I am sick to DEATH of shitty customer service

The BBQ Pit
1

I was raised in Nebraska.

I spent most of my 20’s in the South.

Both fairly socially gracious and friendly places. I learned how to interact with people there. Thus, I am gracious, friendly, and flexible in my dealings with customer service people, clerks, waitresses, etc. (Because it’s the right thing to do, and I’ve been all of these things in my working history.)

But I swear to god if I hear, “Because that’s our policy” one more fucking time I’m going start clubbing people with my purse.

I am sick to death of the tellers at my bank who blow me off and let me stand there when I know that they saw me.

I’m sick of inconsistent policies that treat me like I’m the enemy. Of my bank not seeing the ridiculousness of not requiring ID if I deposit a third party check and get cash back, but having to get a supervisor’s approval if I just want to cash it outright (because my ID is from NE.)

I’m sick of bank’s doing stupid shit like dinging my account for that check (okay, putting a “hold” on my account, which may be common, but I’VE never seen it before) and when I call for an explanation I get “Because that’s our policy”.

I’m sick of the fact that CTA is clearly dinging my account twice for my Chicago Plus Card (if my balance goes below $10, they’re supposed to automatically withdraw $10 out of my checking account) and when I call to fix it I get bullshit like “Because that’s our policy”.

I’m sick of the surly cashiers at Walgreen’s. I’m sick of the surly, rude, and slow counter staff and cashier’s at The Corner Bakery by my work.

I’m sick of fuck-ups and hassles with day to day stuff every goddamn time I turn around, so much so that I am coming to dread having to interact with any customer service personel of any stripe because I know it’s going to fucking drive me apeshit crazy. I’m sick of the attitude. I’m sick of the stonewalling. I’m sick of getting dickled-and-dimed like crazy over every. little. fucking. thing.

I’m tired of the siege every-man-for-himself mentality all over the place. And how, after months of this, I find myself primed for aggression all the goddamn time.

Because being gracious and flexible don’t mean dick.

::deep cleansing breath::

2

I have found, in general, that there are “yes” clerks and “no” clerks. For every polite customer driven to near-homicidal rage by a “no” clerk, there is a “yes” clerk who needs to take blood pressure medication because of impolite customers. If your clerk is a “no” clerk, just say to them,

"Look, I didn’t come here to quibble over your checklist, and I don’t feel like you’re really interested in helping me here. Can I talk to your manager?"

If they don’t let you, then just call back or go to a different clerk. Managers get where they are by… well, sometimes they get there for good reasons. Eventually if you climb the management tree, you will find someone who is a “yes” clerk, or was one at some point in their life. They will help you.

If you come across a business staffed with “no” clerks, leave. Run don’t walk. Take your money out of that bank. The interest you’re making is not worth it–any bank that staffs its branches with “no” clerks in this economy is asking for trouble.

3

You do get that the people who say “because that’s our policy” generally have absolutely no say over that policy, right?

As someone who more times than I care to remember have had to fall back on the “it’s policy” defense, I agree with you that it’s a shitty answer and it’s the last fallback answer someone should be giving. I’m sorry that you don’t like the answer but sometimes it’s the only answer we have, and we don’t have the power to change or override it. Customers are simply not important enough to me to risk losing my job by making exceptions to company policy that I’m not allowed to make.

4

I understand that completely.

I worked as a customer service rep in a call center for years, as a cashier for years, and as a waitress. I also managed service reps for years.

Not having a service attitude is unacceptable. There are ways to put things that explain truths to customers without pissing them off. There are ways to handle service challenges without pouring fuel on the fire. There are ways to begin the interaction with a customer from the get-go that tend to engender a positive interaction. I do these things myself on both sides of the fence and have trained others to do the same.

But if you are going to give me a fuck-off attitude from the beginning and only get more pissy as the conversation goes on… well… after getting that from all corners, it seems, my feeling is I want to club you with my purse.

I come from polite stock. I was raised in polite communities. My service ethic is and has always been that treating people with respect is paramount. I used to assume I’d get the same. And really bad customer service situations used to be so very, very rare that I was shocked when they happened.

