For a country once derided by Napolean as a “nation of shopkeepers,” the English seems to have a hard time with certain basics of the capitalist system. A common complaint among American ex-pats is that customer service here is disastrously bad. That’s not entirely fair. In my experience, the ratio of good to bad service is equal in both countries, and if the clerks and cashiers of England aren’t quite as friendly as those of Los Angeles, they are vastly more polite than those of Boston.
Yet there is a difference.
What gives England’s consumer society a bad name isn’t the quantity of bad service; it’s the quality. The worst customer service here is much, much worse than the worst service in the US. And you can never, ever get transferred to a supervisor. In the US, even the most recalcitrant front-line worker is perfectly happy to make the effort of disguising his voice and pretending to be his own manager.
Even more puzzling to a capitalist Yankee like myself is the point in the mercantile process at which the bad service happens. In the US, it usually comes after the customer has paid the bill. Most of my bad customer service experiences in the UK, by contrast, have ended with me shrieking (silently, to be sure), “I JUST WANT TO GIVE YOU MY MONEY! WHY ARE YOU MAKING IT SO HARD?”
When we moved flats, for example, my Internet provider would not let me transfer my service to our new phone number. All I wanted to do was to continue paying them £20 a month, but they absolutely refused to let me do so, unless I compensated them for the indignity of accepting my money by canceling my old contract, paying an early termination fee, and then signing a new 12-month contract at my new phone number. I’m sure I might have encountered similar illogic in my native country, but there, at least, I could have fought m way up the phone tree until I encountered somebody willing to knock 50 cents off my bill as a token gesture. Here, there was simply nothing that could be done.
And recently, I have enountered the best example yet. The post office near my flat has thoughtfully put a stamp machine on the outside wall. A book of stamps is £3.32. The only problem is, (a) the machine will not give you the stamps unless you put in exact change, and (b) the machine will not accept any coin worth less than 5 pence.
If anybody is still waiting to receive mail from me, now you know why.
The clerks and cashiers in England have one distinct advantage over clerks and cashiers in Boston… they speak English. Not that service in Spanish isn’t as good, it’s just incomprehensible if the only languages you speak are English, French, and Hungarian (ok, nobody speaks Hungarian in the real world… In fact it is easier to find an English-speaking clerk or cashier in Budapest than in Lawrence (small city outside Boston almost entirely populated by Dominicans who don’t get along with the Puerto Ricans who were there first) where I unfortunately live.
I’m an American living in Oxford for 4 years now, and many a time I’ve bent the ear of my friends back home (and my Brit friends here) with this same observation. It still astounds me that the American technique of ‘taking it up the chain’ until you get a manager isn’t possible here. Even more amazing that the other American technique of bitching until you get compensation doesn’t work. However, the lack of rampant commercialism that leads to this sort of poor customer service environment also has a positive effect. I appreciate eating an entire meal without a wait person interrupting it to (insincerely) ask how things are going, and walking into a shop without immediately being set upon by a pushy sales assistant. And buying a car, oh, how much nicer that experience is here in the UK! Sometimes you just don’t want 110% customer service.
In my travels to England I have noticed the same thing.
Interestingly, at one job I had working at “Guest services” at an amusement park in Minnesota I tried to NOT move a customer’s complaint up the chain. I was greeted by my colleagues and superiors with as much hostility as that unleashed onto a known-paedophile at a daycare.
The problem could have easily been solved at my level, but whatever.
I do, though, take comfort in the fact that I can get turn into a litigator at the customer service desk at the local retailer-grocer-etc and usually the customer service rep just doesn’t care enough to take it into their own hands. They gladly pass it up to their manager and sometimes I even get my way.