Mark Bradley: Top tips on how we and our US cousins see each other

AS a customer service campaigner in the UK, I’m usually already annoyed before most of you have got out of bed. But when people start basing observations on lazy national stereotypes, I only get more irked.

So the prospect of an extended tour of the US not only offered relief on the customer experience front, but also helped me learn about the true character of our American cousins.

Let’s put the record straight and find out what they think about us?

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The customer experiences were almost always outstanding, especially in hospitality and leisure. For example, upon turning up at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC too late to pick up one of the entry passes, the security guard asked us where we’d come from. He then stepped inside and emerged a minute later with our passes. “Can’t have you coming so far and not getting in!” he said with a smile.

Later that day, when I tried to get two of us through the metro barrier with the same pre-loaded ticket (that’s how it works in NYC), not only did the attendant deal with us sympathetically, but on realising a train was due, he vaulted back over the barrier to the machine to convert our one $20 card into two $10 ones (and then sprang back over the barrier like Carl Lewis to give them to us in time to catch our train).

Even though tipping is a relatively new concept in the UK, the quality of experience encouraged largesse everywhere (upwards of 15 per cent).

However there was one slightly unsettling episode in New York (where we had a piece of cheesecake which was larger than the Chrysler Building). It wasn’t a bad experience, just very average.

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I gave the waitress a 10 per cent tip in cash – which I felt was appropriate. She apologetically returned the money to me and pointed out a section on the menu that said “if the service is great, we suggest 18 per cent. If it’s excellent, we suggest 20 per cent”.

Unfortunately there weren’t any other options, so I reluctantly upped the tip, privately resolving never to return. However, American service is superior and it’s largely down to cultural reasons: the “anyone can make it” dream, the tipping culture, the constant desire to offer wider choice and the outstanding levels of personal courtesy one encounters. Even the NYPD have cars proudly pasted with their values: courtesy, professionalism and respect.

But once you strip out the predictable perception that our nation is defined by period TV drama, small cars driving on the wrong side of the road, bad breath, red telephone boxes, Simon Cowell and a tendency to address colleagues as “my old bean”, their views of us are intriguing.

Chats at venues as diverse at Ben’s Chili Bowl in DC, Citi Field in Queens, NY (the home of the Mets) and on a subway train in Boston revealed that people loved the UK (whether they’d been or not).

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Many see us as a nation of benign socialists (although admittedly based purely on the concept of the National Health Service), somewhat at odds with the genuine situation here, where the gap between rich and poor extends by the day. Their negative perceptions of the UK? High prices (it takes a trip to the USA to expose just how much we are ripped off in this country), the high taxes, the lack of choice (the 7/11 there had more than 25 Ben & Jerry’s flavours) and some of the worst customer service they had ever experienced.

I skilfully avoided the subject of food. The late comedian Bill Hicks once attributed what comparatively little gun crime there was in the UK to enraged US visitors who had discovered how bad our food was (“you don’t boil pizza”).

As we sat at Newark airport preparing to come home reviewing our conclusions (“why do they use corn syrup when we use glucose?” and “why can’t we get Peanut Butter Snickers Squares?”) I cautioned against the urge to fall back on easy stereotypes. Just then the TV showed Texas Governor Rick Perry announcing his decision to stand for the presidency.

This is a man who delivered his last major political speech in the style of a TV evangelist (with no policy content) and whose party, in the face of suffocating national debt, refuses to countenance tax increases for America’s richest or to discuss removing unjustifiable subsidies for the hugely-profitable oil industry. Like one particular political forebear (who found “potato” too difficult to spell) he eschews complexity, preferring to confront any difficult issue with the default position of quoting from the Old Testament.

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After all, a worker at Arlington Cemetery told me that only around 35 per cent of Republicans ever served their country (while something like 80 per cent of Democrats have). It’s easier to start a war if you don’t have to fight in it. But, of course, these are probably just lazy stereotypes on my part.

Mark Bradley is a customer service expert from near Bradford.