No problem at all for you. The customer goes away, never comes back, your company loses a little bit of money in future purchases and life is good.
Because it’s not my or (I imagine) the OP’s job to be relaying idiotic messages to my boss all the time. And it’s sure as hell not my job to tell the customer next time he comes in the store my bosses response to the idiotic message. If he wishes to bitch about stupid shit, he can do it to the proper people. The job description is ring up your goods and to take their money, with an expected level of courtesy. Not to demean myself by kissing jerk ass.
It’s amazing how quickly customers can lose any societal sensibility they once posessed in the pre-christmas rush. Like the customer, henceforth known as Rude Bitch who, apparantly desperate for some assistance, yelled at me to help her while I was taking a phone call. It’s very difficult to concentrate on someone’s request when you’ve got another person yelling at you to help them. Eventually I had to put the phone customer on hold, having given up on trying to communicate to Rude Bitch that I was currently in the middle of a call.
Rude Bitch: Excuse me! That was VERY RUDE of you!!!
:rolleyes:
Or then there’s the customer who, not being served in the CD section, felt the need to shriek so as I could hear it half way across the store (and we’re talking a big department store here) “CAN I GET SOME HELP I’VE BEEN WAITING FORTY MINUTES HERE!!!”
I tell you… one day, I’ll own a store with no customers. It will be heaven.
Yup, that about sums it up.
Umm, out of curiosity, Bayonet, have you ever actually worked retail or customer service?
The sales income lost by not bending over backwards to please an asshole is more than made up for by reduced staff turnover. Forcing employees to put up with abusive customers with no recourse except letting an extra-big smile be their umbrella leads to MASSIVE turnovers, which are incredibly expensive. Not only do you have to train a bunch of new people, which is a pretty significant expense, but the fact that employees almost never stick around leads to worse customer service.
See, employees that are still really new tend to not be as knowledgable about the goods and sevices they’re dealing with, or with what can or can’t be done to help the customer. Plus, a high turnover rate generally means that the place is always understaffed, meaning that the employees they do have are overworked, harried, and being pulled in fifteen different directions. The bad working conditions not only make it harder for the customers to get the help they need in a timely manner, they often drive the employees away, creating a vicious circle.
That being said, the customer is NOT always right. Sometimes the customer is confused, or honestly mistaken. Sometimes the customer is just fucking lying through their goddammed teeth. Sometimes the customer is trying to return a DieHard car battery to WalMart for cash. Sometimes the customer has to be told, “I’m very sorry, but we cannot do that, and if you don’t control yourself I’ll have to ask security to escort you out of the store.”
If I can expand on this…
Even the store as a whole (meaning the store building itself and everything contained) would rather weed out the jerks. If people consistently come in, bitching and moaning, getting offended when we won’t lick their asshole clean because they’re A Customer™, they’re a big fat waste of time, effort, and nerves. And even a day full of honest folks will wear at your nerves sometimes. The store manager is likely the only one who may actually see his store’s profits affect his pay, so if he wants to come down and deal with the recognizable jerks and keep them away from us, then hey, more power to him, it’s quite admirable and he’ll get an oh-so-slightly bigger bonus. Otherwise, we’re not paid to babysit.
Crap! I can’t do the quote thing today! Anyway, yes I have worked retail, and yes I have worked in CS. A long time ago for both.
And if you read my posts carefully I have never advocated putting up with abuse or “the customer is always right”. I have said a few times over than I, personally, have dealt with assholes in the past by using the old “i’m gonna be polite no matter what you say”. It works for me, but maybe that’s just me.
And the OP was not talking about returning a diehard battery at walmart, more along the lines of a petty complain delivered in a rude and obnoxious manner, which is where I have found my “I’m gonna be polite no matter what you say” approach to be most effective. Again, maybe it’s just me…,<<Forrest Gump on>> my momma always said I was a special child.<<Forrest Gump off>>
A-freaking-men
Where I work, we are told not to use the escalated (supervisor) line unless the customer asks for a supervisor OR is completely out of control. They want reps to try to de-escalate the call first before automatically going to a supervisor.
Since I have supervisor level access, I have the option of saying "Sir, as an apology for the inconvenience, I will give you bonus points/call the hotel in London/waive that fee/etc. " The reps on the floor know that and will email me with requests, which I will fufill.
Customers don’t seem to realize that supervisors, as Fenris stated, have other duties to perform. I’m not a supervisor, but the majority of my time is off the phones getting issues resolved. I watch the queues, do write ups for policy changes, mentor two new hires…it’s not like I’m sitting there waiting for something to do. And my supervisor is busier than I am, with all the stuff their bosses have for them. “We need you to sort all the CSR’s by age/hair color/zodiac sign. And make a snappy pie chart in Powerpoint.”
bayonet1976, I think your policy of being nice no matter what is admirable. Ideally, everyone would live by such a policy and the world would be a better place. The problem comes when you feel the need to recommend such a policy to someone who is frustrated by an asshole treating them like a disobedient servant. No matter how you dress it up, it’s a really irritating thing to say in the context of this thread. To me, it can only be interpreted two ways:
- What you did was wrong/could have been done better.
or - What you did was fine, but here’s how I would have done it better.
