THE customer is always right? Wrong. Let's face it, what is considered to be the appropriate, ideal attitude and behavior of a salesperson varies from one culture to another and also depends on the sales situation – a fast food outlet, for example, as opposed to an exclusive jewelry boutique. In other words, while a salesperson who shadows your every movement as if he were your personal servant waiting for a command might be thought ideal in one part of the world, it would be considered downright creepy somewhere else. Then, of course, international franchises have their own corporate ethos and train their personnel to interact with the public in a particular way so that whenever you enter one of their outlets anywhere in the world, you know exactly where you are because you have heard the script before. There is a chain of small 24-hour convenience stores in an Asian country I have visited where an annoyingly loud electronic ding-dong bell goes off in your ear when you enter the store and continues to go off whenever anyone enters or leaves which on a busy night can be every few seconds. The staff have received Pavlovian training and whenever the bell goes off they shout out “Hello!” and “Welcome!” in the local language no matter what they are doing at the time. The first few times you experience it, it is amusing, but it quickly wears on you and you have to wonder about the effect on the staff, and how many times they hear that bell on an eight-hour shift. And you have to wonder what happens to them when off duty, a bell goes off as they are walking along the street. Here in Jeddah you never know what kind of a service situation you are going to encounter when you enter a store. Although more and more Saudis are being employed as sales staff, sales is still very much a multi-cultural profession. So from one store to the next or even within the same store, you are faced with whatever passes as appropriate behavior in widely divergent parts of the world. While it is hard to generalize, it is safe to say that on average, the customer is not overwhelmed with attention here. Again it depends on who you are and what kind of store it is as it does all over the world, but there does seem to be a sense of certain procedures to be followed when shopping in Jeddah: You are expected to enter the store knowing what you want, to ask only a few simple questions about it, to engage in the usual discussion about the price (whether the item has a price tag or not), then to either buy it or not, and leave. Anything that deviates too drastically from this set formula may mark you as a difficult, or even troublesome, customer. Things can become especially sticky when the purchase involves complicated electronic equipment or other goods requiring extra knowledge, and when it becomes apparent that the salesperson is far from being an expert on the subject. Then the sales attitude can quickly become: Well, do you want it or not ? Why are you wasting my time? The customer who asks too many questions is always wrong. You want to buy a computer, but you really don't know the difference between ROM and RAM? No problem. The computer salesperson will tell you exactly what to buy and what kind of discount you can have. And you will even get answers to some fairly basic questions about the computer. But don't ask too much. After all, they sell computers, they don't give lessons in computer technology. And the opposite situation can be just as sticky. If it turns out that you clearly know more about computers than the sales person, it may be that in the part of the world he comes from, the manifestation of your knowledge can be taken as an affront, and you may find that a simple shopping excursion has turned into a war of wits and a battle of honor. However, in-house training of sales personnel in customer relations has arrived in Jeddah in some places. Some years ago when an international coffee chain first opened an outlet here, I remember stopping in my tracks upon first walking in and hearing the customer friendly script. I had to look out the window to make sure that I was still on the same planet. But now, of course, we take the script for granted and accept it for what it is: Well-rehearsed public relations talk. Friendly though these shops may be, they lack the edge of dangerous adventure of the other shops where you never know what awaits you as you open the door. There the sales personnel may never have taken a course in customer relations but they are ever ready to engage in a good bout of give and take and they are nothing if not sincere. Really, you have to laugh. __
