You want sincerity from customer service people? Ha!
I was reading yesero's thread "no hay problema" and the issue of sincerity in greetings and other phrases that service people use (cashiers, waitresses, etc) was mentioned somewhere.
Almost all my jobs have been in the service industry. I've been a fast-food cashier, a sales clerk at a department store and a cell phone customer service rep (currently I'm level 2 support meaning you get transferred to me if level 1 can't fix your issue).
My sister (who currently no longer works in the service industry) once worked as a Wal-Mart cashier and also worked at the customer service desk there.
My mother, in her younger days, was often employed as a waitress.
You all do realize that after the first week, after one has processed their first 500 customers, the sincerity starts to fade away, right? Hundreds of people every week. The greetings are always the same (there are only a small handful to choose from). We say the same greetings and closing statements 30, 40, 50, 100 times a day.
We say we're sorry for stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with us...over and over and over...every day. We have people cuss / yell at us for stuff that isn't our fault (and sometimes for stuff that is, but usually for stuff that isn't)...not once a week. No, 10, 15, 20, 30 times a day. We are not allowed to respond with the natural response, but must fake acquiescence, humility, regret, sympathy and empathy.
Every time someone paid my sister with twenties, she was required to mark them with a pen as a counterfeit test. And almost every time the customer, upon seeing her testing them, says, "Oh, these should be good. I just printed them up this morning." (Or something very similar.) That's funny once, twice, maybe three times. But my sister got to hear that same joke several times each day....5 days per week...for years. Do you think she sincerely chuckled at that joke 5 times a day, 25 times a week, 100 times a month, 1200 times a year?
All this while trying to please the corporations which often require us to say or do things that don't make any sense (or are hugely inappropriate) in a wide range of contexts but which some manager thought sounded cool. Once we were not allowed to use the word "they" anywhere in our phone calls in reference to other employees or departments. This breaks how English works and how we've spoken all our lives.
"Okay, I'm going to transfer you to our payment department, and th...um...the person over there is going to assist you further, okay?"
If we used "they" in reference to another employee or department, we would lose the "respect" portion of our call (thus failing the call). Yes, using the word "they" was treated exactly like talking to the customer in a condescending tone or what not. Trust me, this is just one small example of the stupidity that goes into grading calls of call center reps.
Or we are supposed to end all our calls telling the customer how much we value them. (I personally do NOT like customer services reps saying insincere nonsense like this to me. It doesn't make me feel valued, it makes me feel like the rep had to say nonsense at the end of the call.) But, whatever, it's corny but doable on a call in which I am able to help the customer, but they forgot that often we must deliver bad news (sometimes quite bad news) to the customers. Telling them something that makes them want to burn down our corporate office should NOT be followed with a sappy statement about how much we value them. It rubs salt in the wound and twists the knife that was already sunk deep in the chest. But, don't do it and fail the call.
Or, my company doesn't like silences longer than 30 seconds. I have often been coached to fill my silences with value statements. Whatever that is supposed to mean. I can't imaging repeating over and over throughout a call that I value a customer in various ways. My company apparently doesn't realize that I have to check 6 to 10 complex, slow-loading systems and try to make sense out of them. I use my silences to try to figure out how to try to fix my customer's complex technical issue. The company wants me to blather constant nonsense at the customer. If the customer says "are you still there" during the call, it's autofail...a zero for that call...regardless if I actually fix their issue...even if the customer ends the call, as they often do, expressing thanks to me and saying I'm one of the best reps. (Some have said they would have left XYZ company were it not for me...it is possible to have a customer say that and still fail the call over any one of hundreds of technicalities).
And, passing calls is important as that is one of several metrics that determine every month if you still have a job the next month.
You want sincerity from service people? Ha, no, I don't think anyone wants true sincerity from service people.
My sister would have sincerely told you that she had heard the joke about freshly printed $20 bills countless times and had long been sick of hearing it.
You know what I want from them? To be knowledgeable (unless they are new) and professional.
I think everyone should be a cashier and work in a restaurant for a little bit. And I think anyone who is responsible for making policies about what a phone rep should say or how they should use the systems should take calls for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 6 months and then make their policies.
