I hope you don’t have any ambitions of ever being anything more than a receptionist. It’s precisely this attitude that leads to the fact that other people in the office are paid much more than you are.
People like you are the reason why so many in retail are burning out-customers are never happy-they want more, more, more, more, as if the employees are nothing more than slaves to their jobs.
I think that’s a crummy attitude. No, you’re not obligated to meet every one of the client’s demands, but you can respond to him without blasting your “Whatever, find someone else if you don’t like it” attitude. Giving the client’s number to the co-worker might have been an option, or what Boyo Jim said: “If you feel this is urgent enough to interrupt his day off, I will call him. Otherwise I will be happy to take a message, I expect him back in the office on XXXday.”
But if, as I got the impression, you reacted all huffy-puffy when he asked for CW’s number, then it’s no wonder it escalated. Think all you like about whether the client’s needs are truly urgent, but it’s not for you to decide who really needs assistance, and act accordingly. For all you know, his kid has cancer or something, and that’s why he missed the earlier appointment, and why he’s so uptight. Deal with the situation at hand, and always be diplomatic.
Well, I’m sorry you got the wrong impression, then. If I’ve learned anything from being a retail monkey all those years ago, is when people get angry and up in your face, the proper reaction is to smile sweetly and keep the conversation in nice and sweet low tones. This drives them nuts because you are not getting flared up and stammer like they hoped you would. I remain calm and professional at all times, and if I really can’t handle it, I walk away.
Actually, it IS up to my discretion, because I am the one who is going to have to do the work for him. From all the clients I’ve been in contact with so far, almost every one of them think their issue is the most important thing ever. Everything must be dropped so their situation is addressed first. Some might be more urgent than others, but like I said before, nothing is ever truly an emergency at this workplace. I’m the one who has my co-worker’s cell phone number, and I am the one who decides whether it’s appropriate to give it out or not, as it’s been left to me.
Being in a bad mood is no excuse to treat people like shit. Everyone has bad moods, the difference between an adult and a child is that the adult knows how to control his bad mood enough that he/she doesn’t take it out on other people.
Dealt with it by telling him “Sorry, all I can do is ask that you phone him on Tuesday to contact him. He will be in at nine o’clock.”
I think the point he’s trying to make here is that there is a lot of indignance about people demanding a certain “unreasonable” amount of service, with the implication being that there is some absolute level that is appropriate.
What’s appropriate is a fluid thing, and it depends on who you are as a business and who the client is. This means the line between “overbearing, unreasonable customer” and “clueless, unresponsive vendor” is really only measured by how successful the business is. If a company is able to push back on customer requests because they don’t need to worry about the lost business, then all sorts of pushy customer behavior is unreasonable and can be ignored. An extreme example of this is utility companies: they have designated all sorts of common things as “unreasonable,” such as talking to a live human being. They can do this because I don’t have much of a choice in who to deal with.
The flip side of all of this is that there are sometimes companies that make their money by targeting markets where this sort of thing has become commonplace and providing service at (previously considered to be) unreasonable levels. The company I work for has regularly been in the practice of saying yes when other more established vendors say no, even though it means being extremely accomodating to client demands. We’ve gutted a lot of business from less responsive companies in this way, and you can see it happening all over the place in other industries. In these specific cases, the client demands started out being unreasonable, but are now considered typical, and the only thing that changed was who was getting the money.
Don’t judge me too harshly.
I don’t work in retail. I do work in a 24/7 operation. We are staffed and equipped appropriately. I don’t suggest that any organization should push their employees beyond a typical 40 hour week. Nor should they recruit employees who are not prepared to work any hours that are not agreeable to them.
The company that I work for requires the services of other organizations around the clock. This demand is inflexible. The staffing of our vendor’s operations is not up to me. I will seek out vendors who provide the level of service which we require. If we are not serviced to our standards, other options are looked at immediately.
From my perspective – there are opportunities for commerce 24 hours per day for some industries. If a business is not set up to accommodate our needs, then we will be seeking out another company to provide service. It’s nothing personal.
As to the OP – I don’t think anyone should be tied to the phone 24 hours per day. Nor do I think that personal phone numbers should be handed out by the company without that person’s permission. If I’m dealing with an issue that only a certain individual can handle and that individual is not available on a certain day, tough luck for me. However, if I find that my activities are routinely being compromised by this situation, I will seek out other options.
