Autism, Customer Service, Context, XYZ's have no clue...& Nordstroms

Being Austic makes everything harder.  Including accepting changes sometimes. However, we austic folks also notice more, and I say our culture has been high jacked by corporate culture and its causing people to be dull and mean.  

I fear the younger generations have no idea what's happened. So I have requests-- S>L>O>W DOWN so you can pay attention and be more aware.  AND THINK-Stick up for everyone and dont let them bamboozle you the way they do all the TIME!. And you might be be part of the problem if you work in customer service.

Transcript

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Hi, I'm Ishi Abel with the Horse Human Connection Matrix, and I got some things to talk about today. I have wanted to avoid ranting because ranting is just a bunch of negative energy. Sometimes comes on like a fire hose that might. Pacify the person ranting for a little bit, but it also causes them to relive everything that they've experienced as they're regurgitating it for whoever's listening to the rant. So my intention is not to rant. My intention is to bring light to some communication issues and what it's like to be autistic. Just another window into the autism bit because I find more and more as I'm interacting with the world more and more that I can pinpoint the patterns I. That seemed to be causing a lot of problems for a lot of people. So I just got back from a trip to visit a family member luckily on Kauai. And luckily he recovered, but he had gotten out of the hospital and I went to help take care of him after the hospital stay. And a number of things happened, planning this trip like in two days and. Having all the pieces fall together, which was great. They did. They all fell together. And some wonderful things happened on the trip. But in getting home and in the traveling, there were some communications with people that I feel are worth talking about. And some of them are generational and some of them are. Autistic flavored, and some of them are just like, we're doing the best we can, but sometimes we just don't get it all. So the autism piece, many people realize now that one of the autistic traits, it doesn't mean everybody has it, but a lot of people on the spectrum have trouble with context. Either when we're. Telling you something, we don't give enough context. And conversely, when we're hearing something, the context that may be obvious to people that are not on the spectrum is not obvious to us. So obviously the answer there is to ask more questions both ways and have people ask questions. Some of the things I'm gonna cover are. When is helping, not helping, and when is it okay to help customer service? That is not customer service, which has been a pet peeve of mine for my entire life and my perspective has shifted many times on it, and so has my emotional response. So. And I wanna talk a little bit about younger people. For a while I was keeping notes on my phone of ridiculous customer service things that happened because we have literally been boiled in water like frogs. Most people have no idea. What's happened to customer service or what it was like for people of my generation back in the day. So I'm gonna have to tell the Nordstrom story, and if Nordstrom's doesn't kick me a little bit of money back at some point, the next time I tell the Nordstrom story, I may just say that it was about Macy's. So I think that's a good place to start the Nordstrom story. So this. Is reportedly a true story that I read in the newspaper sometime in the eighties. And when I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, my closest shopping center was the Stanford Shopping Center, and we had a Nordstrom's put in in the late seventies that went in right next to Sax fifth Avenue. So here's the story. This little old lady. Comes into Nordstrom's with her receipt in hand, and she comes to the counter and she says to the young man behind the counter, I wanna return this tv. It's in my car. And he says, hold on ma'am, just a minute. He goes in the back and he asks manager. So two things about this already. There's somebody who is going to a manager with something he doesn't know what to do with. We rarely see that today in any customer service. He goes to the manager. He says she wants to return this tv. It's in her car. She has a receipt. She paid cash. What do I do? The manager says, go down to the car, bring the TV up from her. Take the money out of the cash register. Keep the receipt, keep the TV, and give her back the cash. He says, okay. He does what he's told. So that's another thing. He does what he's told without asking a lot of questions. We don't see that a lot today. He goes down to the car, he gets the tv, he brings it up, she follows him up, he opens the cash register, chaching comes open, the drawer slides. We don't see that anymore either. He gives her the cash. We don't see a lot of that anymore either. And she hobbles out of the store. He goes back to the manager and he says, now what do I do? And the manager says, did you drive today? And he says, yes. Will the TV fit in your car? He says, yes. Take the tv, put it in your car. Take the receipt. Go back to the store she bought it at and return it. Get the cash and put it back in our register. He's like, okay. Again, he's not asking a lot of questions. He does what the