New East Europe Retailers Told to Put on a Happy Face : Commerce: Western franchisers insist workers discard communism’s sneer. Rather, take a shower and smile.
It was 7:45 a.m.--15 minutes before opening--when the salesclerks at Kmart congregated in the menswear department for their daily dose of religion, free-market style.
Two dozen women in bright red smocks gathered around a bargain bin of flashy neckties, their hands clasped reverently as a supervisor preached from the store’s Ten Commandments of Good Sales.
The capitalist lesson for today: Smile even if you feel lousy. Dress up even if you prefer jeans. Oblige customers even if they treat you rudely.
“Look in the mirror every morning and make sure the impression you give is a good one,” boss Hana Pekarova said sternly. “You are making money for the whole store.”
This was a familiar exhortation--every morning begins with such recitations. But it was one that still invoked blank stares and painful winces among the unknowing and disbelieving.
Customers scream even when it is not my fault! one clerk confided. A customer threatened to never shop here if I didn’t stop bothering her, another grumbled.
Customer service--that groveling prescript of capitalism that has brought the Free World 30-minute pizza delivery, mufflers with a lifetime warranty and dentists who send birthday cards--has been a hard sell in the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Five years of free enterprise have stocked shops from Warsaw to Zagreb, Croatia, with consumer goods like never before.
But converting the souls behind the counter has proved a more deviling pursuit. The notion of pampering the customer is so incongruous in former East Bloc countries that customer service has no linguistic equivalent in most languages, forcing exasperated tongue-tied employers to resort to English.
“There is no miraculous place where you can send employees and have them come back as different people,” said Imrich Gombar, director of human resources for Kmart in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where the company has taken over 13 state-owned department stores. “We had to change the whole environment, from the management structure to the training process.”
Unsuspecting companies, frantic to capture the nascent market after the fall of communism, put virtually anyone on the sales floor, only to discover their front-line converts were unrepentant disciples of a system in which the “customer is always right” maxim had been turned on its head.
“Because, under communism, everything from toilet paper to bicycles was in short supply, it settled in the psychology of people that those behind the counter were in a superior position,” said sociologist Jaroslava Stastna of the Central European University. “It created a distorted relationship with the customer.”
At the highbrow, British-owned Hotel Bristol in Warsaw, the management interviewed 4,000 people before they found 290 who were considered suited for the hotel’s doting customer-service program, so exacting it tallies pillow preferences (foam or feather) on a computer log of guests.
Half of those who made the cut have since quit, many in search of less taxing jobs.
Among its demands, the Bristol requires employees to bathe daily, wear deodorant, refrain from eating garlic and spicy foods, keep a toothbrush and toothpaste on hand, avoid nail biting, wear only clear nail polish and keep fingers out of mouths, ears and noses. Their hair must also be washed daily and be kept “restrained” in color and style.
Above all, Bristol employees are expected “to be happy and friendly,” said Ingrid Eras, the hotel’s personnel and training manager, who rejects 20 candidates for every job that opens. Some applicants are turned away at the door, advised to return only after getting a haircut and fresh clothes.
“The discipline we require has been the hardest part for most people,” Eras said. “It is not easy telling people to completely change their thinking and personal habits, that what they have been doing for the past 15 or 20 years is wrong.”
Among Eras’ successes is sales director Agnieszka Jasinska, who started two years ago as a bleach-blonde clerk with bright red nails.
Jasinska said her family was shocked when she cut her hair, threw away the bleach, stripped the nail polish, bought pin-striped suits and toiled without complaint for 12 hours a day.
“I am a very different person today,” said Jasinska, now a natural brunette. “I had colleagues who couldn’t take the pressure, especially the demanding guests. It took a long time. But I now realize it doesn’t matter to guests if I have problems at home; they still expect the same service.”
Putting on a happy face has been one of the least popular and most ridiculed notions of customer service in the former Communist world, where service with a sneer was long considered a badge of honor and duplicity was tolerated but despised.
Under communism, restaurants and shops often kept registers in which dissatisfied customers were to lodge complaints. But waiters and salesclerks were so ornery and intimidating that most customers didn’t dare pencil an entry. Even if they did, the scribblings were usually ignored or the complainers unceremoniously shown the door.
“Being nice is forced under capitalism, just like being rude was under socialism,” said Polish satirist Jacek Fedorowicz in a popular radio broadcast chronicling changes in Poland. “A human being does only what it pays him to do, and under capitalism it pays to be nice and smiling.”
Grazyna Lobaszewska, a training consultant for McDonald’s restaurants, said Central and Eastern Europeans are perplexed by Western expectations that unhappy emotions be put aside until after work.
McDonald’s, for example, insists that Polish employees smile when they are in contact with customers, a requirement that strikes many as artificial, insincere--even sinister. “If he is smiling, I am sure he is laughing at me,” Fedorowicz said of the counter help, echoing a commonly held fear.
But just as the fast-food giant installed showers in its 17 Polish restaurants to address “the delicate issue” of spotty personal hygiene, McDonald’s has urged managers to delve into the personal problems of employees and juggle work assignments accordingly.
Workers preoccupied with an illness at home, for example, are assigned to the kitchen instead of the food counter so their worries are not taken out on customers. Customer service does not have to translate into cultural insensitivity, Lobaszewska said.