Am I causing people to burn out? I don’t think so. If I feel that the best interests of me or the company that I work for can be better served by another company is it not prudent to take business to them?
ed - good post. You captured many of my thoughts.
The associates I encounter at Nordstrom always seem upbeat and far from burning out, and that retailer bases its entire business model on superior customer service. And they generally kick every direct competitor’s ass seven ways from Sunday.
Of course, there may be the teensy little difference that Nordstrom demands that associates be extremely good at their jobs. I get the impression that if you started whining about how you felt like a slave working there, your problem would be resolved in no time at all.
See, I don’t buy this.
I’ve worked at jobs where I repeatedly went the extra mile, anticipating the needs of our clients and extrapolating the intentions of senior staff, and no one ever said “You’ve saved the project, here’s a raise/promotion!”
In one particular job, we had a Fedex drop that was clearly marked with two large signs “NO pickup after x:00! Jobs dropped off after x:00 will NOT be delivered next day!” Frequently I’d find next-AM Fedex packages marked “urgent” lying in this drop bin, after everyone else had left.
Each time, I personally drove them to a Fedex station after looking up our account number so the items could be correctly charged. Some of these items turned out to be contract deliverables – had they laid there ignored, we might have been in breach of contract.
Eventually I began making a point of double-checking every day.
Another time I found a proposal coming out of the printer with the font wrong. It was on a weekend and everyone was gone, but even though we were there for something else, people in our group were instructed “incidentally” to “just bind up the proposal and send it out”. But clearly this formatting error was changing the page layout and messing with positions of the inserted photographs. It couldn’t go out like this!
I tried repeatedly to contact the people who wrote the thing and the project head, but they were all enjoying their day off. On my own, I tried substituting various fonts to see if the proposal came out correctly in any of them, but it did not work.
I did not have time to reformat the entire proposal; I had my own work to do on deadline. So I used the best-looking of the trials I’d run, and out the door it went.
It turned out that the proposal manager had, in violation of our publications department’s rules, used a font installed on her own laptop for this thing and never cleared it with publications – so no computer other than her laptop could print it. There’s a meeting process designed to catch these things, but it didn’t. Running a test print would have caught this before she left for the weekend – IF she’d used the computer she was planning on us printing from. Hell, just discussing this with us would have caused us to suggest a dry run.
But none of that happened. I went way out of my way to try and reach someone and then to fix this thing, and she broke the rules and went home before the critical moment.
Guess who got yelled at?
In my extensive experience, management SAYS things like “It’s precisely this attitude that leads to the fact that other people in the office are paid much more than you are.” But management doesn’t MEAN it – if management did, the converse would be true: good effort and thoughtfully serving the company’s interest would be rewarded.
if you have a GOOD attitude, if you think about the company’s mission, you’ll still find that caring and going out of your way is seldom seriously rewarded. Serious rewards are reserved for the Brahmin caste, and not wasted on Untouchables.
Sailboat
Sad and Deranged, you did the right thing.
#1, personal phone numbers are always private, unless specifically instructed as otherwise.
#2, this client was given every opportunity to pick the package up during business hours when the employee would be available. It was their choice to show up several days late. The fact that the employee is off that day is simply a matter of course. This is not a business that is run 24-hours, and employees are people too, despite the whole Wal-Mart “The Customer Is Always Right” saying.
#3, If the customer is really that demanding, and cannot get their business done in a reasonable manner, they should find a business that is willing to be open 24 hours, and have their employees on call 24/7. However, from the sounds of it, this isn’t life-or-death business, so I think finding such a place may be tougher than that man may think.
#4, While it is your job as a receptionist to take care of the client, it is also your job to ensure things run smoothly. You could not conceivably call the employee at hand, as was suggested, and say there’s a sticky situation, because this horrible man was standing right in front of you. What if the employee had said, “Well, it’s my son’s third birthday, so I’m not really available to work right now”? You would then have made the employee look bad in front of the client, and the client would be doubly angry.
As such, you did your job exactly as you should have. Keep up the good work. 
