A common complaint here in Tallinn revolves around ‘Estonian customer service’ and its inherent badness.

The mantra is so oft-repeated that no explanation is required — simply say ‘Estonian customer service — tchoh!’ and people will know exactly what you are talking about.

But is the reputation a wholly fair one? Is it even fair at all?

I’m going to explain how Estonian customer service doesn’t quite live up to (or live down to) the poor reputation it has amongst locals and ‘foreigners’ alike, but this is also because it is in effect begging the question (the question here being why exactly should Estonia, a part of the USSR for 45 years, realign its customer service sector to meet the needs of a few ‘westerners’ who come here either to live or to visit).

No doubt this won’t strike a chord with a lot of people so feel free to take pot shots, but this is the Tallinn Dissenter after all…

Just my take; it’s not really tied to any empirical data — which would be difficult in this case — and a quick google search didn’t reveal much apart from company websites’ contact pages rather than private individuals airing their views on the situation here (though here’s one notable exception).

But first let’s clarify our terms…

Say ‘customer service’ and many will think of the narrowest sense of the term — banks of young people in the Philippines answering phones in a ‘timely manner’ about computer hardware problems, train times or online banking.

This latter category has naturally been one of the vicissitudes of modern living of the last 20 years, and Estonia is no exception here, but I think the bulk of what expats living in Estonia, for instance, are referring to in their regular Facebook pronouncements on the topic concern things like someone being rude to them at the Statoil garage, or not being able to fix a problem at the bicycle repair shop, or charging them a different price for an item than was on display. Face-to-face customer service if you will.

There is an American standup comic here in Estonia who has built up a loyal (local) following, due in no small part to amusing vignettes revolving around encounters in the kiosk or the supermarket, with lots of Švejk-esque paradoxical mixups and inconsistencies, so it can’t be purely a perception.

Estonians will often be on the defensive where outsiders are involved so if they can laugh along with these anecdotes it suggests the experience is pretty universal.

However, whilst social media lends itself to the airing of consumer-related mishaps, funny or otherwise, I don’t think this should be taken without a side order of the old sodium chloride.

I actually think that Estonian customer service doesn’t deserve the tawdry reputation it has built up, especially with the expat ‘community’, ie. the people here who I have the most interaction with, and let me explain why.

Eesti 1, Lietuva 0

When I arrived here in Estonia some 6 or 7 years ago, it quite frankly felt like I’d arrived in western Europe.

But then again, I had been living in Vilnius, Lithuania, for the previous couple of years. So arguably I was doing just that.

Let’s have a brief, personalized snapshot of the state of customer service in Lithuania: In the relatively brief time I lived in Vilnius, I had waitresses mocking my speech to one another, supermarket assistants staring me down like I’d just asked them to eat my own excrement, young barmen looking me up and down and checking the label on my clothes before condescending to serve me, young bargirls watching me walk into a deserted bar, whisper something to their coworker as I approached the bar, then walking off leaving me twiddling my thumbs, shop assistants angrily throwing a load of shrapnel change back at me after I’d tried to assist them by giving the correct change on top of bill money, and much more…

…And I was speaking Lithuanian as well as English, depending on when the incident happened, but that seemed to make no difference!

I’ve no reason to assume I had exceptional treatment one way or another and everyone else I knew reported similar stories — or worse.

Now what about Estonia? As stated it was like a cool drink of water at the end of a five-set tennis game. Everyone spoke English (in Tallinn at least). And I mean everyone, not just young philology students who were working in the spare time, and they spoke it to a much higher level than in LT.

But more than that, they were polite (the very first enquiry I ever made was in fact to ask for directions, not to buy something), seemingly sympathetic and largely lacking the brutally surly laxity of any Baltic state beginning with ‘L’ (yes, I spent time in Riga too which, as with most other things, lay somewhere in the middle of the Est-LT customer service continuum)…

So what? You might ask — Estonia’s customer service is generally better than, er, Lithuania’s… That’s the end of it? Isn’t that like the guy who’s in prison for murder saying ‘what about that guy up the corridor, he killed 10 people?!’…

Well one reason why it’s a good comparison is that we’re not looking at apples and oranges here — both countries were absorbed into the USSR at the same time, in the same way, for the same reasons and with the same subsequent experiences.

