Customer Service Versus France
I’ve blogged before about the difference in customer service mindset between ourselves and our American cousins, coming out in favour of yankee doodle dandy every time. In a later blog, I speculated that a cause of this difference in customer care lies in our European reliance on a welfare system that leads to the buck-passing, couldn’t-care-less approach we encounter daily. No intrinsic motivation, you see.
Well, it seems I may have been on to something.
BBC correspondent Emma Jane Kirby has discovered that in Paris, the customer is not always right. Why?
“The revolution of 1789 has burned the notion of equality deep into the French psyche and a proud Parisian finds it abhorrently degrading to act subserviently… The strict code of manners in Paris is a deliberate class-leveller.”
In other words, their obvious lack of any customer care attitude springs from a political source. The theory is that of equality, in this case, between customer and service provider. So far, so mundane. Of course the relationship is one of economic equality – the customer agrees to exchange money for goods or services that is deemed of equal value to their worth. If the exchange is judged unequal, the customer can walk away to get a more equitable deal elsewhere.
In this case, the practice is different. This is no equality or mutual respect between customer and provider.
Instead, the provider assumes a state of superiority over the customer, an attitude of “scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt and any thing that” the French might fancy. Again, why?
France is a socialist state. By equality they mean redistribution. Economic exchange is a fundamentally dirty transition. If one must engage in it, then it is best to do so with a bad conscience and an air of disdain.
Ideas have consequences. If an organisation has a poor level of customer service, perhaps a workshop on ‘delighting the customer’ is not enough. Maybe what they really need is a dose of capitalism to help them care. In a free market economy, service is not a dirty word.
Only a thought.
P.S. If you want to know how to play the French service game… and win, then read this article from The Guardian. They would know, wouldn’t they.
Image credit: blogger’s own.