Frankly, I don’t see that at all. Client purchases service X, even sets up a schedule for it, and the business is all lined up to accomodate him. Things look rosy - service X at time Y, in return for (presumably) amount Z.
When the client decides to blow off the schedule, he unilaterally takes upon himself to change the transaction. Perhaps the business should be ready to accomodate - depends on the entire setup - but perhaps the client should also approach the situation with a bit of respect for the agent’s time, seeing as it’s the client who changed the terms of the deal. He certainly should not act as if entitled to personal contact information.
It also depends on the terms you’re agreeing to do business on, wouldn’t you say ?
I think you’re overlooking one thing here: Some business is not worth having. Some clients are, literally, more trouble than they’re worth.
Raising service levels is not free - making it policy to have your agents available to clients 24/7 is not a trivial decision and it certainly adds to the cost of running your business. Either you’ll have to raise compensation for the agents or you’ll have to settle for agents who can’t negotiate a better deal elsewhere. If there’s a hefty demand for 24/7 service in the OP’s line of business, taht’s a business opportunity and there’s money to be made.
And if you can make money of that, well, cool. There was obviously an untapped market. Still does not make it OK for the client in the OP to insist on service that was pretty obviously not part of the original deal.
I find it appalling that so many on this board apparently think it’s S&D and his co-worker’s problem that the client is a fuckup.
I don’t think we’re in disagreement here, really. Sure, he’s acting unilaterally, and in terms of being an actual nice person he probably fails. My only point is that whether or not denying him the information was an appropriate response hinges completely on how your company is doing in it’s market. If it’s not worth it to deal with this guy, then hey, his loss, and you did the right thing.
Let’s say though that he was responsible for a huge account (just humor me for a second), and that there were other companies looking to push yours out of the competition. In this case it’s not so clear cut: it doesn’t matter what the agreement was if he decides to take all his money elsewhere and this becomes a problem for your business. If you were a small company that really needed his business, it could even be a fatal mistake.
I don’t think so. The agreed upon terms just reflect the state of your business’s position in the market. Companies that have been around a while and don’t care as much about losing a certain number of customers (for whatever reason) will be more willing to point to their agreed upon terms and deny certain things, whereas newer companies that are trying to gain entry into a market will not. In your case it seems clear that you don’t have to sweat pissing off this one guy, so everything’s cool on your end.
But as a counterexample, my company’s clients are constantly adding new demands to our service, even though they are not covered in any agreement we made with them. Some of these demands are seemingly outrageous and require lots of people to drop what they’re doing and do what they need immediately. They will often demand to speak with all kinds of employees at all kinds of hours. This is very frustrating, but we do it because the alternative is to lose them to a competitor. We don’t call it unreasonable behavior, because it’s really what we’re counting on to get ahead, and it’s worked.
Walmart or Microsoft don’t have to do this, because their market is different. That’s all. I guess the point qwest wanted to make, and I agree with, is that you can’t cry about clients making unreasonable demands in a market where they are entitled to them due to extreme competition in the market. When a company really wants someone’s business, their entitlement goes way up, and it may very well include calling people at home.
As I said above, I’ll have to take your word on the situation being such that you don’t have to care. If that’s true, then it’s true and you’re right. My only issue is that often times it can be ok for a client to insist on service that was clearly not part of the original deal.
My argument was not with the OP per se, because that’s a specific case and it sounds like it was probably appropriate to your relationship with your overall customer base. It just seems like people are quick to draw absolute lines: demanding X is always unreasonable, or going outside of the prior agreed terms is always unreasonable, or whatever. This is a silly notion, because it’s really just a factor of economics.
No. It absolutely is alway inappropriate and unreasonable for a client to demand an employee’s personal (home or cell) phone number when it’s clear that a business does not offer 24/7 service to its clientelle.
That’s not at all the same as saying that if a business notices that an increasing number of clients are expressing a desire to have more flexibility in contacting their staff, and/or that they’re losing business to competitors who do offer that service, that they discuss the possibility of implementing hours or means to accomodate them.
One is not the same as the other.
It is never acceptable for a client to demand personal contact information from other staff members when that information was never part of the original agreement between the business and the client. Period.
That makes two of us. I would never give out a co-workers personal contact info or call them on their off day without their express permission. Sounds to me like the OP handled things perfectly. The only thing I would have done different is to leave a message on my coworkers voicemail, or whichever system of getting messages they use.
