Have you ever asked to speak with the manager?
Currently sitting at 6 of each. I honestly expected more people to say that they'd asked to speak with the manager at some point in their lives.
I'm really curious about the differences here. Part of it might be age: the longer you've been around, the more likely you are to have run into a situation where it is relevant, but I'll bet there are other factors too.
Companies have a vested interest in reducing the number of customers who go directly to the managers, because managers must be more highly trained and are paid more, so of course they're going to train low level employees to set up barriers against access to management, so yes, in the immediate term customers insisting on an appropriate level of service might make things harder on low level employees.
However, in the longer term, insisting on an appropriate level of service signals to the companies that they need to either increase the number of better trained higher paid positions or improve training for low level employees.
Let me give you a concrete example. It's clear from conversations I've had when booking travel that many transportation service companies supply their low level employees with exactly the same web interface that is available to the general public.
If you want to do something more complicated than what the website can do, the only recourse is to call the company, but if you stop at the first tier, you're not going to get better functionality than through the website.
For example, for an Amtrak route with coach tickets of $100, a two-person roomette costs around $600. If you want to transport 3 people on an overnight train, you can put all of them in coach for $300, get two roomettes for $1200, or put two people in the roomette and one in coach for $700.
But maybe that third person wants access to the roomette, so they can actually lie down. There shouldn't be a problem with this if everyone else is okay with it. In fact, you can easily fit three people in a two-person roomette if you rotate who is sleeping in the third bunk.
But this isn't possible through the website, and if you ask a first-tier call-center person for help making it happen they will likely tell you it's impossible.
But if you talk to someone with a higher level of training and access to a more sophisticated booking interface, many more options start to open up.
One of the many nasty little trends in contemporary capitalism is called "skimpflation", where when costs start to go up, companies try to keep prices constant by silently reducing the quality of service provided.
I don't think this is something that we as consumers should accept. Refusing to ever escalate to higher paid levels of service enables companies to push us around in exactly that way.
@dynamic I can't say I consider going to a higher tier of support as a "talk to the manager" situation.
@lwriemen @dynamic yeah, I guess it really depends what you mean by "talk to the manager". I've definitely never asked to speak to a manager in order to complain about the first person who was helping me, but I've had customer service people transfer me to someone else and I've always viewed that as them doing me a favor
When I want to go to the next tier of authority, I literally use the phrase "can I speak to your manager?"
I don't know if there's a better phrase to use. If there's one that would produce the same result without getting a cringe reflex out of the employee I'm talking to, I'd definitely be open to it.
Logically, though, it makes sense to me that an individual's manager/supervisor is the person at the next tier up that they would have the most access to.
@dynamic Heh. I guess I don't assume competency in managent, so I just ask for "someone else". I understand your thinking.
Hmm.
Now I wonder whether companies differentiate in how metaphorical beatings are delivered depending on whether the customer just asks for "someone else" vs. explicitly escalating. Both *could* be seen as a complaint about that particular employee.
@dynamic I would rescind my beatings comment based upon my understanding of your intent, but I don't see competency escalation as a complaint. I view such scenarios as help desk support where low-levels of competency are the hurdles to reach higher levels of competency.
@dynamic True. Without feedback some problems can'y be corrected.
@lwriemen
When a company doesn't invest enough in employee training to ensure that low-level employees are able to respond to more than the most basic of questions, nor to pay them for the level of engagement that is required to answer those questions, it becomes necessary for customers to speak to the managers.