The age of rage
Lorraine Mallinder
Scenario: you’ve waded through check-in, dealt with some pretty surly airport officials and survived a bumpy take-off that left your stomach churning halfway down the runway. After a less than satisfactory lunch, you’ve finally settled back for the in-flight film when “Wait a minute, what’s that commotion?” A stale bread roll goes flying through the dry air, followed by an empty Cabernet Sauvignon bottle and yelled demands for some “proper booze”. You glance nervously at the emergency exit, remembering that article you’d read the month before about the guy who . . .
The employee as punchbag
Service sector employees are increasingly the unfortunate victims of a phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘customer rage’. In a world where the old adage, ‘the customer is always right’, still holds sway despite no shortage of evidence to the contrary, service sector employees stand on the last frontier as people to whom you can still be legally abusive.
The trend exists in a number of forms, ranging from the well-documented to the sublime to the ridiculous: air rage, rail rage, restaurant rage, call centre rage, stage rage, trolley rage, fare rage, rink rage (as in ice rink) and many more besides. The causes of customer rage vary widely between industries. Generally, it can be defined as an extreme reaction occurring when a consumer is subjected to discomforting, frustrating or inconvenient situations. As consumers, most of us are probably familiar with the generic situations that have sent levels of stress shooting through the roof. In a retail environment, triggers of rage might be long queues, not getting the requested/paid for product/service and, perhaps most infuriatingly, getting an ‘attitude’ from staff. Add to these triggers the hot, stuffy atmosphere of the average department store or the contagious stress of other shoppers and you have the optimum conditions for an explosion of customer rage.
Air rage, probably the most well-documented of all the customer rage variants, can be sparked off by factors such as low air pressure and oxygen levels, over-consumption of alcohol and nicotine starvation. The ‘sardine’ seating arrangements featuring in the economy class section of most airplanes aggravates matters still further, creating a claustrophobic environment where people feel ‘cooped up’. With the eagerly anticipated unveiling of Airbus’s A380 ‘superjumbo’, capable of carrying 555 people, could ‘cattle class’ soon be replaced by ‘battle class’?
And, let’s not forget call centres with their irritating music, synthetic voices and endless menu options. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking they had been invented with the sole purpose of inducing rage. Who hasn’t been in the situation where they “continue to hold the line”, lulled by soothing words such as “your call is important to us”, only to be unceremoniously dumped 10 minutes later with the curt instruction, “Please call back later”?
The consumer as toddler?
A 2002 report (Farkas et al.) published by US think tank Public Agenda highlights the paradox of increasing customer dissatisfaction within a society where customer satisfaction is a major concern, not to say an obsession: “One would be hard pressed to name a nation [the USA] that has developed more tools and invested more resources in trying to understand—and deliver exactly what customers want. Nor has the lavish attention spent on customers gone unnoticed. American customers do have high expectations about how they should be treated by companies. But, [businesses] may be dismayed to find out that, notwithstanding all of the concern marketeers place on pleasing customers, nearly half of all Americans (46%) report they have walked out of a store in the past year.”
Something must be wrong. Is it a consequence of the increasingly dehumanised service culture in which employees are no longer viewed as real people with feelings, but as machines that are there to do consumers’ bidding? Are companies stretching employees too far, squeezing them through the economic blender to retain the competitive edge? Are we becoming too pampered as consumers, throwing tantrums whenever things don’t go our way, as a spoilt three-year-old toddler would? Is there any empirical evidence suggesting a link between incidences of customer rage and bad hair days?
The answer, depending on the scenario, is probably a mixture of different factors.
Style over content
In an age where style rules over content, advertising is often blamed for misleading the public into expecting spectacular service, almost as a matter of course. There does appear to be a gulf between the slick ad campaigns and corporate mission statements on the one hand and the realities of everyday customer experiences on the other.
An obvious example of advertising failing to live up to expectations is air travel. Passenger expectations, based on glowing advertising and marketing campaigns, are light years away from the reality of flying. Airline advertisements still portray a world of comfort, where flight attendants smilingly attend to customers’ every wish, which is certainly not the case in economy class.
Cutting corners
The finger of blame is also pointed at cost-cutting exercises that, all too often, leave the employee stretched, overworked and harassed, unable to deal with the demands of the customer—hardly the best formula for ensuring smooth relations between staff and the public. Findings from the Public Agenda report showed that “most people [. . .] attribute poor customer service to their sense that businesses are simply trying to squeeze costs and increase profits by hiring fewer service workers or paying them less”. Eight in ten (81%) of the report’s respondents said that “too many stores cut corners by not hiring enough sales help and forcing customers to wait for service”.
In a study carried out by UK management consultants, Beyond Philosophy (2002), call centre staff described how targets set by employees left them feeling pressurised and stressed. They compared themselves to “robots”, unable to remember details of individual calls or clients. One employee reported: “I hate it . . . people are at you all the time, I mean I don’t get nice calls, they are all nasty calls”.
Damage limitation
With reports regularly cropping up in the media, it seems that customer rage is now perceived as a very real threat. Some companies, particularly in the travel industry, are responding with direct action. British Airways led the airline industry’s reactions to the phenomenon with its preventive scheme based on soccer-style yellow cards. The scheme, when first introduced in 1998, was only aimed at troublesome passengers in the air, but in 2002 it was extended to customers who are abusive to ground staff (technically known as ‘ground rage’).
Back on terra firma, staff at UK rail company First Great Western are now offered self defence classes to help them handle attacks of rage. In addition to this drastic measure, experts from trailblazers British Airways have been called in to give workers training in ‘conflict avoidance’.
Guerrilla consumerism
And finally, the last word to the customers. With the rise of customer rage, a parallel trend has emerged: guerrilla consumerism. Websites such as www.untied.com (United Airlines) and www.starbucked.com (no prizes for guessing here) offer platforms on which angry consumers can vent their frustrations. Chase Manhattan Bank rushed to buy the rights to domain names such as chasestinks.com and IHateChase.com when photojournalist Scott Harrison launched gripe site www.chasemanhattansucks.com (now defunct) after the bank mishandled some of his accounts.
Although gripe sites and blogs do contain a large element of aimless ranting, they can also be invaluable consumer tools. Not only do they feature the testimonies of the enraged (often long winded and soporific), they can also be sources of useful information, offering advice on how customers can more constructively channel their anger. These sites are filling a niche area, providing consumers with a place where they can connect and mobilise. Those companies that fail to address the causes of customer rage and to equip their employees with the skills needed to tackle violent incidents could be facing trouble from within as well as from the outside. Employees are only human and will only take so much abuse—is it only a matter of time before they set up a few rage websites of their own? Employers, beware complacency.
References
Beyond Philosophy (2002) ‘Customer Experience: The Next Competitive Battleground’
[online], www.beyondphilosophy.com/downloads/index.aspx (accessed 14 June
2005).
Farkas, S., J. Johnson, A. Duffett and K. Collins (2002) Aggravating Circumstances: A Status
Report on Rudeness in America (New York: Public Agenda).
Excerpt from Above the Clouds © 2008 EFQM. All rights reserved.