manager tells him to do. Nordstrom's doesn't sell TVs. Take a minute for that to sink in. If you're an X, Y, Z person. Nordstrom's was known for their customer service. When these people that worked for Nordstrom's did this. They weren't doing it as a publicity stunt. This was normal protocol. This was how they handled customers. I grew up with a saying, the customer's always right. In my generation, when you went to work for a store, you didn't argue with a customer. If you argued with a customer, the manager would come in and they would fire you. You might get a warning, but you weren't gonna last very long because word of mouth was important. So when I have problems with the cell phone company or somebody made a mistake on my Maurice's bill for$4, that cost me a$200, a 200 point drop on my credit score. They're gonna listen to the Nordstrom story when I called to straighten things out because we didn't grow up with this. Why is it this way now? It's like this. And again, I don't want this to be around. I wanna focus on what's positive, but this is a result of corporate culture. This came in when companies got really big and decided that the customer wasn't always right, and they started training people on purpose to be evasive on the phone, to read from a script. To stay scripted, to record the phone calls. This call may be recorded in order for training purposes, how to deal with difficult people, how to deal with a customer that's not happy. In the old days, it was placating. Then we got to the point where people were active listening to the person. These days, there's. A lot of avoidance, a lot of shoving around, and with one company in particular, even systematic hangups hold times to hang up. That would be, and I have no problem saying this because I went around the corner with these people that would be HughesNet. We purposely put you on hold and then hang up af on you after 45 minutes, and if you call back, they do it again rather than send you to a manager rather than to address a problem. That's true. So how does this affect us talking to each other? How does this affect the interactions we have in a personal way? People that are leaning into avoidance to begin with feel a lot more permission to do it. Just change the subject. Don't answer that question. And if you're autistic, it's even more frustrating because we're not wired that way. At least I'm not. So one of the tasks I needed to deal with when I came back was I have a paddleboard. It's my second season paddleboarding. I absolutely love it. I got a new paddleboard and the instructions were not clear. The fins have a weird little screw that takes a special little key tool to screw it in, and they came with one screw and two holes, and they told me that was in case it got stripped out. And I thought, really, this doesn't seem right. It took me forever to find the little tool'cause it wasn't mentioned where it was in the instructions. I emailed with the place, they emailed me back, said, oh no, that's the way it's supposed to be. There's only one screw. I followed the directions I put them in, I screwed them tight. I tested them with my hand, I took it down the river and I lost a fin. So I came back and I emailed them again and in the email. Instead of telling me that the fins were back ordered, they told me they would send them to me, and then they sent me another email that came from a different place that was spam that told me they were back ordered and. There was some pushback. There was some pushback in the email. It wasn't clean, it wasn't customer service. And then I called them and I tried to get ahold of them, and they were out at some paddle boarding events for two consecutive weekends or something, so there was no one, or maybe it was for a whole week, and they were closed that week, so there was nowhere there to answer the phone. So again, from my generation, if you're running a business and you wanna go take part in something that might be good for your business, it's a good idea to leave somebody to manage your phones because your customer base may not really appreciate the customer service that you're not providing. Or when is it okay to ask these days for customer service? When is it okay? So. Finally got ahold of these people today and when I explained the situation, there was quite a bit of pushback about how it was my fault because I might not have checked my junk folder for the separate email that would've explained part of the context to the situation with the fin and why I got four screws in the mail. And not the fins. Well, what I don't think they realized is it was making them look really bad, saying they were gonna do something and then not doing it. And it makes'em look really bad, not including a piece of information in the email when they know full well apparently that the spam email is probably gonna get stuck in my spam folder, and they did not sign it. So that's another thing I've noticed with customer service emails recently, the employees. Are afraid to sign their name. That wouldn't have happened in the old days. Your family name meant something. If you treated someone rudely or you did something disgraceful, it wasn't just you, it your whole family that was gonna be affected. If you don't feel like you can sign an email at your workplace because of customer backlash, it probably means you're not doing