In case you didn’t know, the USSR was a brutal, highly-centralized command economy, where there was no impetus to be pleasant to customers at all, in the few stores that existed, shortages were the norm and at times just surviving was the only real concern. And I’m talking about the good times here.

There was also, so far as I understand, a thriving black market where it was in theory possible to get your hands on goods not always available in the shops, but the same lack of requirement to bother with niceties I expect prevailed in this case too.

The old system is still alive, sort of

Some of the old mentality of course still survives in Estonia today. A society which can wink at sin — quite literally sometimes.

I once had the vehicle inspection guys put an arbitrary expiry date on the little fire extinguisher (which would be no use on any but the smallest fires) for my car, whilst winking about it to me, or more accurately to my girlfriend of the time. Which raised the question in my mind of what’s the point of having these regulations if circumventing them just becomes a joke.

Not to say we shouldn’t have rules, and in the case of customer service (eg. ‘you HAVE to smile at customers’) maybe this would provide a stop-gap measure for the meantime whilst the bigger issues got ironed out, but the adoption of rules here in practice seems to be mostly arbitrary.

Take the example of pedestrian crossings. Most people will stop for you here in Tallinn at zebra crossings even if it means slamming on the anchors in the wet (though you have to watch out for an occasional Russian for whom trying not to kill someone would be way too much exertion).

That was not the case in Lithuania, where crossings were just white lines painted on the road to be ignored. All good you might think, but I think that people only follow that rule because everyone else does, rather than because they give a flyer about not running someone over.

This arbitrariness can be seen in the case of the use of mobile phones whilst driving. This is technically illegal but noone pays the blindest bit of notice and it’s not enforced to my knowledge.

Naturally old attitudes die hard, with those who actually remember the old system and the hard times that accompanied it, the economic meltdown that led to its destruction, and continued shortages in the early stages of independence for the various former Soviet states (bear in mind we’re only talking 20 years ago).

But this last fact makes all the more remarkable Estonia’s turn around in customer service and many other areas too.

The effects of tourism

I’m by no means the first person to have noticed the difference between Estonia and other parts of the Soviet/Warsaw pact zone; this is often put down to Estonia’s position — it was always the chink in the armour, being on the coast and Tallinn only 80 km from Finland and relative freedom, ‘western’ ideals were bound to percolate through and this increased with tourism especially once (or even before) independence was achieved.

It’s probably true that foreign tourism has acted as a catalyst for presenting a more customer-friendly approach in Tallinn; how many plane-loads of people can a big cruise ship accommodate, I don’t know, but a lot; the relative nearness of the Scandinavian countries in particular bring in far more English speaking-tourists throng the streets of the Old Town, than is the case in Vilnius.

So one factor in Estonia doing well on customer service is just cold, hard cash, at least in Tallinn.

Keeping up with the Jokinens

However, Estonia’s would-be Nordic status comes at the cost of inevitable comparison with those lands.

This brings up the many cracks or imperfections into very sharp relief — they’re having to compare themselves with countries with some of the highest standards of living in the world! Whereas Lithuania has to measure itself up against, er… Belarus…

So in other words the unfavorable comments are almost inevitable.

(North)East is (north)east — it’s a question of culture

Neither of the last two points I raised make one jot of difference to the truth or otherwise of my assertion that Estonia’s customer service is disproportionately maligned.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ve had bad experiences too in Tallinn (and good experiences in Lithuania for that matter). Only last night (!) I stood and watched as the monosyllabic Comarket lady scanned my can of beer twice, then just put it in the basket presumably knowing she’d done that, then had to hold up the Jaanipäev beer-queue as I queried the receipt…Which makes me wonder how much money I’ve thrown away there in the past…

Nonetheless I just feel that the constant cry from those from countries with often very differing consumer cultures isn’t quite justified (the chap in the link above was Spanish — ‘in the Latino countries we gesticulate wildly when we want to make a point’ he says… Er, yeah? And?… You also have ghastly records when it comes to human rights or cruelty to animals, we should be emulating that too?

