Culture of bad service

Before I took a wrong turn and stumbled into journalism, I worked for some years in the hotel trade as what may well now be euphemised “hospitality facilitator”. That career offered me insights into the human condition which are useful to a journalist.

And when I claim to have stumbled into journalism, I might be distorting my biography a little: as an eight-year-old I told my late father, the editor of a weekly newspaper, that I wanted to inherit his job one day. In a way I did, even if I didn’t get to write about football.

The hotel industry also was a splendid training ground in the art of providing good service. On the downside, I also have high expectations of receiving fair service.

The level of service one provides is proportionate to the respect one has for the customer, for the establishment one represents, and for one’s self. Bad service signals contempt for those whose loyalty the service provider ought to nourish. Bad service says: “You are a schmuck for using our services, and no matter how badly I treat you, you’ll just come back for more.”

And it’s true, we are schmucks when we tolerate contempt, condescension and incompetence. Business executives seem to know that our discontent won’t find expression in a meaningful boycott of their products or services (less so when they run a monopoly). I suspect that deliberate rudeness, obfuscation, indifference, obtuseness and duplicity are the strategic corporate tools of intimidation calculated to disempower the exasperated customer.

When I worked in the hotel trade, we would cheerfully bribe an unhappy customer with freebies commensurate with our mistake. “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong,” the former British Airways executive Donald Porter once observed, correctly. And then he went into politics, whose practitioners are even less concerned with people than big business. His advice, however, is good marketing. Disrespecting the clientele is a bad long-term policy.

I once complained to a restaurant manager about some shortcoming or other. He barely apologised — something along the lines of “I’m sorry if you didn’t like it” — and quickly gave notice that he was not going to deduct anything off the bill. I wasn’t about to ask him, but it was the last bill he would ever present me with. No paying customer should receive the gastronomical equivalent of that thing Italians do with their hands and chin.

Other service providers are even worse. The inexorable proliferation of the call centre has garroted the notion of good service, and eliminated the personal relationship with those exploiting us. No longer will your bank manager call to sternly discuss the parlous affairs of your finances. You can’t even call your branch. Everything is centralised in call centres staffed by anonymous drones who not always provide correct information. And the decision-makers, the protected queen bees, will not stoop to speaking with you, a mere customer.

The banking version of that Italian hand-and-chin gesture must be the latest manifestation of sheer arrogance: you pick up the ringing phone, and an automated voice instructs: “Please hold for this very important call.” Can’t be that important, can it? I have resolved that next time, instead of putting down the phone, I shall wait until the call comes through — and then ask the drone to hold on until I am ready to talk. Maybe I will accompany the telephonic hiatus by intermittently announcing: “Please hold. Your call is very important to me.” And after half an hour of this exercise, the call will be inexplicably disconnected.

On the question of respect, I feel troubled when vacancy ads advise: “If you don’t hear from us, consider your application unsuccessful”. Potential employers, show some respect: if applicants think they landed the job after not hearing from you, then they probably weren’t suitable anyway. But what happened to a little courtesy towards the other applicants? They went through the trouble of writing a polite letter to you, compiling a fetching CV, even considered your outfit worthy of their skill and labour. The least they deserves is a form letter telling them that they were considered wholly inadequate. Some people might even collect rejection letters. It is a question of respect. If we lack respect for random others, we don’t show a great deal of respect for ourselves.

So, where does one still receive good service? In my experience, petrol stations seem to have bucked the trend and improved in that regard. Or perhaps a kind attendant has marked my car’s petrol cap to indicate to his colleagues that the driver of this vehicle is inclined to tip well.

And here’s the corollary to my argument: the customer must show respect too. Those of us who grumble about bad service must be courteous to the waiter or call centre operator (unless they call you “dude”, lie to you or make you wait for their “important call”), make a point of praising efficiency, leave a decent tip.

And when service is poor, we must not accept it with a downcast mutter, but confront those who compete for our hard-earned money. If we receive the Italian hand-chin motion, then we must allow other, perhaps less contemptuous businesses to rip us off.