But now it seems to be happening every where, all the time, regardless of the issue or how I present it/myself.

That’s all I’m saying. And I’m sick of it.

5

As much as you may feel you’re getting shitty customer service, I can only say it’s a good thing you don’t live abroad.

6

As a waitress, who does customer service every day, I will never understand why people do these jobs if they don’t want to help the customer. Granted, there are plenty of times that my customers make me really really angry, but in general I enjoy helping people. If I didn’t, this job would suck. Why do people do these jobs if they don’t want to help people?

As for the “that’s our policy” BS, I also have to deal with company policies. But I generally find creative ways to work around them. It makes my job more interesting. I actually really enjoy helping people who can’t find what they want on the menu, so I can help them make something up. Any chance I get to use my brain in a sometimes monotonous job.

Anyway, niblet, it really stinks that you’re getting treated that way. I would take my money else where, if I were you.

7

Hell, everyone has bad days. And I can only imagine the crapola those guys have to put up with (a customer once told me my last name was “stupid” when I was working phones), but I’m sympathetic, I swear! Just don’t treat me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

8

When I was working at Wal-Mart [warning, cliche approaching], if I had gotten a dollar every time I had to tell a customer, “That’s our policy”, I could have retired a very wealthy woman [ok, cliche is over, we now return you to your regularly scheduled post.]

See, the thing is, it was policy. It was policy to have to get a supervisor to suspend a transaction for a customer who got to the register and realized he had left his wallet in his other pants- because if we could do it on our own, we might have “integrity issues”. It was policy to have to get a supervisor if the magnetic stripe on a credit (or worse, debit) card didn’t work and we had to key the number in by hand. Most department stores I know of allow clerks to do this without supervisors’ approval, but Wal-Mart assumes all their employees are thieves. I couldn’t knock 10% off the price of a damaged item, even if it was the last one on the shelf because, well, we can’t just let our cashiers be giving out discounts to all and sundry. I worked as a temp at L.S. Ayers years ago, and they trained the sales clerks to do exactly that. Multiply this by about a dozen little customer servicey things I wasn’t allowed to do because it might cause “integrity issues” on the part of the cashier, then by about a hundred customers a day who needed these little services, then by all the people stuck standing in line behind them because sometimes it took as long as ten minutes for a CSM to respond to my call, and couldn’t even ring the rest of a customer’s purchase because by punching in the code to summon a CSM, I had effectively shut down all of the register’s functions (apparently, the programmers weren’t capable of writing a subroutine that would allow me to finish ringing a purchase while I waited for a CSM). Hell, sometimes the CSM wouldn’t come at all, even when I paged them on the overhead after keeping the customer waiting some unreasonably long period of time, then paged again, and again…

then went around the counter to help other customers pile their items back into their carts so they could go to another checkout stand because they were tired of waiting for someone to come and make my register useful again, apologizing profusely all the while…

See, there really are lots of customer service-type folks who really do want to give service, but our hands are tied by company policies that prevent us from doing so. Eventually the employee becomes frustrated, then jaded, and eventually quits giving a fuck, which is what the employer wants, because they really aren’t interested in customer service, they are interested in moving as much merchandise out the door as possible, and spending a few seconds on customer service impedes that merchandise flow, and the inflow of cash that comes with it. So, for a clerk/cashier/teller/whatever to say, “Sorry, I can’t do that, it’s policy” and keep ringing purchases keeps that exchange of merchandise for money moving along at a merry clip. Of course, when the company loses business because the customers get fed up with the lousy service (frequently abandoning cartloads of merchandise in the aisle in front of the checkout lanes) and decide to go spend their money somewhere else, then some asshat in Bentonville looks at the sales figures, then at the payroll figures, decides that the store is overstaffed because the payroll to sales ratio is too high, orders the store to lay people off, which means customer service gets even worse, which means the store loses more business, which means a higher payroll to sales ratio, which means…

