Service With a (Fake) Smile

A (sort of) scientific inquiry into what makes for good, bad and just plain ugly customer service.

By Timothy Taylor; illustration by Aya Kakeda

A Theory of Everything (T.O.E.) is the Holy Grail of physics. And, as with the physical laws of the universe, scientists have been working for nearly a century now to craft a single unifying Theory of Customer Service. An elegant framework by which all of our customer service experiences may be understood.

Well: I returned from a trip recently (England) and had breakfast the next morning at my regular jet-lag café (Think Café, up 10th Avenue). I'll admit I drink Starbucks when I travel. Over-priced, over-roasted? Perhaps. A globally purveyed experience of spectacular inauthenticity? Right you are. But consistent, which is worth something when you're on the road and pressed for time. Back at home, of course, I don't want routine, programmed, standardized service, however pleasant. I want authenticity, by which I mean service (and goods) that are believably personal, individual and spontaneous. I want real people having good days and bad days. And that's Think. No high-watt grins first thing in the morning because, let's be honest, we're all tired. No by-the-book "Can I get you a pastry with that?" Think coffee service ranges from neutral to grumpy, which is A-OK with me.

I got thinking about why it was I started going to Think in the first place. The catalyst, I recalled, was an incident at another independent neighbourhood coffee shop: Bean Around the World. And there, not a block away, when our dog began barking outside while my sleep-deprived wife with our then-newborn son waited in line, the barrista offered the following in the way of personal, individual, spontaneous customer service: "God, I wish I had a gun right now."

Authentic service? Or just horrifically bad?

Maybe both. Here came my T.O.E. rushing in with the Think caffeine. Maybe the universe of customer service experiences is not a linear structure at all, from good to bad, but a planar one, where experiences range across a grid of possibility as follows:

My experience with coffee shops could be easily understood in these terms. Based on time and location, I might swap some authenticity for programmed pleasantry (Starbucks in London over Think at home). But there is a level of crap service (dog threatened with hypothetical gun, for example) that no amount of authenticity will justify. Which is why I'll never go back to Bean Around the World, and why I enjoy spreading the story as widely as possible.

Of course, I understood that my hypothesis required testing, which required data. And after collecting dozens of stories from friends, I'm pleased to report that my Customer Service T.O.E. is hanging in there. Consider:

Authentically and Inauthentically Good Service
We might as well dispense quickly with the good service stories because people didn't offer me many. I suppose it's a matter of evolutionary imperative that we remember bad experiences so as to avoid them in future. But one friend did describe how the produce manager at Safeway cut open a cantaloupe for her to confirm its ripeness. He even brought her a slice on a little plate. This is a good story illustrating that authentic, personal service may still be found in highly structured, corporate environments.

Of course, inauthentically good customer service is so widespread you probably don't even notice it anymore. Every time you do a bank machine transaction without incident or retrieve a number from the phone automatrix ("I'm sorry, what was that name again?") you are engaged with a program, a routine, however successful the outcome. And when it comes to withdrawing cash or looking up phone numbers (or getting coffee overseas), that's probably just as well.

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