something ethical or you're not doing something in a way that is in alignment with how we wanna treat each other. If you can't put your name behind what comes outta your mouth, we should be questioning. The people that are asking us to respond to each other this way, and that's what I mean by being boiled like frogs. It turned up the temperature and nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that it's not okay to be proud of who you are as you interact with people. We're in some serious trouble here, but. If we become aware of what's happening and we push back on the policies that demand that we behave unethically, we can recover. And that's what the podcast is here. It's about dominance, right? Just the way we train horses with dominance, we need to stop training people with dominance and people need to stop being sheep. It needs to be okay to say what you're doing isn't okay. Treating people like that isn't okay. I see a lot with younger generations too. The problem in this scenario with the paddleboard is I believe that being on a device all the time, the way we listen to music for 60 seconds at a time, and then there's a new song, the way younger people, because of our devices, their minds are being reconstructed to only pay attention for 20 to 60 seconds. Of course they're gonna miss the larger context. Of course, they're not gonna fit all of the pieces together. I see this almost every time now that I have conversations with younger people, they don't understand that they're not explaining the whole thing and it doesn't matter to them. Or they become so entrenched in thinking that if they support their employer. Refusing to take something back, refusing to have a conversation with people. I had, I had one incident at an Applebee's where, and it was right after COVID COVID changed everything. Like we don't complain anymore. You just eat the food that they brought you, even if it's not close to what you ordered or close to being prepared. Like, okay, but this was so bad. This was chicken fettuccine that was uncooked. And it had been sitting under a not warm heat lamp. It was cold. It's a dairy product, it's poultry that was not cooked all the way through. It would've been dangerous to eat it, and I didn't wanna make a fuss. Normally restaurants cook all their baked potatoes at four or five o'clock, and they got some baked potatoes sitting around. I said, could you just bring me a baked potato instead, please? What I got was a waitress that thought she was a real estate agent and she wanted to negotiate with me. I am asking for something super reasonable. They said they were shorthanded in the kitchen. Okay, I get that. I'm, I'm not asking for a lot, just a potato. You could do it like that. So when she came back to negotiate with me for the third time, I got it from the table and I went back and I found the manager and I had a conversation with the manager. She was having a really bad day. She had three cooks walk out on her all at once. I get it. These things happen. But if you have three cooks walk out at you on you all at once, it probably means they're protesting something that shouldn't have happened. Again, back to treating people like people back again to corporate culture, that would never happen. At least I don't believe it would happen in a small restaurant. A family owned restaurant, a restaurant owned by a few people. That treat their employees like more like family. So yeah, we're in some trouble and if we don't start slowing down bulking at dominance, finding some ways to talk to people like people and explain to them what's happening, it's gonna get worse, I'm afraid. So here's another story. I know some people in recovery and someone was telling me a story about a sponsee that they had, and at the time I was thinking, wow, it is really hard to know where the line is. Where is the line between not enabling somebody? But being compassionate and helpful without taking the person's responsibility and dignity away, allowing them to make some of their own choices and fail enough to want to get back on their feet. And I think a lot of people struggle with this too. I am proud that I did three years in Al-Anon. I have been in relationships with people in recovery, and I've been to a lot of 12 step meetings, and I think it's a great program. So what this person was telling me is, I'll regurgitate the story, but it may not be exact, right, because this is like secondhand. But apparently there was somebody, a sponsee, who was struggling with relapse and had gone out but wanted to be included, and the group was going out to have some appetizers and the person sponsoring them wanted to be very kind and include them even though there was a struggle and, and so they did. And it ended up with the person not being able to control their bowels in, in someone else's car. And then again, in the restaurant not understanding what was going on over ordering and, and the whole thing was more than a mess, inconvenienced everybody there, but there was kindness and there was inclusion. And yeah, it's a hard line. Would would the person make the invitation and include them again? I don't know, but it brings up this edge of when do you shun people? I, for their own good. And when do you include them? When do you reach out? When someone's really, really having a hard time. And be the hand that makes a difference