Or maybe I’m just numb, I don't know. Both.
I've been in the people business for nigh nine years now and I would say that easily 100,000 people have crossed my path. Many for only five minutes, some for over an hour. Some of these encounters were recurring, most were one time.
Most people don't experience this degree of exposure to The Public. They live out perhaps the entirety of their lives and through their choice of careers or physical location or both they don't encounter that many different people. They might see them on TV or on the internet, in movies, or maybe watch them if they're on a trip through a bustling city, or in an arena or stadium, but as far as directly interacting with them, no.
They don't go there. I do. I have to, I chose to. I have to answer people's questions, greet them, listen to their complaints sometimes, and a host of other things.
When you start in a people-intensive line of work, you think you can handle it. If you're a typical candidate, there is a degree of resistance that you know is there and probably a lot that you're unaware of. You have rough edges. Because of those, you do it all wrong sometimes and receive heaps of repercussions. A lot is also projected upon you because you are wearing a uniform and there are associations made.
But over time, and through much practice, thought, and effort you get better at handling situations but even so you can't ever rest and say 'I've seen it all!" because you haven't and never will. Nor have you heard it all. Because customers can and will surprise you. Never Assume is another way of putting that.
And so everybody that's been in the people business for awhile has stories. This encounter and that one, tales about events that were handled with aplomb, spiraled out of control, or were a comedy of errors.
Because the customers just don't understand, sometimes, how things work. Even though you have gone through the process or procedure literally ten thousand times it's new to them and so you have to have the patience of a saint while they don't but that's beside the point.
Never can you say that you know what's coming for you don't, when you encounter a person. They might look like trouble, be dressed in a way that sets associative alarms off, or be acting in a manner that looks benign (but is really not) so your outlook has to be neutral. Guarded, definitely, in obviously problematic situations, but neutral to a degree even in those. The jury must still be out. For the most menacing figures can turn out to be pussycats and the sweetest appearing people can turn out to be lions sometimes and unexpectedly claw you.
Over time, pros at customer service become blank slates when it comes to dealing with people. We look for all the 'tells' but we still don't know what we're dealing with, for you might have come upon us pre-loaded and broiling due to an unrelated issue that we know absolutely nothing about. In order to assess you we quickly read your body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and whether or not eye contact is being made. We look for the way you are dressed, how you approach us, and at what speed, any evidence we can pick up that might give us a clue on what we're dealing with, because we don't know you from Shinola and due to that have to act super fast. All sorts of calculations are going on in our minds. We have extensive databases of former encounters, believe you me. The way you talk and the vocal inflections that you purposely or unconsciously use might tell us a ton about you. We listen for any catch phrases that are commonly used. You might think we haven't heard them before and that you're the only one who uses them but Sir, Buddy, Miss, & Ma'am, we've heard them a thousand times or more but you don't know that. How could you? You would only know how glaringly obvious these phrases were if you were in The Business, which most people aren't.
You're probably, very likely, not outsmarting us but we'll let you think you are, because that makes for a smoother customer service interaction.
Our skill comes from practice. Civilians will never truly get what we have from reading about it in a book, or from watching a video. Those tools help but there's something about actually doing it that seats customer service understanding into psyches because in doing it you can't escape, into thought, into disassociation, into observer mode. You have to come up with solutions. Answers. Redirections. Something! (And if it comes out rambly and doesn't really help at least you tried. It's okay that you don't know everything).
I know this is a lot, and it might be viewed as I have wandered off point, but sometimes you have to illustrate a point in its entirety to bring home the message. The message is, despite everything I have said about all this experience and my so-called ability to read people, that I (and every other CSR out there) still don't know who is in front of me when someone is in front of me. I am not distressed, bummed, or jaded by my lack of mastery and continuous frustration at trying to read you, I am merely, and continuously, surprised.
Exhibit A- Left the accountant’s life for a go at being a guitar shredder in leather.
Andrew Spencer- Unsplash.com
For I sense an astounding amount of life experience in you, whoever you are. I know that most Americans speak English, and that they understand much of what goes on and has gone on in the culture, that they can operate computers and hold jobs and raise kids and have families that they interact with, ditto friends and coworkers, but there is so much more. I look at people now and prejudge them not, if I am able, because I have realized that I can't possibly know what is driving them. So much has happened in their lives before they got to me. Each and every time I encounter a person I know I am encountering a truly unique individual and that the story of their life is, well, probably incredible.
(I didn’t say it was good, I said it was incredible).
Yeah, people also put off an energy vibe, a signature, I forgot to mention that earlier. I try and read that too, everybody does. There's a flavor there, you might say. An aroma. A fragrance? A sense of 'warm', 'cold', 'weird', 'yuk', 'yum' and of course that's all mixed together too, little of this, little of that.
Maybe, with all this going on, is why most people don’t work in customer service. It can be very destabilizing to encounter all these different energies. You have to be solidly grounded, firmly able to maintain a sense of yourself in the face of all the other selves out there.
This subject is deep, deeper than I imagined it would be when I first sat down to write it. People are much the same on the surface but below that they are very different from each other. The individual proclivities they have interact with the family dynamics they were born into and then it spreads out from there into friends and coworkers and partners into social networks that now span the globe and I know that sounds quite grand but it's true, it's happening. We’re influencing each other more than ever.
I've noticed that in the social networking arena, young people are painfully (to an older generation) real with each other, and maybe that's driven by this need to understand each other, for nobody really knows who they're dealing with.
So much is there! And if we can find it, share it, reveal it, express it a little bit more, that helps bring us closer together, because we then might finally be able to understand that there is more than a persona, a mask, that is standing in front of us.
Discovering the real person?
That is (almost always) an amazing thing.