Bad customer!, No Donut!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Free advice to customers, just because I was nice to you one time, DOES NOT give you carte blanche to come in and demand I fix your machine again RIGHT NOW, DROP EVERYTHING AND FIX…MY…MACHINE!

Quick backstory, we had a customer (lets call him Jerky McJerkeson) that came in last week with a “dead pixel” on his brand new iMac (aluminum case), we were having a good day that day, and I was in a good mood, so I put it on the bench to take a quick look at it, turns out all it was was an especially tenacious speck of dust, which I removed and sent the customer on his way, total elapsed time, 5 minutes tops

today, the same customer storms in, DEMANDS that we put his machine on the bench right away because he has “more spots” and he wants them fixed NOW…

I was just walking in from buying my late lunch (3:45 PM) over at Quiznos, I hadn’t even begun to sit down and take the food out of the bag, and he was pulling a prima-donna act, wanting me to fix his stupid machine NOW

thankfully, the store manager was able to run interference, tell the customer I was eating lunch and to come back in an hour

Jerky McJerkeson goes out and sits in his car for an hour, glaring daggers at us (awww. poor widdle baby, didn’t get his way and now has to wait, sucks to be you)

I have a leisurely lunch, fully enjoying the waves of anger pouring in from outside as Jerky stews in his own seething, after about an hour and ten minutes, we let him back in

he’s a little more humble now, seems like he doesn’t have the stones to pull that attitude on ME, I quietly put the machine on the bench, advising him that if it’s anything more than dust, he has to check it in for service…

turns out, there’s a couple of tiny dings in the glass panel, so therefore, it needs to be checked in for repair, the dings are tiny, barely pin-point size, yet he still wants the machine fixed

He now has no choice but to check it in, he’s in MY world now, and since he was being such a jerk, I’m unwilling to bend the rules for him, the machine gets checked in by-the-book, he has to fill out our “CYA” drop-off form, to read, comprehend, and check off all the pertinent checkboxes, he’s getting no breaks here, I advise him that it’ll be checked into the queue, which is currently running a 4 business day backlog, and I’ll call him when it’s done

just as he leaves, I advise him that it’s possible that Apple MIGHT decline warranty coverage of this repair, as it’s a cosmetic issue only, and I’ll call him if this is the case

with the check-in completed, he leaves the store, shoulders slumped, head bowed in sadness, defeated, he didn’t get his way, he thanks us for trying a quick fix, and leaves the store, no apologies for his earlier behavior, gets in his car, angrily slams his door, throws his car in reverse…

and almost gets the back end of his car taken off by another car he clearly did not see approaching him until the last minute

I love it when I witness serindipitous events, it almost made up for Jerky’s earlier attitude

2

Remind me not to shop at your store.

3

Conversely, we had a GREAT customer come in yesterday…
he had backed up his machine before bringing it in, and verified his backup was bootable and functioning
He had run Apple Hardware Test, AND had notes of the failure states encountered
He has a backup computer he’s using in the interim
He filled out our CYA form with nary a peep
He was okay with the 4 business day backlog
He thanked us for helping him out
He had done everything perfectly…

We told him “we like customers like you, can we clone you? ;)”
His machine was on the bench within the hour, he made our jobs easier, so he gets the “good customer” treatment

** actual backlog time is much much less, but the minimum customer quote is 4 business days

4

God I hate customers.

5

Ethan, if you pull the snobby “Prima Donna” routine, treating employees like dirt, please feel free to take your business elsewhere, Jerky McJerkeson was being unreasonable and confrontational, expecting us to drop everything just because he was “gracing us with his presence”, if he came in minus the attitude, he wouldn’t have gotten the “by the book” treatment

you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, don’t piss off people who are here to help you, we’re not your personal servants

6

In my store, an attitude like that would get you fired.
I have a sign up “Customers are not an interruption, they are the reason we open the doors.”

7

I second this to the nth degree. When I worked at <name removed to protect the evil> wireless, although it was policy to basically charge the customer for every little thing (you want to make a payment over the phone? $15, wanna change your plan? $15, etc etc) if the customer was acting like a decent human being, I’d waive that charge in a heartbeat.

Where I work now, we usually pick up the freight on orders over $500. Sales have slumped, so we’re running a special for FF at $300. Yesterday, I had two calls where the customer was within $40 of $300 and had over $40 in freight – one customer was a sweetheart and was told about the special. The other was an entitled see ya next tuesday and paid freight :smiley:

Even at my worst, I am never abusive to call center employees, retail employees or waitstaff unless/until they start the game.