or be the hand that maybe saves their life. Where, where is the edge? We don't really know. A lot of people struggle with this a and unfortunately some people fall off the edge and unfortunately some people err always on the side of help and people don't get better. Because there's too much help, which we call enabling. I, I think if we slow down and find a way to listen to our hearts and our heads, that maybe that's part of the answer for that line, for that edge, we always have to take care of ourselves. I fully agree that being of service usually means some degree of sacrifice. Not so much that it costs too much. And how is that like customer service? I, I'm not quite sure. Why do these belong in the same podcast? I'm not quite sure, but it seems like they do, because what we're talking about is context. What we're talking about is asking questions. If in any of those customer service issues, we can say what's true. Name what's happening, stay calm and help co-regulate each other in those awkward conflict and confrontation moments. Maybe. Maybe the answers are there, but we have to remember, we have to keep remembering how to ask the questions and. One of the things that the, the paddleboard guy had said to me when I brought to his attention that he had just blamed me for not getting the email, not looking in my junk folder, not knowing that the fins were out of, you know outta stock. And he offered me something else. He offered me, oh, I can send you a link to the catalog and then you can choose a different pair and we'll give you those. And I was trying to keep him on the phone because he was rushing to get off the phone with me. Long enough to realize that his attitude was affecting the conversation tremendously long enough to realize that I'm asking for some help that someone else from his company had provided in the past by consulting about the board, the fins, the other things that they're supposed to be experts about. And I finally got him to slow down enough to give me the advice on and, and break down what fins I might get instead of redirecting me. To a digital marketing thing that was bound to go wrong and resulted in me having to call back or contact them again. That held the potential for things to go wrong again. Again, rushing and rushing and blaming, and then he said something. I said, well, now you're being brewed. And he said, I'm just meeting you where you are. And I had a bit to say about that because. As Carissa has explained a couple of times in other podcasts that meeting you where you are comes from. Horse training is utilized in psychology, but not with the application he was saying at all. What that means is I'm gonna find where you are emotionally. I'm gonna meet you at that regulation and help you come down together. It doesn't mean you are combative, so I'll be combative and that'll fix it.'cause I guarantee that's not gonna fix it. I guarantee it. And any corporate culture, corporate culture that is teaching that combativeness is the way to handle these situations is absolutely wrong. I had a run in with my doctor's people, and I had a run in with somebody that worked for an attorney that I was working with. In both cases, the doctor and the lawyer scolded me, an autistic person who was being treated badly by their staff f, which I balked at. It is not okay to do that. It's absolutely 100% not okay to do that. Not only did the customer always used to be, right, but we used to treat people with kindness and we used to do what we said we were gonna do. And when people that work for doctors or lawyers or paddleboard companies don't do what they say they're gonna do. This is helping the world fall apart and we can fix it. They're little teeny steps. It starts with slowing down so that you can become aware of how your interactions affect other people, and most of all, how you are contributing to them. There's signs up at hospitals and places of business that say zero tolerance for any anger or outburst. That's a mistake to think that avoidance, a shunning are the answer to people's trauma. To think that not treating customers. Correctly or compassionately or even like humans and being ready to dismiss them or have them physically hauled off off of your premise because your customer service people have forgotten how to be human. It's a problem. I want people to understand neurodivergence better. I want people to slow down. I want these younger generations, the X, Y, Z, whatever. I'd like you to get off your device and I'd like you to spend time with humans, women's, and I'd like you to think about communicating an entire, an entirety of whatever the situation. Is comprised of because this quick swiping through situations is hurting you and it's hurting us and it's hurting our culture. You can't swipe, skip, avoid, and delete these things. They have to be worked through. There's a lot of energy being upset about these things, and when you're autistic, there are a lot of autistic people that there don't go out of their homes because one or two of these a day will send you into tears and over the edge and into some serious overwhelm. And I think maybe part of the reason why people are realizing that they're autistic is because the world is getting harder and harder to live in. Not just for us, but for you guys too. For everybody. So let's do what we can to slow down and be kind.