Shopping for Beauty - Why is the customer service so ugly?

Courtesy of Dibbly Fresh

As much as I adore beauty products, I'll hold my hands up and admit that I hate shopping for them.  I'm quite a shy person and have to say that my experiences of buying beauty products from department stores have been so mediocre I now tend to buy exclusively online.  Thanks to beauty blogs I can get a pretty good idea of what a product looks like on, so colour and texture aren't usually an issue.

For one make up brand in particular (which shall remain nameless) I always buy online because the counter is so yukky.  From the moment you walk near it you are deafened by thumping club music (which, annoyingly, you can hear in the rest of the store).  After that it's pot luck whether you get served by any of the staff as they may be talking about their boyfriends or night out.  Should you be very lucky (perhaps because there's no gossip that day or the staff despise one another), they will either be very cold towards you and not listen to anything you say, or be quite sarcastic and mocking if you happen to know the shades of product you want.  When you happen to make a purchase your items are thrown in a carrier bag (if you ask for one) and you leave the store generally feeling like poo.  Give me extortionate p&p any day!

Sadly I've countless bad shopping experiences across a number of different brands.  In fact, upon talking to friends and family it seems to be the norm.  What annoys me is that there is no other place where I or anyone else would expect or put up with such poor customer service.  Generally if I do experience it I vote with my feet and shop elsewhere.  Where I work my bosses are obsessed about good customer service, as well they should be.  So why is a billion pound/dollar industry not doing more to create a good customer experience?



Courtesy of BBC

It makes me both sad that an industry that apparently aims to make women feel good has such a poor reputation when it comes to customer service, especially given the billions women spend on products.  Are these companies bad to work for, creating miserable and resentful staff?  Does the image of the industry attract haughty, mean girls (and sometimes boys?).  Or are the brands focusing more on the appearance of their staff than their attitude (my local counters are often staffed by girls who look like they should be in Vogue)?  

Courtesy of KitKat's Tales

Maybe the attitude of the brands is that people buy the products anyway, therefore they don't need to try.  Some say the whole point of the beauty industry is to make you feel not quite good enough, and therefore buy more and more products that promise to turn you into that supermodel goddess. 

I'd love to be able to go into a store and be able to discuss my needs with someone who was passionate and had a lot of knowledge about the products they were selling.  One place that is a good example of this is the Benefit counter.  I've visited Benefit counters in a number of different stores around the UK and always found the staff to be helpful, friendly and crazy about the stuff they sell.  I wonder if Benefit have a strict recruitment and training policy or if they are just a great company to work for?

I know a lot of bloggers feel very strongly about this subject, indeed Beaut.ie had a discussion about this some years ago called "The Counter Culture" where a lot of it's readers really named and shamed the brands with the most shoddy service.  It's a shame the media doesn't pick up on this they way it has with other customer service and shopping issues (e.g. the recent campaign by Gok Wan to have average sized shop dummies) to create some kind of industry standard or charter.  Maybe the beauty bloggers of the world could unite and create something similar. 

What do you think about this issue?  Do you think customer service across beauty counters is typically poor or have I just been unlucky?  I'd love to know what you think and whether us bloggers should get together to do something about this.

Lucy x