On love, or Why customer service in Barbados is God-awful

A few years ago, I was in a train station in Warsaw. I was starving and tired from travelling. I wandered into a coffee shop, glanced at the food behind the glass, picked something that looked fairly benign, and ordered.

The lady behind the counter said, “You don’t want that.”

I looked up, surprised, and asked why not. She said, “That’s no good. You want this sandwich here. I’ll fix it up for you. You’ll love it, I promise.”

I said OK. She fixed it up, and I liked it. We made some conversation and I left, a little happier than when I went in. It’s an inconsequential experience, but I still remember it clearly, a long time after.

My point isn’t that customer service in Poland is particularly good. It isn’t even that small acts of kindness can make a big difference to your business, although that seems true.

I bring up the experience because it strikes me that things like that rarely happen in Barbados. The customer service here is terrible. I mean really, truly bad. I have to psych myself up just to set foot in certain places. You never know who you’re going to find working there.

The multiple personalities of terrible service

You might find that lady who’s busy talking on the phone, or to other employees. You’re obviously interrupting her. She won’t even look at you until she’s finished what she was saying before you walked in. When she does look at you, she wants you to hurry up and ask what you have to ask, so she can get back to her life. She may not even hang up or speak to you. She’ll just tell the person on the other end to hang on a minute, then glare at you until you say something.

You might find the guy who’s perfectly comfortable not knowing the answer to your question. He works in a hardware store, but doesn’t have the first clue about tools. He doesn’t even know where things are, or how much they cost. And he doesn’t care. He’ll happily let you leave, rather than bother to find out.

Then there are the angry ones. They’re everywhere. They’re angry at you before you’ve even said anything. Everything about their facial expression, demeanour, tone of voice, and behaviour shouts, “I hate my job, possibly my life, and certainly you, sir, whoever you are.”

Anything that makes their time at work go less smoothly — such as, for example, being asked a question — makes them angrier. They say as little as possible as obnoxiously as possible, to encourage you to fend for yourself.

There are the ones with the chip on their shoulder. Their job is to serve people, but they think that serving people is beneath them. So their first priority is to show you that you aren’t the boss of them. Their default answer is “no.” They provide the opposite of service: They do their best not to help you.

They’re related to the people I call the Lords of Little. These folks love the feeling of power they get from controlling some tiny aspect of your life. The parking attendant who shouts at you because you were supposed to park facing outwards. The security guard at the government building that gets a kick from turning you away because you’re not wearing the right clothes. The guy being an idiot about which line you join to get into an event. Controlling their five-square-foot fiefdom is the only thing that’s important to them.

Every single one of these people is slow. In fact, if there’s any hallmark of Bajan service, it is that everyone moves like molasses. You can literally hear their feet dragging. They have all day, and they act like you do too.

If you’re lucky, you may run into someone who seems nice enough, with none of these glaring character flaws. This rare occasion is a legitimate cause for celebration.

But don’t expect too much. The service you will receive, measured against any but the lowest bar, will still underwhelm.

Expect that person to speak in rank dialect. Expect him to be overly familiar — to ask intimate questions, to make inappropriate jokes, or to remark on your person. Don’t expect him to step an inch beyond his narrowly defined role.

You may escape without feeling insulted or demeaned, but your day will be no brighter.

Why is it so bad?

One reason why our customer service is so awful is that the people doing it are unhappy. It’s hard to make other people feel good when you don’t feel good yourself.

Unlike in many larger countries, most people working entry-level customer service jobs in Barbados aren’t in it for the short-haul. This isn’t a way station on the road to something bigger. This is all there is, permanently. A job with no prospects can’t feel good.

They’re probably unhappy for other reasons too. Jobs are scarce, so many people take whatever they can get. They may feel underpaid and overworked. And no doubt, for many people, life outside of work is burdensome too.

But the bigger issue is that the business owners — the ones employing the unhappy people — don’t see customer service as a thing. It’s not something that they plan. They dedicate all their efforts to whatever it is they’re selling, then they find someone willing to take minimum wage, and put them in front of customers. They spend as little as possible on finding the right people, training them, and keeping them happy, because they don’t think that good customer service would contribute to their bottom line.

It shows. Most people they hire, even if they weren’t unhappy or incompetent, wouldn’t be cut out for customer service roles anyway. It takes a very particular kind of personality to thrive in that job. Our service industry is bad partly because the wrong people are in it.

Happy happy people

People who are really good at customer service are often what I call “happy happy” people.

You’ve seen the type. They’re constantly smiling. And it’s not that plastered-on fake smile that Americans have perfected. It’s genuine glee.

They absolutely love helping people. They look for ways to help people, without waiting for the opportunity to arise. What gives them joy is being useful.

They’re patient. If you change your mind 20 times, they won’t get annoyed. They’ve got nowhere else to be.

They’re empathetic. When you get upset, they get upset too. When they console you, they’re feeling your pain. When they say they’re sorry, they mean it.

They treat you as an individual, not a faceless customer. They remember details about you that other people would forget. They make you feel important.

These people are uniquely qualified for this type of work, because they have a talent for love.

How well do you love?

That sounds like a strange thing to say. Loving feels like it ought to be in the same category as “eating,” “sleeping,” or “breathing”: It’s natural, everyone does it, and nobody is better than anyone else.

But making people feel loved requires both talent and skill. It’s a skill in that anyone can probably become pretty decent at it, with practice. You can train yourself to be attentive, considerate, thoughtful and helpful.

But some people just have a greater capacity for it. They’re better at making people feel warm and fuzzy inside. It doesn’t require an effort. And they’re constantly thinking of new ways to make the people around them happy.

The reason I still remember that barista in Poland years later is that she showed me love. She didn’t know me from Adam, but she managed to make me feel like I wasn’t just one among the crowd. You can train people to do that convincingly — and maybe what I experienced was nothing more than that — but it’s better if you find people with the right raw materials.

We don’t have nearly enough of them facing customers in Barbados.