Performing Customer Service Workshop
Are you a student with experience of working in customer service? Whether you’ve worked in shops, pubs, restaurants or bars…does it sometimes feel like you’re putting on an act for customers?
Performing Customer Service is an upcoming interdisciplinary workshop that will explore how customer service employees are expected to demonstrate certain predetermined behaviours and emotions – just as an actor would learn their lines, wear a costume and exhibit specific characteristics in order to play their part. This workshop will how these "performances" are constructed through the expectations of various "audiences" including customers, managers, colleagues and employers. It will also examine how performing this role can impact (and be impacted by) the emotional and economic wellbeing of the employee.
Run by Dr Ian Farnell (IATL; Theatre & Performance Studies), this workshop will introduce you to some key theories that can be used to examine how these roles may be understood as performances. We'll consider how these performances are shaped by the commercial, hierarchical and public-facing nature of this work. And we'll also apply some of these concepts to our wider lives, such as the ways in which your discipline and your identity may perform themselves.
Performing Customer Service will take place on Wednesday 10th May, 12-3pm in OC1.02. If you would like to register your attendance at this workshop, please click here and fill out the form. We are especially interested in hearing from students with present or previous experience of customer service employment (such as retail and hospitality). If you have any questions about this workshop, please email Ian directly.