13 Answers
The days of going to the local General Store once a month to pick up supplies are gone. The owner of that store got a few customers per day (maybe) and was also the cashier, bagboy, as well as neighbor and friend.
Today we go to Winn Dixie or Wal Mart once or twice per week and we go there by droves. The cashiers don't know us and each one processes 100s of customers each week as we herd ourselves and our two overflowing shopping carts through their lane.
To me, it's like people going to a meat processing plant where 1000s of animals are slaughtered and butchered daily and expecting it to be run like a family farm that butchers a few of their own animals per year.
To me, the qid is that you help the customer regardless of how your employer wants you to handle the customers.
AND, how you feel after helping that customer.
Now, very few will come back and say how great you were, but when that happens, it makes you feel special.
Well, I try to be polite. That's standard in my book. Some reps are not, some are down-right mean. On the other hand, the girl behind me talks to everyone far more politely and sweetly than I, but for some reason they keep needling her about her tone. I prefer professionalism as a customer, not sappiness...so it's hard for me to dish out some of the sappier stuff the ask me to say, and, when I do say it, I try to make my tone sound as though I am being forced to say this crap so the customer realizes it's not I who needs counciling but whoever it is making me say this nonsense.
One thing I remember working at a department store was I felt they were asking us to do more than humanly possible. I told an old timer, it's like they are wanting the work of three people. She responded, they used to have many more employees. I would watch as the Christmas crowd would destroy my department as I and another clerk helplessly rang up the never ending line of customers. We had 30 minutes after closing to restore it to order. Most employees would just put the clothes wherever, but then the day managers would be mad the next day. I kept trying to put the clothes back properly but the night managers were always upset at how long I took. (I now realize it was the put-them-anywhere employees who were smart...they pleased the night managers...they were not around when the day managers came...and it was impossible to get done what they wanted with the amount of people provided in the time frame required...I would often have three or four night managers waiting for me to finish cleaning my area...for 15 or 20 minutes past the half-hour goal...making them late going home...of course the day managers don't come in all super impressed that the clothes are neater and better organized the next day...they just don't complain about the night crew as bad).
Clerk jobs are usually minimum wage + 0.25. I discovered as time went by that every time the Government raises minimum wage, the stores cut minimum wage jobs (but not the workload).
How many workers can McDonald's put on the floor at 1.25/hour? How many at 7.50/hr?
When I drive-thru cashiered at a fast-food restaurant here (not McDonald's), there were often buzzers and requests calling from all corners but my customer didn't see all that. I was dropping fries, running to the back freezer for more chicken patties, bagging orders, giving change...all while there is someone telling me they want a #3 but hold the mayonaise, add an apple pie, with a large drink...not so much ice. Tell the cook to not put so much ketchup on it this time. The system was simply made for more people than were being used to run it currently.
And, when the big-whigs dropped by for two or three days, they'd put extra people on the floor so everything ran smoothly. But the store manager gets a monthly bonus on profits, so generally it will be as few employees as possible.
For some reason, whenever they build a Walmart, they put in 60 cash registers, but whenever I go there, there's like 10 open registers each with with long lines. You can figure there's a store manager padding his monthly bonus. But also the store might not be profitable if they used enough people as minimum wage is so high now. Think if minimum wage was 1.25. They could pay the cashier $2 and have lots of them. At any rate, with the volume of people being processed at Wal Mart, the customers are actually more like cattle going through a corral and the cashier processes so many that she becomes nothing but a cattle prod.
My great uncle (my grandmother's brother) told me when he was young, he worked as a stock boy for $50 / week. On that salary he could support himself and his wife who did not work. The could afford a new vehicle, rent, and food. He didn't say, but I am imagining a little store like the little grocery store in the Andy Griffith Show, where you know everyone, your dad is good friends with the store owner, and, while he does need a stock boy, he is only asking for you to do something he himself could do but he needs to focus on other things. In other words, it's not a soul-crushing, body-destroying repetitive task. It's just a little job you can make a living at.
