I'm not certain when it happened but suddenly the service representatives on the floors of major retailers have sprouted telephone earpieces complete with dangling cables. Or for the more sophisticated (?) stores, a bluetooth earpiece.

I would love to say I don't know what to make of it, but I do. I hate it. It doesn't matter that the employee is not currently speaking to anyone on the phone. The presence of the earpiece, while ostensibly making it easier to deal with incoming calls by allowing the phone to move with the employee instead of making the employee run to the phone, gives the impression that this person is only speaking to me personally because he doesn't happen to have anyone on the phone at that moment.

I have worked retail. I understand that all customers are important and that you need to do your best to serve all of them. I expect employees  sprouted earbuds when management decided it would be more efficient to have everyone be able to answer the phone quickly and easily. Or maybe to be able to get rid of someone answering the phone at the store desk and paging out the calls. Always do more with less seems to have been the mantra for some time now. 

But... there are times when something has to give and I think it needs to give in favor of the person standing in front of you.

Think about it. In the past, answering the phone meant walking (or running) to the phone on the wall or the post nearest you. When you were assisting a customer, I doubt you ever dreamed of simply walking away from them mid-conversation to answer the phone. And yet, that is exactly what seems to be expected of these employees with the plugs in their ears.

We are a society that has become somewhat of a slave to the telephone. It can be hard to ignore the ringing or the paging. But when the phone is out of reach it is so much easier to simply say, "I'll catch it when I'm done with this person."

It becomes much harder to ignore when the beeping is right in your ear and it is extremely easy to answer. Not only that, but just having the earpiece there can muffle a customer's voice. After the beeping starts, I would have to tear it out of my ear in order to hear anything anybody was saying. More than once I had to repeat myself to one of these employees because her ear was partially plugged.

I would ask any store manager or chain manager to walk into one of her own stores and find out how it feels to deal with someone who appears to be speaking with me only because he is on hold. I would also ask this manager to pay attention to how it truly looked to see employees walking around with phones in their ears. Not to mention how hard it can be to figure out if she is speaking to you or to the phone.

Seriously....replace all those earbuds with a regular phone receiver and you have a good idea of what this really looks like to customers to have employees running around holding the receiver to their heads.

Well, this turned into something of a rant. I know I haven't made any suggestions to make things better. But that is because I can't really see how this type of thing can make for a better customer experience.

What do you think of this practice?