this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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I'm a millennial, and any amount of casual customer interaction was quickly killed at my first job. I was taught how to speak in a professional manner, and was told I'd be written up if I was found to be speaking too casually to customers. Speaking to customers as if they're your equal is just not something that was acceptable, even 15 years ago - you had to speak as if you were their servant.
I'm glad it's changing - there was never a good reason for it in the first place - but I still cringe when I hear an employee speak casually to a customer, because I still think they're going to get in trouble for it.
Yeah, I'm born '87, and pretty much any customer interaction at the myriad jobs I had (I got fired a bunch) was basically scripted. Bank. Retail sales. Life guard. Restaurant. You name it, I was supposed to say things a certain way, and generally in a way that I don't think was clear or congenial. I'm a people person. I deal with the customer.
And I think this is why Gen Z is the way it is. They are dealing with two generations of people who are t i r e d of boomer social norms bullshit. Gen X was the first generation in a long time to say fuck it, but we never figured out anything else to do. Millenials figured out that this shit didn't matter and how to navigate between people who care about "professionalism" and people who don't.
Gen Z is, now, mostly dealing with people who don't care about the false polish of professionalism, so they haven't even acquired the habit of putting that face on for people.
I think it happened in the boomer era because that's when all this multi nationalized standardization first became a thing. They hadn't developed the mental guards to realize it was all bullshit. I've seen so many boomers take what customer support people say personally as if they had any control over company policy. Millennials are more like hey, I know you're just doing your job and following company policy, but I need this fixed, can you send me to the right person who can help.
Is this not boomers just being socially inept?
I love when I find my people and I can get workers to drop their guard and talk like a human. Same on the phone and in emails, I work in supply chain and new vendors are always super professional but I just drown em in emojis and eventually I get emojis back and I get people telling me about their dogs and families and the weather in Australia and shit.
Life's to short for boring emails.
I work a phone job and they expect at least some level of professionalism. That is, no swearing, no dirty jokes or being overly crude, etc. But otherwise they let us get away with a lot.
That's a more recent thing, used to be that talking to phone support was like talking to a robot because they weren't allowed to go off script. I guess companies are realizing that customers don't want to be given the same unhelpful scripted response over and over again. They probably listened to enough angry recordings to figure that out.
At least in my case the first few sentences are relatively scripted. You know the standard shit like whose calling and what’s your code. Then it’s free form.
Then there are the people who call enough for me to recognize the caller ID lmao
I think it was mainly so you'd shield the corporation's bullshit policies by taking it on your own head. Corporations dont want you saying "I know it's stupid but it's required by my job"