ESQi - Dan Gass

[FailingEnterpriseAdmin]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

ok. cultural difference. in the uk, people are NOT impressed by over the top, 'have a nice day' attitudes that seem commonplace in the US. when they, for example, arrive at erac to return their car, people in the uk would generally appreciate efficiency and politeness above other qualities you would show. i would treat each customer individually, but my area manager would not, and ended up asking 'the 3 critical questions' to everyone who returned. now, i'm no sociologist, but i can tell you as a 23 year old man i would find it very weird to be asked to give a mark out of ten for the customer service i recieved when i'd done something as simple as rent a car. it would just seem very, very cheesy. when he was in the office and we pretty much HAD to say it, i always felt like an idiot, and the customer always seemed to be uncomfortable. the first word out of 99% of them was 'err...?'

in short, people have places to be, and do not expect to have erac slavering all over them fawning on about customer service. yes, people care about not being treated like a moron, but i tended to find the 'thanks a lot, here's you're driver, take care' approach worked a lot better than asking a series of damned questions about customer service. if i bought a cd i would greatly appreciate a smile, my change, and then the chance to go home and listen to it as opposed to spending five minutes talking to the girl at the checkout about how nice i'd found the layout of the store/was the product easy to find/would i consider buying a cd there again?

the culture in america seems to be driven by who can smile the widest/help the customer to the most ridiculous degree and generally act 100% unlike themselves in order to appease any slight worry at all that the customer may have. in the uk, that just seems cheesy, the worst example being dan gass' crazy esqi ideas that would only see esqi plummet owing to the fact that 'i had to spend ages answering stupid irrelevent questions thanks to that weird smiling american man.'

Yes, there is a lot of false over-the-top cheerfulness in customer service here in the U.S., and I agree that that's probably not what people want.

A friend of mine from the U.K. pointed out to me that there's a big difference between being "eager to help" and being "able to help". When it comes to anything technical in the U.S. you tend to get customer service people who are eager to help but are simply unable to. They're interested, sympathetic, empathetic, they listen, they record your information, they ask questions, they open a ticket, but, in the end, can't help you at all because they're simply reading from a script. They'll escalate the problem, send an e-mail confirming the escalation, etc., etc., etc. You can get extremely cheerful, "helpful" people all the way through a process that just burns up your time without actually being "helpful".

The best customer service, of course, is not needing customer service.