Moreover, if the standup’s observations I mentioned above ring true with the local populace and foreigners alike, surely that suggests we all get treated the same, nobody gets preferential treatment?

This brings me to my final point. Cultural differences have to be allowed for.

I come from the UK, where the customer is king or queen, or at least is presumed to be, and I all too well remember just how nasty and entitled shoppers could occasionally be there (and I only worked in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of a bookshop in a small, middle-England town!).

But that’s just the way things are there, just as we drive on the left, and it’s much harder to change habits in larger countries.

However, partly for reasons expounded above, the UK approach to customer service is not likely to fly here — and why should it? Are we expats, who came here freely, really to be exalted unto the highest by the host population? Why is our way of customer relations (and everything else) ‘correct’ whilst theirs is wrong?

I know critics of Estonia aren’t asking for the earth — just a little respect or consistency or politeness, but the very fact they aren’t asking for radical change suggests the ‘problem’ isn’t that bad and is well on the way to solving itself…

Lost in translation

Another factor which can cause some consternation at least for English-speakers (ie. everybody here who can’t speak Estonian or Russian fluently) is that what would sound perfectly polite in Estonian comes over as abrupt in English.

For instance English lacks the distinction between formal and informal address which most European languages still have, with Estonian no exception — whereas that shop assistant would undoubtedly address you as ‘te’ (formal) if you could be bothered to learn Estonian properly, rather than the informal ‘sina’, English lacks that distinction.

There are other aspects to the differences between the two languages which are beyond the scope of this piece, but those of us who’ve been here a while know, or at least should know, that when a shop assistant (as happened to me recently when buying some new, pricey running shoes) says to you ‘oh well they’re your feet, only you can say if they’re the right size or not’, that this is merely pragmatism and not a personal slight just because they didn’t gift wrap it up in a whole load of spurious niceties or insincere effusiveness.

So expats, learn Estonian if you’re planning to stay…

Getting better all the time

It’s often reported that the whole area of customer relations is slowly improving, and I think in essence Estonians ‘get’ the idea that it’s something that is done better in other places.

But there is still much to change, in attitudes. I knocked Belarus, above. I didn’t mean to do that — the key difference is that Belarus neither has taken vast quantities of EU money nor does it go swanning around all over the place announcing what a great, forward thinking, Nordic-style country it is.

But here I’m not just talking about local attitudes — outsiders will have to pull their weight too.

Expecting everything to be like it is at home is lame.

From my perspective, for instance there isn’t the vast area of consumer law here in Estonia developed as it is at home for the protection of consumers that there is in the UK.

But even that oddly enough has a positive aspect too — the arbitrariness that exists here has a flip side, which is flexibility. Most of us in the UK are used to interminably long waits for anything to get done, and I’m not going back to that.

Speaking of the UK, whenever I return there on a visit and once the novelty has worn off, the forced chirpiness in newsagents, shops, garages etc. does actually start to grate after a while!

Addressing the cause and not the symptoms

In summing up, I think picking up on ‘customer service’ is addressing surface-level issues and not the root cause, which goes to the heart of the faulty worldview still prevalent here, which in turn goes all the way back to the Soviet experience (and merrily being resurrected by those who would seek to destabilize the country, I’m talking about Russian agents of course).

The symptoms of THIS are, amongst many other phenomena, things like exorbitant prices,surly staff, haggling, arbitrariness as mentioned, a seeming lack of responsibility when it comes to cause and effect, a forced, stilted indifference to anything and everything (Estonians are NOT calm in the least despite the boast, believe me), ‘easy’ credit and all-in-all general unfairness and corruption.

Going back to Belarus, according to statistics there are for instance (slightly) more doctors per capita and twice as many hospital beds per person there than in progressive, EU and NATO, ‘Nordic’ Estonia…

So we need to see clarity and consistency brought to all areas of both public and private life, and not just tack on little bits and pieces that we subjectively want here and there, before we can expect those things to be ingrained.

And in the meantime, I’ll put up with the monosyllabic Comarket lady for as long as it takes…