Scientist: Smiling can hurt your health – UPI.com
FRANKFURT, Germany, May 16 (UPI) — A German scientist has proved that people forced to smile and take on-the-job insults suffer more and longer-lasting stress that may harm their health.
Dieter Zapf of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt studied 4,000 volunteers working in a fake call center. Half were allowed to respond in kind to abuse on the other end of the line while the other half had to suck it up, The Telegraph reports.
He found that those able to answer back had a brief increase in heart rate. Those who could not had stress symptoms that lasted much longer.
“Every time a person is forced to repress his true feelings there are negative consequences,” Zapf said. “We are all able to rein in our emotions but it becomes difficult to do this over a protracted period.”
In an interview with the German healthcare magazine Apotheken Umschau, Zapf suggested that people who must keep smiling on the job should get regular breaks to let it out.
Some of these people should get combat pay.
In many ways, customer service is the ultimate job and hones several skills and vastly increases experience and awareness.
Customer service and/or technical support build skills for those that learn:
1. It teaches patience and compassion.
2. It improves people skills.
3. It raises awareness that not everyone is leet.
4. It puts emphasis that a lot of people who think they know what they are doing do not.
5. Allows one to see the real world terrain of implementing ideas.
6. It teaches how bureacracies and top-down management is both wrong and right.
7. One learns you can’t give away to every single demand one has and has to draw a line.
8. One learns to quickly detect inconsolable customers.
Some people don’t have the tolerance, patience, people skills or the ability to read between the lines that customer service requires, but a mastery of customer service is about the same skill set of a salesman or business consultant.
People-oriented jobs like customer service and face-to-face sales sort out the alphas from the betas in this world.
I knew of one case where a customer visited a notorious used car lot to discuss a customer service issue
The customer was shot
I was assured by people who knew the personalities and case involved that the gun went off accidentally
I might add that after reading the research, this experiment proves very little in regarding to at least the Dvorak.org title.
You might as well say couch potatoes encounter soreness after first attempt at exercise.
Humans adapt.
I call shens.
I used to teach high school math, I know stress.
I currently work in technical support, this ain’t stress!
[We didn’t know you lived in India. – ed.]
Fuckin’ pathetic little pissants ! It’s their job to absorb my rage. If they can’t take the heat they should be replaced with someone who can. Now about that accent…
Teaching is an art. Sometimes you get a finger painting, sometimes you get a Mona Lisa.
I hated teachers in school and now I are one.
# 1 Hmeyers,
Who are you desperately trying to convince, and why? It seems to me, the 4th platitude in your diatribe is obviously self descriptive.
Are you one of those “helpful” people, who when asked a yes/no question, you instead read from a script, the box or some label?
@#7
When I was going through college, I spent the better part of a year working in a call center with very demanding resolution % requirements.
Required a lot of discipline. I was surprised. Made working with people and understanding people vastly easier in the future.
And no, I’m just communicating my 2 cents.
Some of us are sheep, some of us are leaders and each of us gets something different from life experiences.
No ma’am, you don’t pry open the diskette, remove the brown thing inside and stuff it into the diskette drive. Of course you can’t get it out now and besides, it’s all folded up and wrinkled in there.
For future reference, you put the entire diskette, including the ‘packaging’, into the diskette drive. I know it doesn’t make any sense but that’s how you do it.
Oh, you typed del a*? That’s not good. You just deleted all the files that start with the letter ‘a’ in the root directory of the hard disk. Those are some important files, ma’am.
Do you have a backup? A backup. A copy of your important files. No? Of course not.
No, no no, no, don’t type del c*. Don’t ever do that, not even if you just want to see what happens.
Nevermind! I’ll be over to see you in an hour or so. Don’t touch the fuggin’ computer till I get there, you fuggin’ moran!
For number 5 Steve.
You are one of the morons that I enjoy hanging up on and documenting the account as an abusive customer. A piece of advice from a customer service rep, if you ask for something nicely most of us will do anything and everything to help you, however when you rant and demand we will do as little as possible to get you off the phone or away from the store.
Enigma
i did customer service, will never do it again just a horrendous amount of stupid people with bank accounts and phones
Enigma- perfect name- as in unable to understand. I read half your comment and realized you couldn’t see the intended humor. I’m so sorry sir. Shall I start again ?
Number 10 is correct, you get more flies with honey then vinegar.
I gave up a good job in a tech related field 8 years ago when my daughter was born. I didn’t want to miss out on her (and then later her brothers) formative years. So, I quit and became a stay at home dad. But, money soon became an issue, and so I took a customer service position for a famous New England catalog company in the nights. I have to tell you, Customer Service Sucks! Even if your good at it, it sucks! It eats your soul! I have found too many people to be stupid and rude. It has ruined my formerly positive outlook. I used to give people the benefit of the doubt, but now, I just hate mankind. (I blame people from Long Island. I once lived there, and now, I think they have to be the rudest people in the world!)
Anyway, my son enters kindergartens in the fall, so my hunt for a “real” job is beginning. I dont care what I find for work, as long as it is not Customer Service!!!
Steve,
I’m sorry but Humor is supposed to be funny, you were not.
Customer service can make the mundane trip to the grocery store mundane, or simply a horror story which you tell your friends about.
You want to just drop kick and clothes line some a-holes that work in some stores.