by Klaus Rohrich
July 27, 2004
as a result of a recent spring cleaning spree, I was saddled with the odious task of disposing of a rather large amount of garbage that was not covered through the regular weekly collection. This entailed renting a van, loading the lumber scraps and unwanted furniture and appliances in the back and making a pilgrimage to our local transfer station. I was surprised upon entering the weighscales by the sign in the operator’s window that stated "aBUSIVE LaNGUaGE WILL NOT BE TOLERaTED". It gave me cause to think why such a sign was necessary.
Of course, I soon found out from the demeanour of those working at the transfer station. While our fees and taxes pay for their salaries, they did not find it necessary to acknowledge my presence, make eye contact with me or extend any other common courtesies one might expect through a simple social, or financial transaction. The person responsible for weighing my vehicle was sullen and seemed angry at the world. His instructions to me to dump garbage in the green bin and metals in the blue bin were delivered in a monotone and his tone oozed contempt.
We entered the transfer station, disposed of our unwanted goods and then made out way back to the weighstation to determine how much we had to pay to dispose of our unwanted items. While there were five people working inside the kiosk, not one looked at me nor did they deign to come out of the kiosk to deliver my invoice. I had to exit my vehicle and walk to the kiosk window to pick up the invoice and pay the fee.
Upon leaving the transfer station I had a really good understanding of why the sign about abusive language was necessary. It was all I could do to keep a civil tongue.
Those of us who are, shall we say, "mature", remember a time when rude attendants were the exception and not the rule. In fact, anyone in any position to interact with the public who was rude wasn’t in that position very long, as the public would not have tolerated the rudeness.
The above example is in reference to a government employee, and most of us have our own stories regarding the demeanour of government functionaries toward their customers. Suffice it to say that rude treatment at the hands of government workers seems to have become the rule, rather than the exception.
I recently read a piece by Jonathan Kay of the National Post, who recounted his run-in with officialdom in his attempt to acquire a passport for his two-month old daughter. From the sounds of it, the workers at the passport office were convinced that Kay’s baby girl was an al-Qaeda agent attempting to get onto a plane so she could hijack it and fly it into a shopping mall in Windsor.
However, one would expect the private sector to be more responsive to their customers’ needs than the government. I’m sad to say that empirically speaking, private sector workers are on the whole, even ruder than government workers. It seems that the larger the company, the more outrageous the behaviour of "customer service" representatives. I recently had a problem with my office telephones and attempted to have it resolved through my local Bell Canada Repair Department. Despite the fact that I pay for a service contract in advance annually, I was told that my problem would not be solved for 24 hours. When I offered to pay to have a service representative come fix the problem sooner, my "customer service" representative put me on hold for 22 minutes, at which point I just hung up.
The next day I attempted to lodge a complaint with Bell Canada’s executive offices and had to leave a voice message to do so. Despite the fact that the pre-recorded announcement assured me my problem would be dealt with in no more than 24 hours, I had to call a second time after four days of no response. and then, it was just a flak to tell me that their policy was that they do not fix problems in less than 24 hours. No apology, no nothing. Just pay your bill and shut up.
When is the last time you were at a fast-food restaurant? Do you remember any of the employees making eye contact, or even acknowledging your presence? I didn’t think so. Did you notice how they have five people working on serving the drive-through window, while the stalwarts ambitious enough to actually go inside and place an order are studiously ignored? That’s because the drive-through window is the most profitable as those customers don’t place too much demand on the resources of the restaurant. No one walks into the store, uses the bathroom, dirties a table, or even throws their garbage in the restaurant garbage cans. So they get the preference.
This decline of customer service, or even civility, has begun to permeate all aspects of our economy as more and more people seek to hire the barely literate and certainly socially awkward troglodytes that are graduating from our educational system. This despite the fact that they can barely read, can’t do simple mathematical functions without a calculator and don’t know squat about the niceties of social interactions.
The trend toward social dysfunction and rudeness among individuals in the front lines of customer service is not likely to get better any time soon. as our educational system is churning out vast numbers of individuals totally unprepared to deal with the challenges of the real world, it is incumbent on us to make sure that businesses who do not focus on adequate customer service pay the price through customer complaints and loss of business.