(7 of 8)
Sensitive to the mounting criticism, the business world is starting to make amends. Says Alan Raedels, professor of business administration at Oregon's Portland State University: "If stores are competing with the same products at basically the same price, then the next major battlefield is going to be service." Claims Steve Shelton, who represents an association of Southern California gas-station operators: "The market is begging for attention today. Motorists seem tickled when someone is actually giving old- fashioned service and cares about the condition of their car." Quality- service gurus like John Tschohl of Bloomington, Minn., are now in heavy demand to give speeches to top managers. Says he: "We teach them the financial impact of good customer service. They're interested only in hard dollars and cents."
One company that seems to have come to this conclusion the hard way is Sears, the largest U.S. retailer. Sears managed to smudge its image in recent years by grouping its salesclerks around cash registers for fast check-out, which reduced the number of employees who were in the aisles to answer questions. Sears still helped customers in its custom-drapery departments, for example, but left buyers of prepackaged drapes to struggle for themselves. Now the company apparently believes it went too far. "We've been looking at service in the past 18 months with heightened intensity," says Everett Buckardt, a Sears vice president. "We have put more people on the sales floor."
Other examples are multiplying. In Miami all 5,000 of the city's cab drivers are required to take a three-hour course in courtesy called Miami Nice, which has reduced the rate of customer complaints by 80%. To do better in the highly competitive health-care industry, California's Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center put its 1,500 employees through a two-day seminar on customer service. One result: the hospital changed its emergency-room admission procedure to one in which staffers "greet and comfort" patients before bothering them with the paperwork.
Nearly all the experts agree that the way to improve America's service industry is to understand the lot of the front-line worker. At this point, too few businesses recognize that many service workers are doing a relatively new, difficult kind of work that could be called emotional labor, a term coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a Berkeley sociology professor, in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Just as factory workers can become estranged from the products they manufacture, says Hochschild, service workers can feel distanced from their put-on emotions. Flight attendants, for example, often feel that their smile belongs to the company. One solution Hochschild recommends is for businesses to give employees a chance to rest and recharge their smiles by temporarily rotating to less stressful jobs.
Cosmetic approaches will not do. K mart, for one, tried to cue its employees to be more personable by putting TYFSOK on their cash registers, which was supposed to remind them to thank customers for shopping K mart. But some harried clerks reportedly mocked the procedure by blurting "Tyfsok!" at puzzled customers. Other companies have tried to get across an impression of personal service with tired slogans to the effect that "people are our most important asset."