IT’S SO EASY

This morning, in the window at the gas station, waiting on this black working class guy about my own age, I swear I did nothing special beyond just putting a little extra inflection in my voice as I parroted back his pump number and the amount of money he had paid. But this guy’s expression got really bright as he looked me straight in the eye and said, with lots of emphasis, “You’re so nice!” I gave him a really genuine “Thank you”, partly because I was genuinely floored by the compliment.

Just a little extra lilt in my voice – that’s all it took. This was a new guy, but I know I have a fan club around there – many of them have told me how much they appreciate the attention I give them. Some of these, again, have floored me, because I don’t remember being especially nice to them – in some cases, I just plain don’t remember them!

It’s so easy, so easy to make people feel special. I think it also is an unfortunate reflection of how little people expect from customer service folks – it like shocks them when someone is genuinely nice to them.

Here’s where it becomes more complicated. I embrace this work because I’m writing, thinking, conversing – I’m just all over “front line customer service”. It’s all grist for the mill for me. I have lots of threads that make this job worthwhile to me, even at shit pay and in a system where managers don’t know how to manage – and especially don’t know how to give “attaboys” for good work.

So, most front line customer service folks are not writing stuff about the work. Most of them are in it because it was the job that they got. Most of them (except maybe in this town) don’t think of themselves as living the life of the Asheville artist, with mindless day jobs that support – or at least don’t suck too much energy away from – their art. Most of them don’t have an artistic form of expression to nurture their soul. (Again, Asheville is the exception that proves the rule.) And then they work in these systems where they chronically do not feel respected or appreciated for their contributions – including being paid a disrespectfully low wage.

So, here’s the paradox: easy to give customers that extra little juice that makes their day, but hard to motivate customer service folks to do this. Hard to help them find their way into “Authentic Customer Service (ACS)”, that path that celebrates the server as much as the customer.

But not really all that hard if you know how. I’m convinced that, in many workplaces, just having people take five minutes after each shift to fill out my “Post-Shift Debrief” (www.home.earthlink.net/~authenticcustomerservice/id23.html), could in itself leverage a shift in this area. I also think it wouldn’t be all that hard to teach supervisors to move in this ACS direction – though you probably would have to get through their resistance that comes from them also being managed so poorly. It would be really good to be able to get my hands on their bosses, too.