simplerich

An employee was complaining to me about our “Greet the customer” policy. I was trying to convince them that it was a good thing because, well… it’s a good thing. They didn’t want to do it because being friendly and helpful has gone out of vogue and is just no longer cool. It’s a cultural hurdle I’m having to work harder and harder to get kids over these days, but I find it to be true. Aloof and standoffish= teh cool! Sadly… that also equals sadly underemployed if you are trying to work for me. I don’t happen to believe I can beat someone into good customer service so I try and bring them around to my way of thinking.

Customer comes in and makes a bee-line to the counter. It’s maybe 4 steps. He flings his money on the counter and mumbles something. We know what it is he’s mumbled and it’s not a greeting. The clerk and I both say, “Good morning!” The customer looks at us as if we’re imbeciles because we are greeting him instead of just serving him. What he didn’t know was that the geegaws he wanted right then were, at that very moment completely inaccessible and we were stalling for time. Put a gun to our heads and you’re just going to have to shoot because they are not something we can give him. So, I try the small talk while new clerk watches. “It was snowing earlier, has that mess stopped yet?” Winningest smile as I monkey with the register as if I’m processing the sale. I’m not. I’m readying the change. He doesn’t answer. He just stares at me like I’m gibbering at him in Greek.

I turn to the watching sullen clerk. “See. I don’t require the customers to be polite because I can’t. But the way you feel right now when he’s being rude… If you make my customers feel like that I’ll be angry. So you HAVE to be polite.” I turned to the man who seemed to be figuring out I was talking about him. “We strive to always be polite and welcoming to our customers because we appreciate your business,” as I aim my winningest smile at him and give him a slight nod as if letting him in on something. The light came on, releasing the geegaws for sale and I gave them to the man with his change. He continued to stare at me as the lights slowly came on in beady little eyes. “Thank you sir. Have a nice day,” says I.

He mumbled “Thank you” as he left.

I really should have handled it better. The clerk figured out it could be a game though to use smiles and cheerfulness as a shield against the sullen grumpy customers so their bad day doesn’t stick to us behind the counter and pollute our atmosphere. We keep our area sunny and positive. Let them take their clouds with them and not leave any trace of it in our store with us. It’s a choice WE make about how we react to their treatment of us, and as someone who has worked with the customer a lot of years… sometimes they’re an ornery, disgruntled, not-fit-to-be-around-animal that should just be put down. But that’s a minority. And if we let the minority rub their psychic stink off on us we have only ourselves to blame when we can’t get the stank out of our hair.

The jerks who we most don’t want to greet. if we ignore them or react to them in the sullen pouty unfriendly way they treat us… we can start to feel that way, and we can be seen treating them that way by other customers who will rightly assume we’re not really all that friendly apparently. If we are great to the jerks out there they’ll see that too and the contrast makes the jerk look MORE like a jerk, and us look even better. By out-nicing a jerk the company will always win. At least I think so.

The Greet the customers, even the jerks… maybe especially the jerks! by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.