Who can tame the customer service monster?

When we first got to America, four months ago, my husband feared that our savings might run out too fast, so he took the first job he could find. He worked full-time as a merchandiser for a national retail chain and though the payment was lousy, something else made his days at work unbearable. The extreme worship of customers. 
 

“They are taking customer services too far”, he told me one night, at the dinner table. I didn’t know what to say. After living my whole life in an ex-communist country where returning policies were basically non-existent, I was delighted to be treated like royalty whenever I purchased something, no matter how inexpensive. But I was about to change my mind. 

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My husband’s employer had a skewed manner to stimulate its staff. Three times a day, my husband was required to take part in team meetings, a masquerade really. They were given candy and instructed to cheer and clap as the team leader enthusiastically talked about “vibing with the guests”. In other words, stalking clients in the name of perfect costumer service. 

Freshly brainwashed, they were encouraged to go on their day like construction workers from Lego Movie did, with a giant, dumb smile on their faces. Maybe even humming the “Everything is awesome” song. Not fun. And totally ineffective. Instead of building enthusiasm, they were depleting it.

In many ways, this customer service training approach harms us all, clients and retail workers as well. The frustration felt by employees each time they are force to drop whatever they are doing and hunt down people who just want a carton of milk snowballed into a much greater damage. Customers started acting like spoiled brats. They are no longer asking, they demand. And a sense of rude ownership took place to their common sense. Mountains of returned products are collected each day by the retail employees, who first have to clean the mess people leave behind. 

I was a witness of all this one night, when I happened to step into a popular clothing store near the closing hours. Dozens of pairs of shoes sprawled on the floor, right next to their empty boxes; clothing racks bursting with tangled hangers. It looked like a tornado hit the store minutes earlier. What shocked me the most was seeing people shopping careless, blind to the clutter disaster surrounding them. No one was trying to pick something up. After all, they did exactly what retail chains got them used to do. They were the mighty Costumer. 

But since when being attune with a natural instincts of cleaning your own mess is a violation of customer etiquette? Just like Rome, this self-absorbed image of a typical American costumer as we know it wasn’t built in a day, rather than decades.

For starters, the 80’s brought in the industrial revolution and thus the need for customer service teams. Companies came up with ideas to reward loyalty and to measure buyer’s levels of satisfaction; Coca-Cola released the first discount coupon. All this expanded with the launched of Internet, in the early 90’s. Nowadays, even the modest companies have a person in charge with social media, also known as the dead seat considering the huge volume of complains released online. 

A survey conducted by The Social Habit, a well-known social media research group, shows 42% of people who ever contacted a brand for costumer support via Twitter or Facebook expected a response within 60 minutes. Furthermore, 57% expect the same speed of response at night and during weekends.

On the other hand, we have a ridiculous number of stories about costumers who successfully returned soiled clothes simply because they were allowed to do so. In the last years though, famous department stores like Bloomingdales have taken measures to corrected breaches in their return policies and put an end to “wardrobing”.

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That’s not to say retailers must treat buyers like burglars or that they should obliterate return rules all together. It may be them who opened the Pandora box, but costumers have the power to seal it off for good. Particularly Millennials. 

A handful of surveys performed by Luxury Institute revealed Millennials (people in their mid-twenties, who make up about 25 percent of the U.S. workforce) gravitate towards user-friendly return policies, but don’t exploit them. They are also on a budget, which forces them to think twice when purchasing something. They don’t care much about overly friendly cashiers or servers; they look for efficiency. In fact, while they browse around retail store, most of their actual shopping is done online, shows research by Accenture, a management consulting company.

Possibly the most revealing study about Millennials’s buying behavior was conducted earlier this year, by The Intelligence Group.

Instead of spending on things they don’t need or can’t afford, this complex breed prefers renting everything from movies to cars and houses. If they do make a purchase, they don’t return it; they sell it on EBay. “They watched their parents work, work, work, buy the big house, and then lose their pension and have it taken away from them. They’re looking at that model and thinking, ‘I want to do this differently,’” says Jamie Gutfreund, chief strategy officer of the Intelligence Group.

If he's right, let’s hope Millennials get along with their parents. Because those Target and Walmart employees could really use a break from being real-life Lego Movie characters.