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Disembodied Voices

I seem to have missed a beat. At what point in the evolution of hte service industry did it become OK to look someone in the eye, say 'hi, how can I help you' and ignore the answer? Obviously I don't travel thru, um, drive-thru USA enough - where this past weekend a number of restaurant serving staff were expected to multi-task by enaging in-store customers whilst simultainiously coping with incoming drive-thru and telephone orders. The net result is a disembodied experience where all the social cues say 'you presense in this store is valued' but the words that are spoken 'you're irrelevant'.

I'd assume that most stores would train their frontline staff to adopt body language that makes it obvious where their current attention lies - with the customer in-store or a remote somebody. But how to unlearn a life time of social behaviour and cope with the multi-tasking demands of service industry managers?

BTW - the server above is an example local/remote multi-tasking done right - when micro-phone is down she's somewhere else, when in the up position she gave her full attention. The worst offender? Below.

Writing from Monterey | March 11, 2007 | Permalink