Will Service Still Stink?

By Miss Manners (Judith Martin)

How could customer service get any worse than it is now? People just barge into restaurants and stores, all full of themselves, and expect you to drop everything to tend to their demands, never mind if you happen to be in the middle of a conversation, or talking on the telephone, or listening to the radio or having a bad day. And if they don't get what they want, or they claim there's something wrong with whatever they got before, they start carrying on as if it were your fault or there were anything you could do about it even if you wanted to.

Wait--customer service, you mean as in providing service to customers? Why should anyone expect that? Service people and their customers are becoming increasingly indignant with one another, and they're punishing one another's rudeness by becoming increasingly ruder back. What reason is there to suppose that the downward spiral in behavior will reverse direction?

Analysis of specific incidents--why the airline passenger mooned the flight attendant, why the clerk brained the customer--yields remarkably similar results. Everyone agrees that these things should not happen. Only the question of who bears the responsibility is subject to debate, to wit:

"You started it!" "Did not!" "Did so!" "Did not!"

Daily examples serve to point out why we should probably be grateful for rudeness. The customer who is ignored by people hired to help is at least able to leave in one piece. And the one who storms out angrily at least leaves the help breathing.

But changed conditions could bring changes in behavior. That is the basis on which those who deplore rudeness often voice the unseemly hope that some future economy will turn a few shades darker. When things are bad enough, according to this antidote for antisocial service, desperate, insecure workers will turn to politeness.

That misfortune inspires good manners is not borne out by history, although one might be able to make a case for the reverse (not that good manners bring on hardship but that good fortune inspires bad manners). There is even evidence that rudeness may be good for business. Inspired by the success of restaurants and nightclubs at which customers are treated so rudely that they offer the staff bribes to ward off insult, many industries have learned to sell ordinary service as a luxury item. Such marketing concepts as first-class travel, executive floors in hotels, and personal shoppers in stores are based on the idea that decent treatment and efficient service are not what the ordinary customer should expect.

Nevertheless, there have also been changes in our way of doing business that could eventually work to improve customer service. From the modest beginning signaled by the promise of "easy to assemble," we have trained people to pump their own gas and be responsible for installing and fixing their own telephones. We now have "assisted self-service," or hold for the hot line, in which someone is eventually made available to tell the customer to look around the store to find what he wants, wait around all day for home service or call around until a representative can be made available to tell him whom else to call. Every day people stop waiting in line and start waiting online. At this rate, all business activity will cease around 2015. This leaves only one option: people will soon have to provide whatever services they require.

Help yourself, to everything.

Self-service improves service by getting rid of it. Total self-service would have the etiquette advantages of eliminating opportunities to be rude and removing incentive for issuing blame. More important, it could make customer service into a noble profession serving the unfortunate. Not only will people who can't fix their own computer problems be even more pitiful than they are now, but the ability to help them, which will require experience in dealing with people who are actually present in the flesh, will be even rarer.

It is the general attitude toward those who serve that explains why customer-service problems, far from being a recent phenomenon, are inherent in an egalitarian society. If everyone is equal, why should one person wait on another? Never mind that the answer ought to be that all of us should do that in one way or another and that public service is our highest calling. (Public service that comes with private dining rooms is another matter.)

True, everyone knows there was a time when customer service was better than it is now, but that was not because people used to be humbler. It was because consultants weren't available to "fix" service problems. Consultants made people who had been reasonably content working in customer service turn disgruntled with their lot, and deeply annoyed people who had been reasonably content with the level of service they had been receiving.

The first such fix was "The customer is always right," innocently intended to convey the idea that efforts should be made to please even unreasonable customers. But whoever invented it does not seem to have considered the question of why anyone would be happy doing a job in which he or she was condemned to be always in the wrong. Nor does this bring out the best in the customers whom it was intended to attract with the promise of being judged right, notwithstanding any evidence to the contrary.

The next was "friendly service." This was another well-meant concept, the idea being to assure the customer that the service would not be surly. Those who launched it didn't realize that the opposite of surly, in a business context, is not friendly but cheeky. What was really meant was cheerfulness, not the license of friendship to unburden oneself, which sometimes includes not having to keep up a cheerful front. And aside from the question of why those friendly banks ran away leaving their friends in the care of machines, there is the small matter of people wanting to choose their own friends.

Related to this is "personal service," meant to tailor the service to the requirements of the individual. But as this was applied in situations in which altering the service for every customer was not possible, it was pretty much confined to reading customers' first names from their credit cards and reciting them back to them. Lately, however, it has come to mean keeping track of their purchases as a way of enticing them to keep right on purchasing.

Improved customer service will probably have to wait a decade for the realization that what the customer wants is fairness, efficiency and privacy. Meanwhile, customers who want to be righteous in sharing personal experiences with friendly strangers can turn to chat groups that deal with complaints about customer service. : )

Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated "Miss Manners" column, is at work on a history of American etiquette