor employee in front of me”!!!

“Furthermore, verbally abusing a person is ILLEGAL” (I have a fairly decent knowledge of CFRs). Usually I don’t get that far, usually the shocked manager stops in his tracks and lets the employee go. However, I have gone so far as to have complained IN WRITING to the national headquarters of Kmart or some other chain store because this has happened to me.

30

Exactly, I was quite perplexed at rushgeek’s outburst. I did not at ALL get the impression that the OP was giving carte blanche permission for people who are underpaid to act like jerks.

He was saying that the system is, in a great part, responsible for those that ARE undertrained and/or act like jerks.

I’ve been in the service industry, and I’ve been in the corporate world, corporate knocks SPOTS off of the service industry for how they treat their employees.

The service industry, AS A WHOLE, needs to change it’s treatment of employees.

31

There is utterly no incentive for this. According to Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, McDonalds gets a tax creidt of (IIRC) $400 for each new employee that it “trains” if the employee stays for six weeks. After that, to hell with them. It’s actually better, money wise, if the employee gets fed up and quits, because they can get the credit for the next one.

Companies expect, and depend on, high turn-over. It keeps them from having to pay whatever vacation and medical benifits which are dangled enticingly for employees that stay for x-number of weeks. It also means that they won’t have to dole out raises for long-termers, and ensures that whoever does tough it out is potential management material, in that they can take abuse, bow to the corporate dictates with the proper submission, and for whatever reason, can’t leave on a whim.

God bless you. On behalf of all of the employees, myself included who have been publicly humiliated in front of gaping, smug customers by a petty-tyrant manager who needs to vent his frustration with his own corporate-induced impotance, thank you.

There has actually been a concerted effort, especially in the fast-food industry to almost eliminate the need training. Efforts are being made to develop idiot-proof equipment that pretty much runs itself with minimum brain-power needed.

When I got my first job at age 16, I was so excited to be working. I was hired at McDonald’s, and I was bound and determined to be the best, friendliest, hard-working, most helpful cashier ever to step through the Golden Arches, fully willing to bust my ass for $4.25 an hour. My cynical co-workers called me “Rainbow Bright” for my chipper, smiling manner. Later, I learned that there had actually been an employee pool going to see how long it would take me to break. As I recall, it was only about four weeks. The first time a customer screamed at me, I wept. The first time the manager publicly berated and shamed me, I cried again. But soon, I was just as angry and uncaring as the other employees. There’s only so much dehumanization and abuse that a person can take before it starts to show. I left that job for a corporate retail store, and found the same type of atmosphere.

It wasn’t until I left the big corporation work force that I found myself respected, appreciated, and treated with human dignity. The difference is night and day. In my job that I currently have, the pay is crap, but, to me, it’s worth $10 and hour just to enjoy your work.

32

Being a manager at McDonalds gives you all the responsibility and none of the power. It sucked. I did my best, though, and when I finally had enough and told the head manager in the middle of change-over to fuck off (in those words), about 25 employees quit. I am happy to have been what was keeping them there in one way, but sad in another that I actually kept them there. They didn’t keep me there.

33

Obviously, none of you people have ever been to the very special Customer Service Hell that is “Germany”. Heck, you people are spoiled, when comparing to German levels of service. Everyone in retail and a service oriented profession in Germany is surly. I think it’s some kind of special training they all have to take first.

34

No, that would be exploitation.

35

Actually, I get pretty good service in McDonalds or Burger King here. The jobs are poorly paid, and hard - just like in the US. Germans don’t want that kind of job. The foreigners (Turkish, Italien, and others) work the low paying jobs, and they can be quite nice to deal with. Native Germans, on the other hand, go for the better paying jobs and act like they are doing you a favor by taking the time out of their busy day to deal with you. I always joke that I’m going to take a bag of rocks with me the next time my wife and I go out to eat. The waiters tend to ignore you after they bring your meal, and it can be a real pain to get one to come and refill a drink - or even just bring the check. The rocks are to throw at the waiters to get their attention.
Yeah, service in just about any kind of customer oriented business pretty much sucks over here.

36

Oh, yeah. Ithink most of the reason theyare so surly is because it can be very difficult for a German to change jobs. Generally, a German goes to what amounts to a technical school and learns a trade before hsi twentieth birthday. Once you are a doctor’s assistant, or sales clerk, or brick layer, or what ever, you are pretty much tied to that for life. So, they get their training, head out into the real world, and discover that they don’t like their trade - that they maybe even hate it - and they can’t change it. This applies to a lot of professinal people, too. Doctor’s who find that they would rather be sports coaches, engineers who find that they are better as salesmen, etc.

37

Damn. I guess I need more caffeine. That last post is just full of errors.

38

My first thought was, “Not bad for a first job.”

Then I heard that familiar wooshing sound. . .

39

Fast food managers get chewed up and spit out. I used to manage a pizza restaurant for a famous LARGE pizza chain, franchise-owned. I hated it, and most of my employees could tell. My bonus was based on store profit, and, looking at the books one day, I realized the store was payng for some guys apartment in a nearby city. Came out of my till, cut down on my bonus. Turns out this idiot was hiding a girlfriend there. I was actualy relieved when I was fired. Got along great with most of the help, as a result nothing got done.

40

racinchikki:

"Can we get a fuck yeah? "

Oh yes. Yes indeed…

Although I always thought that fast food places had “Employee of the Month”. That’s supposed to be some sort of reward, right?

Anyway, I’m just glad I have the job I have! :smiley: