Adventures In Customer Service

[rapunzel]

When dealing with the public

one has to always be ready for anything, and I mean 'anything.'

My working life is based on lots of public contact and I must say that most of the time people are fine. Unfortunately it is the tiny minority who are not, that tend to invade the consciousness.

I am also a great customer, the best there is in fact. Unless people try to put one over me, are disinterested, take me and my money for granted, or act like they are doing me a favor by doing their job.

We all have tales to tell, but everything cuts both ways. When people come into my workplace they deserve my undivided attention, professionalism and respect, even if they are rude. I have found that approaching every situation with a professional attitude and confidence in my work puts people like that in their place every time.

 

[sdlee]

well said repunzel....

It DOES work both ways.

Since the day I started the adulthood adventure of working I have dealt with over the counter costomer service in one way or another and believe me there is puh-lenty of stupidity on both sides..

...but more over most people are smart and friendly, Most transactions go down fairly smoothly and most people are generally patient.

Having said that I cant resist adding a few zingers I have seen or been involved in.

Do you folks need help or are you beyonde help?

Is this place closed?

I am a costomer bitch!!!

said about supervisor as she was walking away "She can really be a bitch, uhm I mean jerk."
"WHAT DID YOU SAY?!!!"
"I said were itching to get to work!!!"

walmart is going down and your going down with it

what is the qualifications for your job?breathing?

the list can be endless but my most recent favorite comes from a 19 year old clerk who thought a woman buying a douche was actually buying some kind of pet deorderizer and in the way of making friendly conversation says in a loud booming voice "Oh, got a stinky one, huh?"

Were still having trouble talking about that one........
lols somewhat painfully

 

[seeitrun2006]

I worked at Sears for 3 months TOO LONG!

I was laid off from my corporate job in Feb. 2002. Went to work in Sears Lawn and garden department part time in April 2002. I had a lot of good customers and gained a lot of respect from them. Most of them were Latinos.

The thing I learned from the Latino culture is you treat one Latino with excellant customer service they will bring their parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, co-workers to do business with you. I was referred to as Senoir David. They never argued, never knew more then you did, everything was always please and thank you.

The Americans were another story. Give me a discount, always knew more then you <the sales person>, I can get it cheaper somewhere else and you just don't know anything or you just don't care do you? The best was when they would try to use out dated coupons. I had an American woman literally tear her Sears credit card in half with her bare hands because I could not accept her coupon. It clearly said on the back of the coupon "use on anything except lawn and garden". She was buying lawn mower blades. Call the manager, I turning you over to the BBB, I'm going to get you fired, or they would stand around for an hour just fussing and cussing. I was just stand there and smile when I really felt like punching them out!

I'll tell you one thing it made me a better customer. Now if you really want me to go up in smoke give me that "I'm doing you a favor serving you" type attitude and I will call over the manager. My wife and I tip very well for good service. But give us poor service and you will be luckly to get pocket lint from me.

The other thing I literally can't stand is when you call the 1-800-GOTOHELL numbers with the endless list of recordings. Then get to a "HUMAN" and have them say "I'm sorry I'll have to transfer you to another department. At the bank we use to bank at we wanted to upgrade our credit cards for a cheaper rate. I was transferred 6 times. We changed banks after that!

 

[gizmo]

I have worked in restaurants since 1985. A couple of my stories...
1. we used to have a regular customer who ate there almost every day. She was as real complainer, her main argument was that we always had a "special of the day" and she would want another day's special. She could not understand that the ingredients were bought in for that day's special and when it was gone, it was gone. She used to say, "do you know how much money I spend in this place?" as if knowing that would cause some special ingredient for the Friday special to suddenly materialize on a Tuesday.
As she was there so often I invented a pet name for her. She had a huge piled up hairdo of plain white hair. (She was an older woman.) I called her Mrs. White as she reminded me of the character in the board game Cluedo (Clue in USA). The name caught on, we would say to waiters, "could you get Mrs. White's order" and so on. One day the inevitable happened and a waitress said to her, "Hello Mrs. White, how are you today?" The lady was NOT amused.

2. The same place had (still has) a company logo of a lady holding up a fork with the word "lovely" written underneath. At the time the staff uniform for waiters included a t-shirt with the logo approximately over the left breast. One taxi driver called Ivan was known for being sleazy with the waitresses (naturally nicknamed Ivan the Terrible). One day he said to a waitress "the left one is lovely, what do you call the right one?" He was asked never to return after that.

Chris

 

[gyrafoam]

See what happens when pigs fly------------

I LOVE that story. That would have been hilarious although cabin service was not too happy I'm sure.