Wal-Mart is doomed. It may take a few years, maybe as long as a decade, but eventually the service cuts to keep prices low cycle will create exactly the same kind of economic vortex that K-mart was sucked through. Meanwhile, Mom and I do our non-grocery shopping at Target, where there is always a sales person on the floor to help us, the lines are not long, and the stores are nearly devoid of customers. I think that Target would do well to try to struggle along without cutting staff, because they are starting to get a steady trickle of customers who got fed up with Wal-Mart and decided that paying an extra coupla bucks for that pair of jeans is worth it for the service and the not having to wait half an hour or longer in line to purchase them. Oh, yeah, and the clean floors in the store, and the not being hassled by “people greeters”…

9

I feel your pain. It’s a different workforce these days.

Went into a Pizza Hut not to long ago as a part of a party of four for a quick lunch.
Lunch hours had just begun and we were the first to enter the restaurant. We literally stood at the counter for 10 minutes while 4 or 5 employees prepped, etc within sight just to the rear of the counter in the kitchen area. We could see them. They could have seen us if they hadn’t have had theiir heads up their butts.

Finally an idiot with a manager’s name tage comes up wiping his hands on a towel and says something to the effect of “Like wow, I guess you guys want to eat or something?” Normally we would have left but we didn’t have much time and decided to make the best of it.

Then after being seated Little Suzy Bitchface comes out to take our order. Very cute, 19-20ish looking girl with an absolutely Stepford demeanor about her who didn’t offer menus, salutations or anything much at all. During out 10 minute lag we had all memorized the menu above the counter and knew what we wanted so we began reciting and Suzy just looked and nodded at each of us and literally wandered off.

Way too long later she returns with a tray of our personal pan pizzas and breadsticks. 4 people, four ppps. I had ordered a side salad in lieu of breadsticks for .50 extra but got breadsticks. After she had placed our food before us and was hovering for an instant with an “I hope you choke on it” look I half raised my hand and said “Excuse me. I ordered the side salad instead of breadsticks” (we’re the only four people here. wonder why) and she just looks at me like “So What?” and gives a little nod of her head. Literally like “Look I just work here. Your getting the damn breadsticks now shut up and eat.” That’s basically what I did seeing as how there was obviously no intelligent life employed in the whole place and I just basically wanted a quick bite of something. It wasn’t worth it and I didn’t have the time. Never offered so much as an apology and just wandered off again. We paid this very same idiot on the way out and she was still just as sullen.

It’s not like we were drunk or anything. We were as presentable and well behaved as your average patron but our service was absolutely shitty to non-existent.

10

And today in obvious land, we learn exactly what “minimum wage employee” entails.

We also learn that low prices are more important to most people than good customer service, and that companies are smart enough to realize that, and adjust accordingly.

11

Because some of us want to do selfish things like eat and pay rent.

12

As a retail manager in a small store well known for outstanding customer service, let me tell you what I perceive to be a sad truth:

Customer service is not going to get better, instead it will continue to get worse.

Poor customer service is not the fault of bad managers, bad employees or even bad customers.

The problem is cultural. We value price over service. We’re easily pissed of at one another. We don’t look highly on service jobs or the people who work them. We’ve raised a generation of workers with low self esteem more concerned with “respect” than customer excellence. Look at all the angry anti-retail worker/anti-customer threads that keep coming up over and over and over here in the Pit. All anyone can do is bitch because we don’t have any meaningful way to alter the downward spiral. It’s sad.

If you really want to improve the situation, go all out to support good customer service business and don’t give a damn how much it costs. Get a majority of others to do the same. Then, we in retail could pay the good people decent wages and fire all crumby service employees.

Reality: The market supports “shitty” customer service. If the market did not support crumby customer service, it would diminish.

13

But there is no requirement that you work in a service position in order to do so, especially if you have a chip on your shoulder about your work or about dealing with the public. It’s not only in the best interests of the public if you find another way to make money, it’s in yours.

14

And what if you don’t meet the requirements for other jobs? Yeah you can work in a cookie factory but not everyone can do that. Sometimes the only job you can really find is customer service of some kind.

