“Just bring everything you could need,” my mom stressed through speaker phone as I scrambled to put together the endless stream of paperwork for my brother’s and my applications for a French passport renewal. She has decades of experience with both the French and American processing systems and has acquired a lot of knowledge on how to handle these interactions. So I brought a readied mind to this experience, ready to learn how to navigate these new waters for myself. Before this moment, I believed the two countries shared a lot in common as they are both connected through a love for food, family, and freedom. But I faced a stark awakening when I learned that France and America could not be more different when it comes to the field of customer service.
In America, we put our customers on a pedestal; a paying consumer’s needs are always the top priority, and are constantly attended to by eager employees ready to be of service. In the United States, it is a societal norm that we look down on poor customer service and this lack of integrity contributes largely to the credibility of companies in most fields. In France, the customers are not nearly as lucky. In most small French towns, the entire economy shuts down between 11 am and 2 pm for diner (translated to “lunch” in English) besides a straggling supermarché, pharmacie or restaurant. Want to purchase some meat from the roasted chicken guy? Need a stick of glue to finish that project? Better wait until after the long lunch. Once you finally arrive, the level of service compliments the town’s work sentiment. The combination of sharp tone, slow-moving lines, and endless streams of paperwork that is would tic every New Yorker’s Achilles’ heal of angry impatience for incompetence.
I opened the door to the French embassy–the same place I had arrived at one month earlier attempting to make an appointment in-person and was curtly turned away at the threshold–and so this time I was prepared for the worst. Fortunately, I was presently surprised. After passing the impolite doorman, and a gaggle of security guards, we only had to wait a record five minutes in line! An agent assisted us through the process, letting us know which documents were needed to supplement the pile that we had brought with us. Luckily my mom had them on her computer hard drive! In conversation, the agent mentioned her daughter who lives in Paris and so I brought up my interest in living there this summer. She eagerly put me in contact with her daughter and I stood there awestruck wondering where these rays of kindness had magically appeared from?
France and America may share a love for food, family, and freedom, but that is not all they have in common. Before, having embarked on this odyssey to renew my passport, I had believed that the two painfully juxtapose each other in every way when it comes to their values of customer service. However, during my time at the Embassy, I learned of something new that both the French and Americans share: a knack for impatience and flashes of kindness. This experience taught me that there there are similarities in even our greatest differences.
