{"id":3030,"date":"2012-05-17T08:05:04","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T12:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=3030"},"modified":"2012-05-17T17:10:52","modified_gmt":"2012-05-17T21:10:52","slug":"study-examines-phenomenon-of-customer-service-saboteurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2012\/05\/study-examines-phenomenon-of-customer-service-saboteurs\/","title":{"rendered":"Study examines phenomenon of customer service saboteurs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the Washington State University press release via EurekAlert!:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"annoying\" src=\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/AnnoyingPerson.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" \/>There are jerks, and then there are jerks.<\/p>\n<p>Joel Anaya has given them a fair amount of study, focusing on that very special jerk who can take a routine service experience\u2014dining out, paying at a cash register, air travel\u2014and make it a nightmare.<\/p>\n<p>Anaya has even coined a term for it\u2014&#8221;<strong>customer service sabotage<\/strong>&#8220;\u2014and discerned <strong>seven different categories of rude customers who can be a serious liability for the service industry<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Customers don&#8217;t just go to a restaurant to enjoy a burger,&#8221; he says. &#8220;They go to have a good time, to enjoy the ambience of the establishment. If that&#8217;s ever affected, if they ever leave liking your hamburger but saying they had a bad time, that&#8217;s not a win for the restaurant.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Anaya, a McNair scholar and senior in Hospitality Business Management at Washington State University, recently presented his findings at the school&#8217;s Academic Showcase.<\/p>\n<p>Anaya, 21, of Pasco, Wash., had set out simply to study customers who misbehave. Then he realized no one had looked at how those customers affect the experience of others.<\/p>\n<p>For data, he culled more than 200 accounts of customers annoying fellow customers from four websites: notalwaysright.com, dinnersfromhell.com, flightsfromhell.com and servernightmares.com.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I never even heard of these websites before,&#8221; says Anaya.<\/p>\n<p>It was an odyssey in retail-level strangeness.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There are these weirdoes,&#8221; Anaya says, &#8220;but these weirdoes are now going to be coming into contact with your good, normal paying customers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In analyzing the different accounts, Anaya came up with the following categories of customer sabotage.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Badmouthers,&#8221; the most common saboteurs, used profanity and raised their voices.&#8221;It&#8217;s crazy what a few bad words can do, how uncomfortable they can really make other customers nearby,&#8221; says Anaya.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Paranoid shouters,&#8221; a close second in Anaya&#8217;s tabulations, are &#8220;really irate customers who don&#8217;t know how to handle themselves.&#8221; They are like badmouthers but start yelling at the first sign of inadequate service or a perceived injustice.<\/li>\n<li>Customers with poor hygiene were a close third.&#8221;Quite frankly, they smelled,&#8221; says Anaya. Or they sweat on to other people, picked their noses, sneezed openly, or all of the above. They are most often found on airplanes.<\/li>\n<li>Some customers make outlandish requests, like the one who insisted on paying at a grocery store in pennies while others had to wait.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Service rule breakers&#8221; don&#8217;t follow social norms, like waiting their turn instead of cutting in line.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Bad parents with bad kids&#8221; refuse to discipline unruly children whose behavior is bothering others.This category made Anaya nervous, as if he might be blaming the parent on a flight whose child is crying uncontrollably. But he let the data speak for itself.\n<p>&#8220;I just made it objective,&#8221; he says. &#8220;&#8216;This kind of customer affected this kind of service experience.'&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Unknowledgeable customers will belabor service workers with endless questions or minor quibbles while others have to wait.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Anaya hopes that managers and workers can use the categories to reevaluate customer complaints and in some cases realize their service wasn&#8217;t to blame, or that the service experience might be changed to head off such behavior in the future.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It just begins with the acknowledgment as managers to say to your employees, your front desks, your servers: &#8216;Keep an eye out for them,'&#8221; says Anaya. &#8220;These are the type of people that exist. These are the types of people that may affect our service quality perception from other customers.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Washington State University press release via EurekAlert!: There are jerks, and then there are jerks. Joel Anaya has given them a fair amount of study, focusing on that&#8230; <a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2012\/05\/study-examines-phenomenon-of-customer-service-saboteurs\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[96,364,363,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3030"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3031,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3030\/revisions\/3031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}