Fanatical Service?

I saw this poster in the South Commons Food District and thought of this class! I thought this directly pertained to our class. This is stating that good customer service is a habit, so does this mean that surface acting and/or deep acting becomes habit over time? This would mean that these types of acting eventually become subconscious acts and in this case, would they cause more or less emotional exhaustion?

“My Pleasure”: The Chick-fil-A Customer Service Story

Here is an article which caught my attention because it is about the service at Chick Fil A where i used to work  http://thefranchisehound.com/2011/08/18/%E2%80%9Cmy-pleasure%E2%80%9D-the-chick-fil-a-customer-service-story/. Chick-fil-a is a business which has very much prospered as a result of their customer service. It may even be considered a success story for EL jobs. You can see that in the article Mr. Cathy even states that every employees job is costumer service, "All of us at Chick-fil-a are in costumer service." He says, "We all need to be lifted up and made to feel special...That's way service is so important at Chick-fil-a." From personal experience i know that every employee watches several hours of service videos in training and is taught the "core 4" which are enthusiastic tone, enthusiastic smile, emotional connection, and eye contact with every costumer. All of these together define what we have talked about as positive display rules in EL jobs; and judging from the business' success such display rules have seemed to be beneficial. However, though not supported by any articles, i can also say that from my own experienced i saw a significant cost to employee well being in the work place so that on a front counter staff of 12 Chick-fil-a hired 2-3 new employees to take the place of ones leaving per month.

This is one of my favorite finds in "real world" settings:  note how McDonalds is trying to use CUSTOMERS to monitor and control the employee's emotional labor!  How effective do you think this would be for creating 'service with a smile'?  How would this affect employees?

Celebrating an Emotional-Labor Day

Here are 2 interesting articles that further suggest the negative correlations between emotional labor and wage compensation. I would treat them as casual reads as the articles are pretty opinionated and they lacked the definitive, empirical, and statistically significant evidences to support their claims.

One thing I do find relevant though is that emotional labor is slowly getting the recognition it deserves within the commercial settings. Companies are also implementing strategies to help employees cope with the emotional stress they face in their day-to-day service work and, at the same time, try to find the profit maximizing output from emotional labor. In Glomb (2004) we learned that emotional labor when performed with cognitive skills produces leaders and managers. This is consistent with findings from the HBR articles that CEOs are regular performers of deep acting as "this tactic is common among individuals who identify with their role", therefore helping them cope with the emotional stress they face. Also, people that are able to engage in deep acting often fare better in the work environment and possibly increase the longevity of their span in the job (Grandey, 2011). This explains why leaders deserves the positions they're in as they know how to deal with emotional labor better than others.

http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/09/why-is-it-that-we.html

http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/09/celebrating-an-emotional-labor.html

Service with a...smile?

Not exactly a real world example, but I saw this episode of "The King of Queens" today and I couldn't resist sharing. Note what Doug says about the service industry. Here's the link, start at 4:40.

....Would you eat at this restaurant?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raQjk4fN68w

This blog provides the way that we can share with each other our Real World experiences of "service with a smile" (or not).   As part of the class, you are expected to share at least 2 such experiences.  These may be pictures, experiences, or current media links, combined with a description of how they relate to class topics or readings.  For example, I'm posting the picture I saw outside Dunkin Donuts.  Are smiles really free?  According to Hochschild (1983), aren't they paying their employees to provide friendly service to make customers smile, and then that wage cost gets passed to the consumer?    This ad is trying to say that customers' smiles are an authentic experience of being at Dunkin Donuts.  What do you think?

Welcome!

Hi everyone,

Hopefully you're all authors and can therefore make posts.  You should also be able to comment on all the other posts also.  When you compose a post, you can insert a link by clicking the "Link" button above the text box.  You can add pictures by clicking the landscape button, or a video by clicking the movie symbol.  If you have any questions about how to post, feel free to email me! 

-Christina