Today the job at Walmart is usually NOT enough to make ends meet at probably $300 - $400 / week, and the stock boys are wheeling out those horrible mountainous palettes, and stocking endlessly for 8 hours, getting torn rotator cuffs, knee problems, picking up things too heavy for them. In training they tell you to get help, but, if you actually do, you will not find it available as everyone else is too busy too; so they slip, they fall, they do their back out, the palettes fall on them...yes, that happened at a Walmart here, my parents saw the palette fall and coworkers carry the boy away in a vegetable-like state).
My mom saw several Walmart cashiers (when she was one) get injuries like torn rotator cuffs (a bad shoulder injury) due to the severe repetitiveness of the job. She herself was developing heel spurs, shoulder and back problems before she left.
These are soul-crushing, body-wrecking jobs where 1000s of people get processed each day. There's no hope for advancement. In the morning, they literally call you in to sing Walmart songs (a supposed morale builder). They needle you every three months because your product-per-minute scan rate is not at the company goal. (My mother used to try harder each time to make the stupid, unreasonable goal...only to realize before she quit that the cashiers that didn't have shoulder problems were the ones that didn't care at all about the goal and whom she had previously considered lazy but now maybe considered smart in a way).
The Walmart cashier may be wincing in pain every item she passes over the scanner. She's looking at the next 50 overflowing carts and wanting to cry because she already hurts so bad, but she's a single mom and already can't make ends meet.
I don't expect anything at all from my Walmart cashier except she ring up my order, and I feel bad I am helping to wreck her shoulders and her feet. If she barely acknowledges me, I understand. Sometimes I want to cry with them. I see them wearing wrist braces and rubber gloves (they come in contact with unsanitary money in such volumes they stay sick). I see the never-ending line behind me. I see single people picking up furniture clearly labled as requiring two people to lift.
And it's not just Walmart, it's every company. It's the gas station that has one attendant, the restaurant with a skeleton staff and tons of customers, the call center that processes back-to-back calls because they don't want to hire enough people...until they figure out they can ship the jobs oversees and pay a fraction of the cost (and it'll still be back to back calls for those guys, too). It's all the major corporations. It's modern society.
It's not the 1950s any more (a reference to my uncle's prime time period).
Webdunce, you make a good point.
Whenever I have a complex problem that I am working through with a telephone service rep, I always try to relate to them as a person by asking them about where they are located, what the weather is like there, what they have planned for the weekend.
I do this because I assume that for eight hours a day of their precious lives they are working for a company that treats them like a machine, in a cubicle somewhere under florescent lights dealing with a string of cranky people who they will never know and who will never know them.
They took the job because they needed to pay the rent, needed health insurance or like to eat on a regular basis. Companies take advantage of that. If one tries to relate to customer service reps as human beings, it can make that cubicle a little less depressing. From my end, it always makes my call more pleasant.
I use the phone a lot at my job, I frequently talk to annoying, stupid, blackmailing, overbearing, extorting, forceful, dishonest clients.
I'm not rude or impolite, however I'm cordial and cool. I do not do fake friendliness - I don't use my real name, nor do I support discussions that have nothing to do with work (weather, wife, kids, politics).
When as a customer I call and talk to a service rep I most certainly do not engage in idle chitchat. A cordial business transaction is all that is necessary.
And yet I get the highest marks. Why? Because I'm really fast and precise and efficient. If the company rulebook or the daily memos don't specifically say, "ask the customer how her grand children are doing in college", I most certainly will not.
I follow rules such as: "Must call client by Mr./Ms. last name twice within the call". I follow them to the letter.
I remember there was this one lady from México who filed a complaint about me for unfriendliness because I wouldn't tell her where I was I from, where I was living, where I learned my Spanish, where I grew up. Her complaint said, "very unfriendly rep, very typical for a European". I remember telling HR "if you guys use that complaint against me, then I will take it that you condone racist/ethnic prejudice against your employees, which is not something you want me to accuse you of".
A few weeks after that I was given a raise 
The days of going to the local General Store once a month to pick up supplies are gone. The owner of that store got a few customers per day (maybe) and was also the cashier, bagboy, as well as neighbor and friend.