Which reminds me of a funny thing that happened one morning at my favourite $tarbucks store. They were pretty well slammed (which, as I am there at the same time each day, I know was unusual) and therefore understaffed. A cuntstomer started bitching at the barista about how she’d “never been in a store so poorly staffed” and “why aren’t you putting names on the cups, every other store does!” My darling barista (who is absolutely gorgeous, sweet and the biggest flirt ever created) was taking the abuse without making excuses, just the “I am so sorry, we are working on getting the orders out, just another moment” act, when I (and apparently 3 other customers) had had enough of her. I couldn’t stop myself and said, “you know, if this store is so horrible, you can leave. I am sure the barista wouldn’t mind. As for me, I will personally refund your money if you will just shut the fuck up.” The other 3 customers started pulling money out of their pockets and offered to help me pay her to leave. Seriously, no one is forcing you to stand there and wait – if it’s beyond your ability to do so, just make your own godsdamned coffee at home!

8

I would rather go to MacTech’s shop than yours.

9

Ethan, I DID NOT do anything the customer could take offense at, I am not rude to customers (I just wish the opposite was true) in fact, my manager was a little annoyed that I put the machine on the bench for a quick check in the first place, he wanted me to simply check it in this time, the customer was the one being unreasonable here, he pulled a major attitude on the manager when I was over buying lunch

besides, it’s more fun to vent in here, better than venting on the customer

10

I thought Macs never had problems. Macs NEVER crash is all I ever hear about them.

11

That sign does not give customers an excuse to be either rude or condescending. Who knows what may have happened if the customer showed the base respect one human being should have for any other - perhaps then MacTech may have put his sandwich to the side, helped him, and then ate. Too many stores ‘train’ customers to be raging assholes by acquiescing to raging assholes and shafting anyone who isn’t a rectal orifice. Those stores are sending the wrong messages.

12

Bingo!, done it many times before, will keep on doing it whenever possible, lunch can be reheated, that’s what microwaves are for

treat me like a human being, and I’ll do whatever it takes to fix your machine, treat me like your servant, and you get just the bare minimum to finish the job within Apple spec, nothing more

oh and the fallacy that Macs never fail, LIES, all of it, LIES!!, that’s just a side effect of His Steveness’s Reality Distortion Field, Macs are hardware based computing devices and have just as much of a chance of hardware failure as an equivalent pc, the Mac OS does have less instability than windows, yes, but the hardware itself is no different, mechanically, from any other computer

And that’s the Straight Dope…

13

The laptop in this case wasn’t crashed - on the first time in the shop, it was dusty. On the second time? Eh, sounds like the owner dinged the screen somehow.

My iMac runs 24/7 and hasn’t crashed in oh, 19 months or so. (It only gets a reboot after the occasional patch that needs a reboot.) Safari has choked a couple times, needing a force-quit, but Internet Exploder crashes more in a week on my work PC than Safari has ever crapped out on my iMac in 19 months.

But, the stability of my Mac is neither here nor there - this is a thread about unpleasant customers, and how store managers will either support their employees or leave them twisting in the wind.

Remind me not to go to any shop that doesn’t back up its employees when they have to deal with difficult customers.

14

Yes and no.

Some customers simply are not worth the time and energy required to deal with them. We can and have given (rare) customers their walking papers because they were unreasonable to deal with. If you allow a customer to walk all over you and yell their way to the top of queues, good customers are being punished and your staff is being abused.

Let me give you an example. I work in tech support, and we just launched a product. We have a rare, but known issue that is currently unsolvable but that our development team is working hard to fix. It affected about ten people, and we have been nothing but apologetic to every person affected.

Nine people have been relatively understanding that the fix is not immediate, and we check in with them every day or two with possible fixes or updates.

One person is a complete nuthouse. He has called us at least twenty or thirty times, and has sent us as many emails. The person working on the issue gave him his name, so he calls for this guy every day - at least three or four times a day. He wants the guy to constantly re-explain the problem and drills him for information. When our guy let him know of an unrelated but nasty system problem that we saw during diagnosis, he started calling him non-stop trying to get him to give tons of info about the problem (even after being explained multiple times that it was just intended as a friendly heads-up, and isn’t related to our software). When that person stopped taking his calls, he began drilling any employee he could get as to when that person would call him, if he was at his desk, why he won’t call back, etc. etc. and refuses to be transferred to voice mail. Note that we’ve offered him his money back several times and he refuses (and this product is not business software or in any way critical).

The second person is wasting our time. Normally we would never shunt a customer to voice mail when he calls but he is not a customer anymore, he is a pest. He has met and exceeded any profit for us ages ago and is simply wasting our time. He admitted to another employee that he is acting this way on purpose since he believes pushing really hard is the way to get results. Net result: he is given the bare minimum of courtesy, but his calls will not get returned, his extended email missives will not be responded to other than a one or two sentence “we’re working on it”.