Ugh.
Personally, I think the fact that the OP didn’t drive a gift card into the customer’s skull shows that she’s already a better person than I am. I don’t see how it’s reasonable to expect much more than that, in the face of such unjustified rudeness. BinaryDrone put it very well – there is a point at which “killing them with kindness” is pretty dysfunctional. I’d rather have a human being helping me, than a drone who is not allowed to do anything other than smile and nod.
Ugh indeed. I meant both 1 and 2. And of course it’s irritating, but have you noticed how unfailingly polite I have been? And how everyone who has responded has been polite to me? Granted this board is a limited sample, and WAY above average for intelligence and education, but it kinda proves my point.
Proves what point exactly? That it’s OK to be irritating as long as you are polite at the same time? Now there’s a helpful life lesson.
The original point I made of course, which was that by replaying in a calm and polite fashion you will improve the level of discourse. I’m sorry you find this irritating, if you think of any way for me to help you with this please let me know.
Wow, thanks! You are so wise. I am truly honored to share this thread with you. I can feel the level of discourse rising as we speak.
No wait, that’s my lunch.
I understand that when mere mortals come face to face with a such shining example of goodness as myself their bodies betray them in various unexpected ways. Just close your eyes, take a deep breath and enjoy the undiluted wisdom that are my posts in this thread.
<Ralph Wiggum>
It tastes like burning!
</Ralph Wiggum>
Well, like I said, my approach to be nice is being super syrupy sweet and disgusting and nicey nice. Annoys the hell out of them and they can’t complain. Heheheh…and they KNOW I’m being too nice and sweet on purpose-but only just enough to annoy them, but not enough to ACCUSE me of having attitude.
However, I don’t give a rat’s ass if they buy something or not. Oh boy, one asshole we lose. For every asshole there are about ten nice customers.
There’s just one little problem with your assertion that your politeness has raised our level of discourse here, Bayonet. Nobody was being an asshole to you to start with.
If people had gone from calling you a hamster-brained, goat-felching assmunch to being civil. you’d have a hell of a point. As it stands, though, things were never bad in this thread, so you can’t really claim to have improved them with your shiny happy attitude and perky cheerfulness. That would be like me claiming that I improved Dr. J’s gpa in college by sleeping with him. His grades were just fine to start with.
Nobody’s saying you should ever be anything but polite/civil/professional when dealing with an asshole. There is, however, a subtle but important difference between staying calm and polite and bending over backwards to lick an asshole’s asshole. The phrase “killing them with kindness” implies that you advocate the latter, when I get the feeling from your more recent posts that you mean the former. Which is it?
I dunno Fenris. Maybe it’s just because I’ve never had a boss who didn’t want to take calls, but my first thought when I got to this statement was that maybe the CSR had screwed up, was supposed to get to this case 2 days ago, and didn’t want it going to her supervisor.
Speaking as a CSR myself, I can tell you that I am definitely nicer to people that are nice to me. I mean, duh.
Yeah, this happens in my call center as well. Because of all the performance measurements the CSRs are under, many times they don’t WANT to escalate to a lead or supervisor. In our case, they try to pass the call of to the Sales Dept. Urgh!
I_Dig - I’d recommend getting more pissed off then they do.
Grow furious and let your eyes slowly bulge out as veins begin crawl over your body; fists clenched; neck trembling and furiously breathe, “I hate it when that happens!”. Then start searching this rage around the store as if to find the precise person or object to blame for this sticker. “Charlie did it!” Then turn back to them; “Thank you sir for notifying me. Who ever did this will pay, Charlie will pay. I have friends for this kind of thing. Charlie needs to learn that there are real consequences in the real world! If only there were more people like you… Sorry for that outburst, some people just need to learn their lessons. You can rest assured that this will be handled with your best interests at heart; I don’t think management needs to hear about this.”
Then wink at them.
-Justhink
To me, the “killing them with kindness” approach is worth pursuing not becaue of the asshole–fuck the asshole–but becasue of your own mental psyche. For me, when I’ve reached the state where I can be equally polite and cheerful and chipper to assholes, it means I’ve reached the state where I just don’t care what they think about anything. I don’t mind them yelling at me, because it dosen’t have anything to do with me: they’re yelling at the uniform. When I’m in that state, calming down assholes with politness becomes an intelectual challenge that I vaugely enjoy because it makes the time go faster.
Every psyche is different, of course, but for me, if I’m at hte point where I am really tempted to be a jerk back, then the customer is geting to me, and I can’t imagene the horror of customer service if you let customer’s get yo you.
That said, I’ll still fucking delighted I will (hopefully) never hvae to work in direct customer service again. Though dealing with students and parents has many of the same problems (certainly the same assholes).