“It is not unusual for someone in the United States who has a big problem at home to say, ‘Fine, thanks,’ when asked at work how he is doing,” she said. “Our tradition is different. When you have something on your heart, you don’t hide it.”
Even sensitive employers, however, have occasionally resorted to grand schemes to shake up the staff and demonstrate how seriously they take the new vaulted status of the customer.
At Kmart, Gombar yanked the door frame from the Prague general manager’s fifth-floor office and deposited it on the ground floor, the store’s busiest retail area. The message: Under capitalism, sales work is just as valued as traditionally esteemed managerial tasks.
The store also astonished its clerks when it required them to wear name tags proclaiming, “I am here for you.” The clerks balked, insisting the tags be revised to say, “ We are here for you,” a concept more in line with Communist-era practices, when lazy salespeople would snarl at advancing customers, then sit back and enjoy the anonymity of their numbers.
Kmart refused to change the tags and has since made some clerks squirm further by introducing another threatening nicety: an American-style pin saying, “T.L.C. (Think Like Customers). Ask Me What It Means.”
To motivate the staff, the company is rewarding its cheeriest clerks with 20% monthly bonuses, determined in part by an undercover team of customers that completes a 17-question survey after snooping around the store. “You cannot build an American system here, but we can get as close as possible,” Gombar said.
At Delta Air Lines, the largest American carrier with routes in the former East Bloc, role models were deemed the best way to introduce new employees to the Delta way of business. An army of Delta employees from the United States and Western Europe were deployed for “side-by-side” training with counterparts in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Russia.
New employees are also flown to corporate headquarters in Atlanta for a down-home lesson in customer hospitality, which includes a frank discussion about the bottom line: Nine in 10 dissatisfied customers don’t complain; they simply don’t come back.
“Peer pressure is one of the best ways to change behavior,” said Anna Van Exel, assistant manager for customer service training. “If the acceptable thing is to provide good customer service, then it creates a good environment for the others.”
Even the guards at Prague Castle, residence of Czech President Vaclav Havel and one of the most popular tourist attractions in this tourist-crazed capital, are working on their people skills. Now sporting designer uniforms (a gift to Havel from Hollywood costumer Theodor Pistek), a handful of guards have enrolled in Dale Carnegie self-improvement courses.
At a recent evening session, the guards joined an Avon lady, a doctor, a soldier, a yellow-pages salesman, a computer programmer, two college students and a dozen others hoping their $1,000 investment will help make friends and influence enemies--and maybe advance them in the ranks along the way.
School President Temi B. Miller said the course teaches that “a true smile comes from within” and that through self-discovery it is possible to reverse the bad habits of communism.
Castle guard Martin Bernasek, a skeptic who was sent by his commander to a class in the summer, was so taken by it that he now assists other students.
Bernasek is still not a big advocate of matter-of-fact smiling. (It degrades the value of a real smile, he says.) But he said the Czech Republic would be a much happier place if more people enrolled in such courses. It is not only a matter of undoing communism, he said, but changing a centuries-old “mind-set of subjugation” that dates to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
“People have been acting this way for 300 years,” he said.
But some companies have shied away from such self-help programs, instead crossing their fingers and trusting employees to pick it up on the job. Others forked out huge sums for training, only to have employees quickly revert to old habits. Many simply barked out new instructions and hoped for the best.
At the towering Bila Labut department store in Prague, a worn 60-year-old shopping center that was recently sold to private owners, a young saleswoman was asked why she was smiling at passing customers.
“We are supposed to,” she replied.
Why?
A long pause followed.
“I don’t know why,” she said with a puzzled look.
Did anyone tell you why?
“No. I wasn’t told anything.”
At a nearby counter, a scowling senior colleague looked on disapprovingly, then buried her name tag beneath her sweater when approached by a reporter.
Private ownership means saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could get you in trouble, she said. “Under communism we would speak to you, but not anymore,” she grunted.
Although the unfriendly clerk disobeyed the directive to deliver service with a smile, she had mastered something her grinning counterpart had not. She had grasped what training experts say is one of the least understood principles of customer service in Eastern Europe: that the behavior of individual employees is linked to the prosperity of the business, and vice versa.
It is a lesson repeated day after day at the century-old Prague Secondary Commercial School, a vocational center for teen-agers preparing for careers in retail sales. Between 10% and 20% of students are dismissed each year because they are caught stealing from the shops where they serve as apprentices, making honesty second only to courtesy on the school’s lesson plan.
School Principal Jindrich Brtnicky said stealing was common under communism as well. But it is taken more seriously now because private shop owners, who sponsor students, are unwilling to absorb the losses like state-owned enterprises once did.
“The great problem is both grown-ups and kids still don’t feel part of the firm where they work,” Brtnicky said. “The way of working under the previous system is still in each of us. It has left a stain on us that might take a generation to remove.”
Down the hall in a classroom for aspiring retailers, 16-year-old Olga Zaluska professed to have solved the problem. When she graduates, she said, she does not intend to repeat the mistakes of her mother, a longtime salesclerk who seldom smiles at work.
A self-described entrepreneur, Zaluska said she plans to open her own store.
Murphy was recently on assignment in Prague.
