On Customer Service

I am not usually big on make-up, but there are certain products which I live for and am convinced make a difference as to whether I feel confident, or the lack of, on any particular day. Like the Faceshop metallic range lipstick, in red-orange.

I first came across the lipstick when I visited a Faceshop branch in Melbourne two years back. Tried it, loved it, finished it and the next time I was back in Melbourne, tried to look for it but realised they no longer carry this line. Various attempts of searching online and within the Faceshop branch in Perth did not return any success.

Therefore imagine my ecstasy when I located the exact lipstick in a Faceshop branch in Myeondong, Seoul - at one third the price I bought it for back in Melbourne!! Happy me was in a good mood and was ready to make some additional purchases to celebrate my find. I went up to the sales lady, whom I realised quickly was Chinese and not Korean (much to my relief) and tried to ask her a couple of questions in elementary chinese regarding another product.

She turned around, looked at me with her disinterested slit eyes, and ... to my horror, turned back and completely ignored me!

Now by this stage I was seething inside and decided to leave the store having only purchased the lipstick and nothing else (I would have left empty-handed if I had not been looking for it for 2 years).

Looking back at that incident now makes me wonder ... what do retail shop owners look for when hiring a staff?
There are two broad aspects of skills sets which an employer would generally look for in an employee - technical skills e.g. accounting or engineering knowledge; and transferable / behavioural skills e.g. friendly attitude to a customer. Technical skills are something you can learn, although depending on what industry and role you are in, the timing to learn these skills can take from 2 weeks to 5 years. Whereas behavioural skills, I believe, are not something you can necessarily learn within a time period, no matter how long. These are inherent within a person, or if not, there has to be a (huge) willingness from the part of the employee to want to acquire these skills. E.g. how do you teach someone to be friendly?

I looked back to my uni days, when I was an international student trying to look for a part-time job with little prior work experience but a very humble attitude and extreme willingness to learn. In many occasions I was discounted for a job in a restaurant, or a cafe, or a retail store due to my lack of experience. Now I question if I was an employer myself would I be making the same judgement? How long would it take for someone to have taught me how to handle the cash till as opposed to someone trying to teach me how to be nice to a customer?

At the end of the day, if you are a customer, would you have walked away from a store because a perfectly experienced employee has been rude to you, or because an perfectly polite employee is a little slow in bringing you what you need?

I am upset that I had not purchased 5 more of the Faceshop lipsticks and another 2 bottles of BBcream, but as a customer my integrity would not have allowed me to make that decision. Given another chance I would not even have bought that lipstick - maybe.