4.4.2.2: Reflection Exercise- "Customer Service Voice"

Customer Service Voice \(\PageIndex{1}\)

At this point in life, you have either been or helped a customer. Whatever you patronized, or spent money at, whether it was a mall kiosk selling Jibbitz or a boba tea shop like Teaspoon, you have probably practiced what we might call "customer service voice," which we can describe as a form of code-switching.

Definition: Code-switching

The act of changing language choices to anticipate your audience's wants or needs.

To be honest, it sounds a lot like serving tables. My old boss would always snarl, "try to anticipate the needs of your guests," while slithering back into his office. How many times I forgot a lemon wedge or straw are uncountable, but I would never have said anything but sorry if asked about these frequently desired items in the food service environment. In fact, at a P.F. Chang's I once worked for, management posted a sign that encouraged servers to deliberately avoid remarking no problem to a guest; at first I didn't get it. When I asked, I was told that there should never be any indication it would ever even have been a problem in the first place, whatever the request was.

Directions

In a paragraph of descriptive writing, please share an anecdote, or a short, personal, true story, that fully responds to the following prompt:

Describe one situation from your life that involved code-switching, or a time when you used different words, phrases, or gestures to appeal to the person or people you were addressing. What kinds of words did you use? What made you choose the words you chose in the life event you describe? How did, or would, thinking about the audience and purpose of your communication help or have helped you decide how to talk, write, and/or act?

Writing advice

• Try to use concrete images and diction (not abstract)
• Use several specific details
• Find specific words or names for what you write about
  • For example, a serving environment might involve ramekins, fork tines, or even blade tangs. Finding the names for items around you is an edifying process: an oak tree looks much different than a sargasso palm, a bromeliad is leagues away in appearance and smell from a humble forget-me-not.

Student Example Response

Student Example Response

There’ve been so many times I had to use code-switching at work, but this reminds me of my time spent on the radio station as a deejay at SJSU’s 90.5 FM KSJS. When you take on-air operator training, you are told you can’t use certain words at all. From what I recall, you can’t use most cuss words, of course, especially ones that have anything to do with bodily fluids. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) regulates what on-air operators can say. One day, I was on the air and I had a guest with me on the mic in the studio. He used a cuss word, the s-word, quickly correcting himself after, but we got a phone call from a parent who was angry that her child, listening in the car with her on the way to school, had overheard my friend use the word “sh*t.” Since the station could get fined for this violation, I got a reprimand from my superiors. Other words you could not say on the air were ones I needn’t mention here in a polite classroom setting, but since you ask about how thinking about the audience/purpose of the communication of radio stations factors into my decisions about what to say and do, I’d say I learned an important lesson that day: you can’t trust your friends to code-switch if they haven’t been properly taught about the consequences of not doing so, and the audience that my deejaying reached was bigger and more diverse than I had ever imagined.