Now I don’t mind working customer service, in fact I do enjoy it as long as I don’t get too many asshole customers. That doesn’t stop me from joining in those anti-customer threads because yeah I DO have bad experiences and they stick out in my mind. But overall I enjoyed my work.

But it’s tough to find a job doing anything else without being trained in that and you have to pay for college somehow, right?

15

Ahhh, don’t take it like that. I’ve been working in a restaurant for three years, I deal with the customers every day. But I see people I work with, and I honestly don’t know why they do this to themselves. They hate the customers. All the time. There are other jobs, if you totally and completely hate every aspect of your job, and refuse to do anything in your job description, why not find another job?

A guy I work with, when he left tonight, he said, I hope this whole place and everyone in it go to hell, and I just thought, if you really feel that way, why on earth would you drag yourself through it every day? Find another freaking job, it’s not hard. And if you can’t, and you have to work there to pay your bills, and there are no other options, than suck it up, say it’s worth having a place to sleep at night, and do it. Don’t be rude and take it out on everyone around you.

16

Then you need to do yourself the favor of cleaning up your act while you attempt to improve your abilities. You don’t do yourself any favors by acting like the people who keep you employed – the customers – are such a hassle and burden to you. Check your attitude and your problems at the door, do an honest day’s work and go home.

No one is denying that there are asshole customers. (Though I understand that sometimes you’ve had enough and you lose it, I can’t understand sinking to the asshoel customer’s level in general.) But this isn’t about asshole customers, this is about people in service positions, of all kinds, who act like it’s a major imposition to simply do their damned jobs. That’s not you, OF, and not most Dopers in such positions, but you cannot deny that these people exist.

17

snort I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science so I can be a programmer, and I’m working in… tech support. Tech support is all about telling a pissed off customer something they don’t want to hear to get their gizmo fixed. Sometimes it’s, “Sorry, the problem isn’t the gizmo, it’s the widget, you have to call the widget people.” Or “Sorry, that’s gonna cost you extra.” Or “Sorry, I don’t know, we’ll have to research that and get back to you.” Yeah, sometimes it’s stonewalling, but sometimes it’s the damn truth. I personally don’t stonewall, but customers sometimes think I do and then it gets hairy.

18

TeaElle, I certainly don’t deny these people exist. Which I lament when I find such people. Having worked in retail far more than I prefer (which is why I AM going to college this fall) I have a fairly lenient attitude towards the workers. I cut them a lot of slack. But I was always polite and helpful even when I was dead tired, run ragged and ready to be sick in the nearest garbage can from morning sickness.

Usually I find cutting slack gets me better service but sometimes… Ooo I just want to smack these people. Those are the ones that REALLY need to go to work at the cookie factory. That way they don’t deal with customers.

sturmhawke: I do realize not everyone works in their field of choice… in fact a lot of people don’t. But I find even if you don’t have a degree in that field just by going to college you have slightly better options than a high school grad. I’ve worked with a few recent uni/college grads, enough to know it’s not always easy.

19

I hope you can understand that I wasn’t born with qualifications. But I am currently at uni and am in the process of getting some. However, since we live in a capitalist society, I need money to support me while I gain those qualifications. I’m sure it may shock you, but working minimum wage customer service positions for the rest of my life does not hold the same appeal it holds for you. But, while I’m in my unqualified state, the only jobs available that require minimal skill and have the necessary flexibility to fit around my education commitments are customer service jobs. I’m not going to give more than I have to for a job that doesn’t pay very well, has no long-term prospects and isn’t a terribly wonderful working environment. I hate to bring you down from your ditzy-waitress-“service-with-a-smile” paradise, but the rest of us live in the real world.

(I also know that in the real world, the company is going to be pretty pissed if I start coming up with creative ways to get around their company policies.)

20

Truer words were never spoken. Of course, this is the case because dealing with the public is a huge pain in the ass, and so it is where the most vacancies would be because when people can flee this industry, they do.

Amen.