This is really sad, here in Spain many of these shops are closing down too, due to what we call, grandes superficies, big supermarkets or big malls.
There are still a lot around though, we are lucky, there is nothing like being able to go shopping and omg, I have forgotten my purse...
, well , no se preocupe señora, ahora viene y me paga.. And you can go quietly go home with your shopping and go back even the next day, no hurry at all, to pay the bill.
I hope these shops won't die.
Wow, Webdunce, you have my sympathy. I could never work in that kind of environment - give me a job digging a ditch and leave me alone. My mother-in-law worked as a cashier for years and would come home about to blow up at having to hold her tongue all day.
As far as dealing with someone on the telephone - that is a different story. After fifteen minutes of trying to reach your party through a computer you finally reach someone in some far-off country who barely speaks English and has a poor connection - that is when I am about to blow up.
Decades ago I, too, worked in the service industry when I was in my late teens (at all the jobs mentioned above -- and more).
But I've noticed the difference. And it's B I G 
These huge companies treat their employees like "talking cattle," i.e., completely and utterly inhumane. It's gotten to the point where NO ONE treats a "service dog" or "working horse" that way! 
Top management gets paid for figuring out another way to save one eighth of a cent on a phone call -- or at the check out counter. Have you noticed that most stores now have "self-serve" check out? 
Paying a fortune for splashy ads to impress you how "much every employee cares about you as an individual" is the current "cost effective" solution. But, in defense of management, you save that one eighth of a cent or you are in the unemployment line yourself. 
It is a different world. What do I do?? I guess I try my best to be as kind and polite as I am able to the poor person having to deal with me, knowing in my heart I made a few seconds of their day more tolerable.
Then I cone to SpanishDict and wallow in some real sincerity, and I feel utterly fantastic!! 
And you can't imagine how grateful I am to you, Web, for bringing this up. I just plain didn't have the nerve. 
Ditto Mariana!!! I have to be in a really bad way to give anyone a hard time on the phone because I know they are just doing a job. Remember, I'm the guy who still likes to hear "you're welcome sir"
We say we're sorry for stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with us...over and over and over...every day.
This is the very reason that I say to the person in Customer Service, "I know it's not your fault and I don't blame you," and why I never blame the rep for a problem he/she didn't cause.
I almost always write an email of commendation when someone goes out of his way to help me. I have made many employees nervous by saying, "Can I speak to your manager?" But they are relieved when I say, "I'd like the manager to know how much you've helped and how professional you've been."
Hmmmm
I expect efficiency, I admit.
I never complain to or about a cashier, they have their handsful with enough silly stuff, people taking too many goods , then they can't pay, oh, can you take that off the bill, oh , just that, not the two items, hmmm, sorry, I still don't have enough money, can you wait till I get my credit card...
Jesus Christ. 
I do complain about phone receptionists. I made a call the other day to a place where I am registered as I have been going there for over three months, to get an appointment. So the woman could not find my file, ok she finally found it, took her about three minutes after even spelling my name for like three times, so then she was asking, ok what is your name, your phone number please....wtf, I am sorry, but hey, you have all the info right in front of your eyes, so what is this all about? I asked to speak to somebody in charge and she hung up on me. I sent a letter. I got an answer. She hopefully got a rebuke.
I find inefficiency hard to bear.
Web, you are talking about the point of view of a probably highly efficient and experienced call service manager. This is not always the case, and I do hate inefficiency, I get extremely annoyed.
I am very good at my job, I don't expect anything less from other people in their jobs.
On the other hand, the Publix by my house seems to have lots of employees. The bag boys offer to carry even small bags out for me (and I'm a middle-aged man, not some frail elderly grandma). And they try to engage in conversation on the walk to the car (I'm sure they are forced to do this, but still). Main thing is, the employees don't appear to be run ragged. Publix at least appears to have enough employees to do the work required. I've never worked there so I can't say for sure.
The cash registers never seem to have never-ending lines of overflowing buggies.
But, then, Publix is expensive compared to Walmart.
Hi web, I thought you were looking for a word, or an expression when I saw the thread... I had not even opened it till now, as I have no idea about this stuff.
This is interesting....
