The Long and Winding Road to Service Hell

37-years ago, I began my first job working after-school in a family owned market. 89-year old founder Angelo Tedeschi was wheeled by pushchair through each store talking with customers and employees (most of whom he knew by name). He asked about everyone’s family and checked the condition of the store with his name on the front door. He’d long since “retired,” couldn’t sit around and so he and his sons started again.

The early 1970’s was a time of perfect square, paper sacks and 20 smartly-dressed cashiers and white shirt and tie “bag boys” all under the watchful eye of manager Bill Gear. Mr. Gear’s office was the size of a broom closet. He’d never sit in it because his real office was the store floor where meetings and job interviews took place, on the fly, during his constant inspection walks which he interrupted many times to greet customers. His was a living message learned early; the customer is the most important thing in my day.

Mr. Gear instructed every new bag boy in the art and science of paper sack packing. We watched as he built a perfect square sack every time. “Build a ssolid base in the bottom with a balance of cartons, boxes and bottles, then fill in the open spaces areas these so the sack remains upright, rigid and supported by the load inside. Pack it too heavily and elderly customers cannot lift and carry them… too lightly, then the order is not balanced and you waste bags. Always place frozen items in a separate plastic bag (who knew about global warming). This keeps the sack dry. And always, ALWAYS ask the customer if they have a preference.” His mantra became ours.

Can you imagine this happening today? The scanner lady sometimes remembers to ask her rote line, “do you need help with packing your order, sir?” My reply rarely varies, “would it make a difference if I answered in the affirmative?” As she tries to vainly figure out if I said yeah, but no, but yeah, but no, but maybe… her answer rarely varies, “no, not really.”

Thus begins the 180-second dash to ensure we climax this task at the same moment. She speeds items across the scanner as if the 20-seconds waiting for me at the end will be her break. I fill my blue recyclable back-breaking bags in time to hand over my card, pay for my order and then must gather everything up and leave breathlessly because she cannot start the next order until I am “CLEAR” of the belt. And God help me for holding up the next four customers in the queue who are glaring at me for taking precious seconds by disturbing her fragile concentration by engaging in conversation.

Of course her entire training regimen is a day of health and safety training (we don’t want to be sued!) and a day observing another at the till before being thrown to the wolves, so they get what they pay for? When I asked the young lady last week if there was any training on how to speak with and solve customer issues, she giggled, “no,” with the unsaid, “why would we do that,” hanging awkwardly unsaid in the air.

They have ME well trained. Their “service culture” includes several self-scan DIY paying lanes installed “for my convenience.” This “no nonsense” machine orders me to place each scanned items on the belt or the entire system locks up. The belt whisks items away at bowling ball speed crushing everything at the end like scattered 10-pins. Hint, scan the eggs last.

I expect that either my personal shelf-stocking schedule will soon be included in the bag (Mr. Campbell, you will work the baked beans aisle Thursday night, what’s that, a bad back, charge this man another £20 for shopping here!) or I will eventually have to swing the car around back and pick my items off of the moving truck, before then scanning them in myself.

Where did it all go so wrong?

Details mattered to Mr. Gear and to each of us, from how we were dressed to how we addressed the customer (“Thank you Mrs. Jones,” if possible) to how we carried their bags on our shiny carts and loaded them into the car so they would not fall over or spill out. Competition for these positions was fierce and we were evaluated regularly.

It meant something to work at Angelo’s.

Contrast that with the pleading voice heard every Sunday morning at 10:15 am over the PA at your local Tesco, “will all of the 10:00 am cashiers pleeeeaaassee come to the front immediately,” as each queue is now six-deep and most employees live by American comedian George Carlin’s mantra, “you may get there on time, but screw the company those first 20-minutes belong to you!” We then watch the “front-end manager” run around, looking worried, important and busy, palms extended upwards in the classic, “what do you want me to do about it” shrug as he has no answer to the question, “how long does the queue need to be before opening all of the tills.”

If screaming would help, I would. I simply want service people in this or any country to behave as if customer service was an important condition of their employment and, indeed, their job depended upon its quality. Instead I stupidly stand there contributing to the £80,000 quid a minute they make because there are no closer options. Is it too much to expect my custom to matter? Apparently, yes.

Service used to matter. It used to mean something to be a City of London taxi driver. You had to complete a battery of tests and compete to become one. Now cab drivers I encounter in The City are simultaneously practice their map reading and English speaking skills (said whilst pointing to the map “here?, here?”). Even with Sat-Nav you’re lucky to get within three blocks of your destination.

The final exam was the stuff of legend. A tester would hop into your cab and say, “OK it’s 16:15, we’re at Bank, there is a memorial service for the Queen Mum just ending at St. Paul’s, an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar, Tower Bridge is jammed open and several horses broke free from a parade and are on the loose in Kensington Gardens with PC’s conducting rolling blockades until are all corralled. Your fare has to be to Heathrow’s Terminal Two in 26 minutes… GO!

Today service standards have sunk to where mediocre is considered excellent. Smile and shrug are the norm and getting angry at service failures (particularly in an NHS facility) has you targeted for prosecution as abusive. Emboldened, they now stand in a stare-down with you, one hand on the phone desperately wanting an excuse to call security whilst you are cowed silently back into your seat because your child who has a temperature of 104 and you have waited 90-minutes because of their error. So not only have we no voice, face an uncaring group of service personnel, but we also run the risk of an ASBO!

Businesses take advantage of this nation’s desire to not make a fuss. For decades they’ve grown cockier trampling over consumers’ rights. Just try to find a live human being to complain to inside any company with the authority to actually fix something or accept accountability.

Service booked a permanent passage to India where bleary-eyed foreign call centre kids (many supporting an entire extended family off of their meagre pay cheque) stare at computer screens at 4 am local time providing ‘service’ which mostly consists of reading the same computer Help screens we see at home. Has anyone actually had their question appear on a website’s FAQ list? These screens are written in a vacuum by people who spend their days writing and talking in the 1’s and 0’s of binary code vs. the English the rest of us speak.

Some of these kids even have their native Hindi names anglicised (as if the accent does not give me a clue I am talking to Bangalore!) and while they do try their level best, their hands are tied by UK head office control freaks who are afraid these off-site people might harm the relationship with their customers if they give too much information or are somehow allowed to think for themselves.

So people thousands of miles away, hired to provide me with service, have their hands tied and are not given the bare minimum of information to help a customer because the company just saved £3,000,000 by firing everyone in the UK, hiring this group and only wants the telephone answered by the third ring vs. actually doing something to help? These call centre personnel think if they repeat, “I am so very, very sorry for the inconvenience” enough times, that this will satisfy every situation?!? The simple fact is, they have no other words in their script, they are not trusted by the company and the game can volley up to 10 times! Try this next time. Be silent… … … It freaks them out.

I don’t want pity. Just answer the question and help me! In the words of Paddy Chayefsky’s protagonist played by Peter Finch in the film “Network” open your windows and scream as loud as you can, “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” At least you’ll feel a bit better and finally be deserving of the strange looks your neighbours already give you anyways.

(As appeared on tbd.com)