Has anyone ever wondered what part caffeine plays in our overstressed world? More and more studies are concluding that people driven by the daily ups and downs of caffeine addiction are the ones who tend to "snap".
Suppossedly so many of the morning and late afternoon (i.e. "rush-hour") "road-rage" incidents are because stressed-out people are consuming waaaaay too much caffeine.And that usually occurs beginning in the morning (how many cups?) and then that late afternoon cup 'o Joe, Iced Tea or Cola.
Even worse are those new "super-energy" drinks that contain ridiculous amounts of caffeine. Hell, just a Mountain Dew is loaded with it and the Coca-Cola Company is famous for lacing their drinks with it. Why should an Orange soda contain caffeine? Fanta does!!!

Oh, and then there are the super-caffeine "hustlers" your neighborhood "pushers" like Starbucks,etc.
I'm telling 'ya------it is having a negative effect on us!
Have you noticed how many people's hands are shaking especially in the mornings!

 

[jamiel]

I'm in the middle of an interesting one with Hoover. I bought, a little over a year ago, a Hoover "Z" vacuum on a 75% closeout at Home Depot (still, it was $99). It was Hoover's answer to Dyson...anyway it worked well (but is rather clumsy to use), but I bought it as a curiosity more than a daily-driver. It had a 2 year warranty. It's my upstairs (bedrooms) vacuum.

Fast forward to now. I'm busily vacuuming away and find that one of the screens has pulled away (very slightly) from the mounting, causing a dust leak into the filter. Fixable, with a little epoxy or silicone. I called the local vac repair who said "bring it in". They've had it 2 weeks and have called back to say that there are no parts available for this and that the Hoover rep was out this week on vacation but would be back next week and would call to make a settlement with me...this should be interesting.

Problem is, this is more a curiosity/historical oddity than anything.

 

[whirlcool]

he list can be endless but my most recent favorite comes from a 19 year old clerk who thought a woman buying a douche was actually buying some kind of pet deorderizer and in the way of making friendly conversation says in a loud booming voice "Oh, got a stinky one, huh?"

I loved this one. I would have given ANYTHING to have been there to see the look on the woman's face!

The Pig:
Well, the woman eventually wanted to fly the pig and herself back to PHL on US as they had a round trip ticket. When she arived at the airport she was told that she could NOT take the pig onboard. So she sued US, and had to rent a U-Haul to drive her and the pig back home. US countersued for damage done to their aircraft. It turned out that some of the pig crap couldn't be cleaned and a lot of the carpet and several cushions and wall panels that were damaged had to be replaced.

I told a freind of mine this story, and I got no further than asking him if he had heard of pig onboard the aircraft story. He said no he hadn't heard of it before but had this horrified look on his face. I asked him what was wrong and he said obviously the people at the airport had never dealt with pigs before as if they had they would never had let the pig onboard.
He said "They are like little bulldozers, and when they get angry they can be really mean!"

Has anyone here ever smelled pig poo? Yuck!

Keep em' coming!

 

[saltysam]

Wal-mart! need i say more

Years ago when i was a manager for Wally-World (I'm talkin 25 years ago) it was routine for people to bring in clothes that had clearly been worn for some "special" occasion and demanded that they get their money back because they said they didn't fit! (Hello!! that's why there are dressing rooms people!) Now what was really disgusting is the fact that we would have people actually bring back "used" underwear! Complete with racing stripes! It was DISGUSTING! The customer service counter kept a pair of tongs underneath the counter just for these occasions.........no way were they going to touch a pair of nasty underwear that had been worn..

Like the saying goes "It takes all kinds to make the world go'round" LOL

Thank God I no longer work in retail. I don't have any idea how i survived it for 20 years.....I'll take factory work any day!

Mark

 

[oldhouseman]

The end of the week

is here for me since tomorrow is a holiday. I had only about a half dozen nasty attitudes to deal with this week. Not bad considering the large number of people I work with on a daily basis.

We keep a calendar in the office and mark when it's a full moon. It may sound crazy but we get a high number of difficult and odd people on the week of a full moon.

My most odd case this week was a woman who wanted a copy of her ancestor's confederate service record so she could join the united daughters of the confederacy. Her ancestor deserted shortly after being conscripted in 1862. He came home after the war. Smart fellow I think. Well, that ruined her chances for membership. Now she wants the record closed. HA! Fat chance!

On another note I now have a washer to repair. I got a phone call from my partner today (he had the day off). He broke the door on my Danby frontloading washer. How does one break the door exactly? That should be an interesting story. I hope ordering the part won't be to difficult.

