IS IT ME?

I’ ve been doing a lot of so­cial media stuff with the help of a firm that spe­cialises in the field. I can af­ford to do this be­cause of Eu­ro­pean fund­ing aimed at in­creas­ing my pres­ence as a busi­ness, known here is “el kit dig­i­tal”. This al­lows me to re­ceive so­cial media sup­port for one year. So don’t be sur­prised if you see me on the Net a bit more pro­mot­ing my ser­vices.

This means I have a new work­ing re­la­tion­ship with a Span­ish firm based in Va­len­cia. I pro­vide them with ideas for posts and they ad­vise me about which would make the best ones, be­fore de­sign­ing the posts them­selves and send­ing them to me to edit and give my final ap­proval on.

The first issue arose with a low-qual­ity video they up­loaded for me. Here’s the tran­script trans­lated from Span­ish (SP here stands for Ser­vice Provider):

Me (upon re­ceiv­ing the post for ap­proval): Has the qual­ity of the video changed? It looks blurry.

SP: It loses qual­ity on What­sApp, but I’ll make it good qual­ity on my com­puter.

Me (after see­ing the final post on­line): It seems that in the end the qual­ity is the same as on What­sApp... it’s not very clear.

SP: Be­cause you sent it to me via What­sApp. I made it the best qual­ity pos­si­ble. It doesn’t mat­ter how I ex­port it, if you send it to me here, it stays like this.

Me: Why didn’t you ask me to send it by an­other means then? Is it worth delet­ing it and re­plac­ing it?

SP: I al­ready men­tioned the issue of qual­ity.

Me: Yes, but I un­der­stood that it was be­cause I was watch­ing it on What­sApp and that the final ver­sion would be good qual­ity, not be­cause I sent it to you on What­sApp.

SP: Well, you mis­un­der­stood me.

Me: I don’t un­der­stand why you’ve up­loaded it with this qual­ity and you didn’t ask for it by an­other means, when I al­ready told you about the qual­ity. It ob­vi­ously didn’t seem right to me. I think it’s worth delet­ing and re­plac­ing it, right?

SP: I’m not going to argue, if you want me to delete it, I’ll delete it and do it again. I can’t do any­thing if you don’t un­der­stand me.

My point here is the cul­tural im­pli­ca­tions of the sen­tence “I can’t do any­thing if you don’t un­der­stand me”. Now you might say this is a typ­i­cal re­ac­tion in any cul­ture, and you may be right, but we can’t for­get here that I am this firm’s client… this is not a per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion. And there’s the point, that a ser­vice provider would talk to a client as they would some­one in a per­sonal re­la­tion­ship. Not to men­tion no sign of an apol­ogy: it was my prob­lem for not un­der­stand­ing.

Sec­ond sit­u­a­tion: my con­tact at the com­pany, with whom I reg­u­larly ex­change mes­sages, went on a week’s hol­i­day with­out telling me. No one from the com­pany con­tacted me, and even­tu­ally when I pushed them some­one an­swered via the con­tact’s What­sApp and ended up doing one post on the Wednes­day, but noth­ing else all week. Here’s our ex­change when my con­tact re­turned:

Me: Hello xxx. I was sur­prised no none told me about your hol­i­day… and they only did one post last week.

SP: My col­leagues have been very busy, they did what they could. This week I’ll do two for you, no prob­lem.

In other words, not my/our/their fault, and no offer of mak­ing up for the miss­ing post, only re­as­sur­ance that things were back to nor­mal.

Is it me? Am I wrong to point out this being a cul­tural re­flec­tion of work prac­tices in Spain? To me, the client here is owed an apol­ogy and an offer to make it up to them, not an ex­cuse and an at­tempt to pro­tect col­leagues. Al­though the im­pulse to pro­tect col­leagues may seem ho­n­ourable to many, it doesn’t help the rep­u­ta­tion of the busi­ness in ques­tion.

We all know the con­se­quences of doing busi­ness in this way: poor cus­tomer ser­vice = poor image = fewer cus­tomers, etc. But the in­ter­est­ing thing I find about all of this is that I think the be­hav­iour of the SP, who I would say dis­played a lack of pro­fes­sion­al­ism and poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion, would be deemed com­pletely ac­cept­able in Span­ish terms, rather than detri­men­tal to the com­pany’s suc­cess.

Opin­ion