**Sad and Deranged, ** I’m firmly on your side on this one . I think if it was that important that Mr. COTU be able contact your co-worker at any time that the co-worker would have given him whatever phone numbers that would have allowed him to do so, i.e. if it would have meant losing a big commission. you did everything you could to accomodate him and were polite the whole while, rather than “Steve isn’t here today, so get lost and quit bugging me.”
at our store we are not allowed to tell customers when an employee will be working (after one employee from another dept. was being stalked by a creepy customer), let alone give out personal phone numbers. we are told to say “Can I help you instead?” and if the customer says no, they can come back another day or go elsewhere.
I have worked retail for 8 years now, and been a department manager for 2, so I can recognize a good employee letting off steam about an annoying customer when I see one. as long as the ranting isn’t in front of the customer (or any other one for that matter) or a manager there’s nothing wrong with letting off steam.
GASP!!! Nordstrom sales associates acting pleasant and enthusiastic? gosh, they’re a superior species to the rest of us pouty degenerate salespeople who don’t know that thing wit’ all duh buttons and da munny inside a it and a hole in the ass… er, head… or maybe they’re just trying to earn their commissions and make their sales quotas without incurring the Wrath of Management. The store where I work has customer service as first priority, which includes knowledge of the merchandise, ringing procedures, merchandising, etc. so we ain’t no stoopud peeples neezer.
and obviously you haven’t spent much time in the break room of a store: every salesperson I’ve ever met, from high-end jewelry stores right on down to Dollar Tree, and every person who has to deal with the public, receptionists, emergency dispatchers, restaurant servers, and beauticians will sit down and bitch about their problem customers/clients at the drop of a hat, as well as about their pay, the hours they have to work, their coworkers, their feet hurt, etc. it’s a great icebreaker at parties 
Painting with a kind of broad brush, don’t you think? There are a lot of companies and a lot of scenarios out there for how money is made, and a lot of sales are made by people doing seemingly outrageous things like this. Maybe you don’t want to work for a company that does this, but there are people who don’t care as much. My current employer has to do this sort of thing sometimes – sure there are clashes, and we don’t always capitulate, and I don’t think we’ve ever resorted to actually handing over contact information directly (so maybe we are talking at cross purposes), but it’s certainly true that if a client says “call lead programmer X right now and put him on the line” we sometimes have to do it. It depends on how likely we think pissing off our lead programmer is vs how likely pissing off our client is, and which is more of a problem. If we think he’s not very likely to be that upset, we’ll take the chance.
I’ve been on the recieving end of this decision a fair number of times and I don’t see it as a huge affront. I guess everyone’s personal mileage varies.
You quote me, yet you don’t directly address the specific argument I made, but make an entirely different scenario up.
Certain business situations in certain types of businesses, may or may not call for an employee to be contacted during off hours by other staff members within the company.
It is never acceptable for a client to demand personal contact information be handed over directly to them by other staff members when that information was never part of the original agreement between the business and the client. Period.
And even you admit that your company doesn’t capitulate to this particular demand. So what, exactly, are you on about?
I agree. My boss (and his boss) have my cell phone number, and if a meltdown was truly in process on my day off, I would accept that and do what I can do. But I’d be pissed as hell if anyone gave out my personal number to a customer.
And to all those who have suggested that a reasonable solution would have been to call the coworker, or to take the client’s number and pass it to the coworker, you failed your reading comprehension test. Go back and read the OP, where it says:
I cannot agree with that. As I see it, the terms are part of the product you’re offering. “Sorry, we don’t sell that” is a valid reply to someone who demands what’s not on the shelves.
It is a completely valid business decision to tell a client that employee contact phone numbers isn’t part of the product he purchased - in fact, that it’s not part of any of your products. It can absolutely be the right business decision - not having to compensate your agents for being on call on their days off saves operating expenses.
I know it’s heresy, but: There are clients whose business is not worth having.
Not dealing with the troublesome clients can streamline your business operation considerably.
For some markets, but it’s certainly not universal - the opposite can be equally true. There are plenty of companies who entered markets and made themselves a very nice niche indeed by deciding not to cater to high-maintenance customers.