Frankly, if it wasn’t for the fact that the guy is polite (and never rude or condescending), he would have been issued a refund and told to fob off one way or the other. We have had others who crossed the line too many times, and we don’t tolerate people who think that it’s okay to abuse our staff. That’s how companies KEEP good staff.

15

Looooong time ago, in 1991, I was at a McDonald’s when a couple came in and ordered at the counter. Apparently the guy ordered something special (like “hold the whatever” or “extra whatever” or something that meant they had to make it for him) and he got ridiculously irate that it wasn’t instantly ready. The cashier told him she’d bring it out to him as soon as it was ready if he’d just have a seat. He kept yelling as he and his girlfriend or whoever she was went to a table. He was bellowing at full volume about “those stupid fucking McDonald’s employees” because his special order wasn’t instantly ready–they hadn’t psychically anticipated his order and made it beforehand, which was apparently what he’d expected them to do. So they sit down and he is carrying on and on and on about how stupid the people who worked there were. [His food came out to his table after about a 2 minute wait.] Many, many people in the dining area were turning to look and see what the hell was wrong with him. I finally turned around in my seat (I’d been sitting with a friend) and looked at him with a “you can’t be for real” kind of look. He saw me and shouted “DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM!?” to which I responded (because I was 19 at the time and hot-headed) “I was wondering the same thing about you…” To which his reply was to start cussing me out at the top of his lungs. I got up and told the manager what was going on (which she could pretty much hear anyway) and she said she’d keep an eye on it, and to tell her if anything else happened. As I was on my way back to my seat, my friend came up and said “Now we’re ‘dumb sorority bitches’ and he is going to kick our asses, he says” so I turned back around and told the manager that the guy was now threatening violence. We went back to our table, getting several sympathetic looks from other customers. A minute later he comes storming past our table yelling that he was going out to his car to get his gun, and went out into the parking lot. I ran up and told the manager, who was on the phone, what he’d just said. Apparently she was on the phone with the police, and she relayed to them what he’d said. I’ve never seen such fast response in my life. Almost instantly there were several cop cars plus a helicopter swarming all over the place. They caught the guy and searched his car–they didn’t find a gun but they found drug paraphernalia. When I gave the police report, at least a dozen other people lined up to tell the cops what they’d seen. I’ve never seen so many people so pissed off at a customer, and wanting to nail his ass so bad.

I have a MacBook Pro laptop and it’s the biggest piece of crap computer I’ve ever owned. I will never buy another Mac. It has had problems practically since day one, and the support guy on the phone said that if I send it in for repair, the first thing they will do, no matter what, is wipe the hard drive. Hell with that, I know it’s not a problem with the hard drive, and it took forever to get the thing set up how I want it, and half of the things I don’t have installers for anymore, etc. Fortunately the main problem it was having, a spontaneous power issue where it would power off and then not come back on at all for any reason, hasn’t happened in months, so maybe it fixed itself. The power button is also broken–it sits in at an angle, which makes me think that part of what’s supporting it underneath has broken or bent. Oh, and the keyboard started wearing almost instantly. Within a month the thing looked like it had been used hard for years, with all the silvery shiny stuff rubbing off. Gah I despise this thing. I didn’t like Macs before, but figured since I’m in the art field it would be good for me to have one, but holy crap it so isn’t worth it. Piece of garbage. Don’t believe the hype about them being so superior.

16

I heard that too. They have cool commercials and whatnot. But customers, I love them. They make my paycheck. I really couldn’t live without them. Sometimes some are assholes, but what are you going to do? I just tell them the truth and that usually gets everything rolling the right way.

17

When things get bad, we always say that “if you ignore your customers, maybe they will just go away.” Always puts things in perspective for me!

18

Years ago, when I was teaching customer service classes, I came across an article written by some customer service guru. The article talked about how to *get * good customer service. The advice was eminently sensible: treat service providers with politeness and respect, assume they want to help you get what you need, and be clear about what you want and need without being unreasonable or demanding. I’ve followed that advice as much as I can, and I generally get great service.

19

I’ve had a lot of crashes ever since I upgraded to Leopard (and I’m not counting the weird video glitch that happens too.) I’m hoping that the cause has been kernel panics caused by the AirPort card and that the 10.5.2 update fixes that. I’ll know today when I open my MacBook and see if it instantly reboots.

20

Actually, I picture MacTech and Mac’s sort of like the Maytag repairman and Maytag washers. He is there if you need him, but we all know he just sits there all day waiting for one to break so he can fix it.

And if that day ever comes, by golly, he’ll fix your broken Mac and everyone will laugh and smile. Silly customer, of course I can fix this computer. Hahaha. Now you be good, and take care of this little machine and It’ll take care of you.

Sorry, maybe I got a little carried away…