 

[retro-man]

Well after reading this thread yesterday I decided today I would be happy and as polite as I could when dealing with people today. This is my usual practice. Besides my home job we own a hair salon also with 10 stylists, so I get to meet some real "interesting people" as I will put it. The issue today wasn't there but at the state liquor store. I went in to pick up a few bottles for a party were going to on the 4th. This poor cashier is being read a riot act by her manager along with a laudry list of issues to take care of. She had just gotten back from lunch and I was her 1st customer. Well he said did you get all that and when can you get it done. I couldn't hold myself back anymore! I looked at him with a samantha look and said in a loud and demeening voice "AS SOON AS SHE GETS THE BROOM OUT OF HER ASS! He looked at me and was speechless, turned his ass and headed to the back of the store. That poor woman wanted to kiss me. She thanked me several times and said I just made her weekend and after that she had such a big smile on her face. She was going to tell everybody at work and over the 4th about it. I felt good to help her out. What an ass this guy was.
Jon

 

[saltysam]

What an ass this guy was.

GO JON! I love it when someone puts an ass in its place!

Mark

 

[neptunebob]

Whirlcool, I agree with you about books from the 80's - it seemed that decade created a lot of greed and other bad traits.

Panthera, are you some kind of professor? You sound like one. Do you ever teach any business or MBA classes? I had some business classes (human resoruces was the worst) and sometimes I felt like we were obnoxious people in training!

 

[panthera]

Bob,

You caught me out. Yes, I teach at a small technical university here in Munich.
The last two semesters were a break, this fall I shall again be teaching "Business English" to future MBAs in their larval form.
Nothing and no-one has done as much harm to the middle class and the capitalist system of value addition as has this MBA mentality of the last 20 years. What the god damned communists didn't manage to do, these assholes are doing.

 

[neptunebob]

Oh, I feel for you...

I have to ask, are most of the students in that class obnoxioius? Everyone I ever knew who had one of those degrees was a Mean Bear Always. I once had a director of a medical records dept with a degress in Health Systems Administration (sounds like an MBA) who still cannot spell so I wonder if you have a hard time teaching them?

Given a choice of classes, would you teach Business English to business people or Shakespeare English (or whatever it is called) to actors and actresses? At least the classes would have a lot more drama!

 

[panthera]

The folks coming back to school after several years working

re-entering the workforce after raising kids are all a dream. In their late 30's, 40's, sometimes 50's, they are mature, clever, creative and want the MBA so they can fight back on equal terms.

The BWL students (Betriebswirtschaftslehre=Business Major) are by and large the worst. The classes with engineers, former housewives, soldiers on their last tour of duty, Americans (get an awful lot of them, cheaper to study here) and, of course, the "hard" science background folks are fun. We are "per Du" and we all just have a wonderful time. They usually also go on to get the best marks in all their courses.
The BWL students are, with exceptions (one out of 500), pompous, resentful that they have to take English (they also resent all the other courses), insist on being referred to by their last names...so I make them use my full title, von und zu and may the gods help them if they forget it. The other classes get to ask questions, these folks have to enter their questions into the system and wait for me to call them up on the screen. I then decide whether they are of general interest and worthy of answer or not.
After two, occasionally three sessions of this, they lose the stick up their asses, we go to first names and they act almost human. Paradoxically, the BWL students, despite already having a business degree, have a consistently lower GPA at graduation than do the other groups.
As time has gone on, things have gotten better because my reputation proceeds me. They know that my students do well in the finals; they also know that you can't push me around. I once had an entire group of 17 cheat on an exam. They didn't think I would fail all of them, the paperwork would be prohibitive.
I failed them.
Enough about me, so tell me, what do YOU think of me?
Seriously, what's your experience been? You teach as well, no?

Oh, to answer the question. Hmm, I have coached actors upon occasion on red-nex accents (my natural English). They are usually quick studies and nice people. As opposed to stars. Guess I don't much care, 'long as I can learn something new at the same time.

 

[ptcruiser51]

retired after 31 years at the phone company

most of it in customer service. There isn't enough bandwidth here to share the abuse I received from both customers and the company itself! One has to realize that we dealt with the general public in the broadest sense: The cretins who cut you off on the exit ramp; the senile citizens with expired coupons in front of you at the supermarket; the scumbags responsible for 9/11 - yes, they all have phones. I at one time worked in the payment office (when we had them) where customers could also turn in/pick up equipment. Phones choked with roaches. Equipment thrown at me. Lactating welfare mothers paying their bill with wet fives pulled out of their bras. Children wetting (or worse) on the floor. Paint-peeling body odor. I've been called everything imaginable. Our office used to compile these atrocities in a loose-leaf book, when someone retired they got a xerox copy of it to remember "those good times".

