The Bullshit Of Customer Service And Public Relations

Tradition or preference will always be at the heart of the imposed, contrived requirements for professionalism beyond just doing a job itself well.  Both tradition and preference, in the context of customer service and public relations (PR), are frequently rooted in a desire to amass as much money from customers as possible or preserve a perhaps inaccurate, undeserved reputation so that future customers are not deterred.  They are not only irrelevant to the true nature of business because preference is subjective and tradition is a meaningless construct, but they are also largely about superficial perceptions for the sake of keeping customers in line by inflating their egos.  People who devise these things are idiots and people who enforce them while believing anything contrary to what has been said here are the same.

For instance, workers are probably expected to be "professional" by ignoring hostile comments from customers to leave a "positive impression."  The latter deserve no special recognition for paying a company for something; the executives or managers are, in many cases, only interested in continuing their revenue stream for monetary gain or for the prestige of a favorable reputation (as if reputation on its own proves anything more than that there is a given reputation!).  This is not problematic on its own.  As a low-level employee or an executive, there is absolutely no reason to go above and beyond for a customer other than sheer happenstance preference in the moment or for the pragmatic benefit one can get out of it (as long as one is not irrational or immoral in the process).  As long as someone is not mistreating another person, including in an employee-customer setting, it does not matter if the customer feels attended to beyond the bare minimum necessary to not mistreat them and to get the business transaction finished.

The customer is not always right; the customer does not have surplus human rights just because someone probably well above the public-facing employees will be enriched by them.  Customer service on the level of practice is, in my experience and according to what I hear from others, mostly about appeasing even emotionalistic, abusive, petty consumers to keep up the facade of "professionalism," with the threat of losing one's job or forfeiting raises if the arbitrary social constructs of professionalism are not met in a way that subjectively gratifies someone above the worker in question.  Really, in these cases, it is the higher people on the hierarchy who support this illusory approach to "service" that dehumanize both the employee and customer by regarding them as only a means to an end due to greed.

This is also what PR is mostly about, after all, with the way it is conducted in plenty of companies.  It is about presenting the company image in a particular way, often selectively silent on company controversies or wording things as if executives did not know about illicit practices before they were exposed even if this was not the case.  PR is easily used as a way to manipulate superficial perceptions that will sway people on an impulse to associate positive feelings or other experiences with a given product, public-facing figure, or the general company.  One form would be carefully cultivated social media posts that are designed to make the company look helpful, ethically oriented, and inviting, when the employees and consumers might be lied to or trampled upon on an ongoing basis in order to extract maximum profit for the almighty quarterly reports.

The "professionalism" of customer service or PR might very well not really be about anything other than persuading people to submit to corporate manipulation.  Keep spending money on their products or services, and the selfish manager or employer who wants to keep up this status quo will do what they can to produce useful illusions.  They will say practically anything if they expect for it to generate their profit.  Appeasing the customer, as stupid as many manifestations of this can be already, can be part of this, ultimately about manipulating the customer so that revenue and, more precisely, profit continues to flow in to a company.  Anyone who believes otherwise can only assume.  Business does not have to be about superficialities, but most manifestations of it in America will be drenched in such things.