Service

It feels a little like I’ve been floundering lately, bouncing from one project to another, switching my brain between left and right. It’s also tax season, and I have filed my taxes!! I asked my partner to guess how many pages my return was, and he was confused and asked, “It’s not one page? Two pages?” Hilarious, because it’s 68 pages long. 

If you’re in the US and a creative freelancer, I recommend Brass Taxes! This is the second year I’ve used them and their process is very straightforward with a whole video hour of reviewing your numbers, plus answering all the miscellaneous questions. Every year, I think I have it down and I inevitably learn something new. This year, I knew that donated services can’t be written off, but associated costs like supplies, gas for the trip, mileage, could…except not. There’s a separate number for charity miles, it goes onto your personal return, AND for it to really count, needs to be more than $15k (not exact, I am not a CPA, this is not tax advice).

Okay, so. What I’ve actually been thinking about lately is service.

When I started in coffee, I already knew I didn’t want to be in production, so the only other entry-level alternative was to be a barista. And service came to mind when I read this interview with a coffee company president in Japan about how they train for it: 

Is that “ability to sense” something you actively train? How does it translate into service?

Yes—we intentionally cultivate it. We have a training room on the floor below our basement office, and through daily training we guide people to naturally read what someone is looking for from their facial expression and the atmosphere. For example, imagine a tired customer comes in. How you speak to them and how you close the distance depends on their response. There’s no script. I used to be an actor, and I believe the best performance is improvisation. You feel the person in that moment and build the conversation. That kind of natural exchange is what customers want, in my view. We teach staff not to be passive, but to take the initiative to connect. Through that, the “ability to sense” is naturally developed.

And this blew my mind because I was absolutely not trained for customer service scenarios. I learned how to use the POS, how the bar flow worked, what to check off for closing or opening, but definitely not about the how of customer service. Having read the interview, I now wonder why I wasn’t trained in observing and anticipating—it was all learned via watching others, reading the training manual, and my own on-the-job experience. An improv class—which sounds torturous to me—would’ve been helpful. 

I know that service varies widely across cultures. With tipping involved, service workers in the US are basically required to don big smiles, check in on you constantly, go above and beyond. However, if you visit a restaurant owned by immigrants, cooking their culture’s foods, the service experience reflects the culture. I can really only confirm on Chinese restaurants in the US, combined with first-hand experience of restaurants in Taiwan. You’re left alone to dine and you have to flag servers if you want to order or get the check. I read a theory that it’s because all the energy is put towards the food. In Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Hungary, I was also left alone to dine with no pressure to turn the tables. 

Outside of dining, I’ve also been confronted with the reality that as a photographer, I’m a service provider. Writing can be done remotely, with some phone/video or email interviews, but for the most part, it’s pretty solitary. But photography, if I’m at a photoshoot with a client, involves responding in real-time, to their face. During the pandemic lockdown, I really lost my poker face and I need to get it back. Because now I’m confronted with well-meaning employees who want to art direct (“you could do a group shot of us! And that group over there” when the primary contact requested only candids). 

[tangent] Out of curiosity, I googled how to have a good poker face and of course there’s a wikiHow page for that, observing, “Hiding your reactions is power because no one knows what you’re thinking or what you’re about to do.” There are some good, actionable tips on the page, though!