Now I work at The Home Depot (selling appliances, of course) and it's truly a great place IMHO. Most customers are fine, some are clueless but do appreciate the help I offer. The worst experience in 4+ years was a slob who sneezed on me - got me from my hair all the way to my shoe. I left the floor immediately in my apron, drove home (1 mi.), showered and changed clothes. My boss was waiting when I got back, fuming. I vividly explained what happened and she visibly gagged. Not another word was said... It's a fun job when you love your merchandise!

 

[foraloysius]

I'm coaching unemployed people and have been in other jobs dealing with the public too for over fifteen years now. I can only say it never gets boring!!

In the building I work there is also an office that deals with people with debts. Most clients get a settlement with their creditors and they are on minimal benefits for three years. Last week there was noone at the desk and a client took the opportunity to climb over it and steal a bag that looked like a camera bag. He must have thought it was a big catch but the bag only contained some old Tupperware stuff. His whole action was filmed and his settlement was cancelled. He is not allowed to enter the building anymore and he is also not allowed to call. A complaint was filed to the police for stealing that bag. Boy, will he be sorry that he took that bag, his creditors will soon be all over him!!

 

[neptunebob]

No, I am not a teacher, but will try to explain...

Back when I was young I went to a community college, which is the first 2 years of a college education here and took general college courses like math, English, and some accounting. It was when I transferred to a small 4 year college outside of Pittsburgh that I ran into a bad situation that I did not know about until I started classes. I was thinking of business becuase I wanted to work in an office and wear a suit (people dressed better in the 80s) but a 4 year college is different. It is no place to learn a subject for the first time and if you go to less than the best high school or do not have experience I did have a hard time. I started taking businss classes with human resources - ohhh, was it nasty! Some of the classes were "circle classes" - everyone would sit in a circle with the teacher in the middle, often complaining about their management job at Westinghouse and the young students were lost. There was also a lot of the professor giving his opinion, usually a nasty one, about their work, the school, the goverment, etc. But his opinion is not on a test and a lot of people did not do well. THis was also when I lived in a nightmare of a dorm with constant noise, could not get any sleep, the food was horrid, and when my dad called the dean about this the dean told him he did not raise me properly!. That is when Dad let me out of there - he wasnted me to stick it out because his generation said that "when you start something you finish it" but this would have been like finishing a bad movie.

I later worked in medical offices and picked up medical transcription and am so glad I work from home now. Anyway, what I saw above is why I think that business people and MBAs are obnoxious people in training. It seems like you don't learn much because all you hear is their opinion so when the parents ask "what did you learn in school today" (which few parents ask but mine did) there is not much to tell them. Today, I see many ads in the paper for colleges to have people get their MBA and advance in the company, but no ad tells what subjects you might learn there, yet I am sure a lot of people will go. It's just that it seems that everyone I know who has this type of degree is just miserable and obnoxious, so I hope you are not teaching obnoxious people in training.

I later went back to school to study nursing and I noticed another obnoxious subject that makes me glad I don't have kids: Elementary schoolteacher students. Most of the girls who chose education would tell me it was "because chemistry is too hard" and some of them were first class b-----s!

 

[perc-o-prince]

In the building I work there is also an office that deals wi

"Most clients get a settlement with their creditors and they are on minimal benefits for three years."

I thought this was something that only happened here in the US. So, basically, I can go out and charge a bunch of stuff that I have, or can make, open credit for, then make a deal with the creditors to only pay part of it back. In essence, I get all the "stuff" for less than the price that was charged (made my own sale price), don't have to pay interest, and just have to be careful for a few years.

Whatever happened to paying for things you bought or they get taken away?

The other travesty is when I see the commercial for "local phone service" that you can get, and the offering company doesn't care if you have an outstanding bill with THE phone company. Wow!

Sorry if this was a little off-topic for the thead, but it still speaks to the rudeness, carelessness, brazenness and self-centeredness of some people.

Chuck

 

[foraloysius]

"So, basically, I can go out and charge a bunch of stuff that I have, or can make, open credit for, then make a deal with the creditors to only pay part of it back. In essence, I get all the "stuff" for less than the price that was charged (made my own sale price), don't have to pay interest, and just have to be careful for a few years."

No, it's not that easy. The creditors must agree with it. Only when the creditors agree it is possible to get a settlement. When they don't the client must pay all his debts off. Overhere in the Netherlands we hardly use creditcards so it doesn't concern that many people as it probably would in the USA.