I’m a good natured girl and I love my job working the circulation desk at the local library but sometimes I just want to strangle some of these people. Rude unreasonable buggers, all of them.
At first I wanted to make this a rant, throw it into the Pit. But I’d like to stay positive. So I’m looking for help from you guys. Tell me some of your stories working behind the counter, facing the customer from hell.
Well, if I can’t get a few tips, at least I can cheer myself up a bit. [grumble]It’s Sunday and I’m working - I’m not even supposed to be here today![/grumble]
I always liked talking to rude customers as if they were the ages they were acting. I remained calm and polite, but I took the tone of a preschool teacher in trying to get them to calm down. Sometimes it worked, sometimes they got angrier, but I usually had fun.
I once made a hoagie for a lady, who obviously wasn’t pleased with how long it took. As I aproached the counter with her sandwich, she said “It’s about fucking time!”
I turned around, dropped the sandwich in the trashcan and smiled at her. With a pleasant “Have a nice day”, I went back to work.
Well, Ski, it’s funny you mention that you work in a library. I work for a library software vendor, and I just dealt with not only a rude customer, but one who is a lying sack of shit as well.
I’ve found that the best thing to do with rude people is just deal with them, remind yourself that they don’t sign your paycheck, and be thankful that you don’t have to go home to them. In a face-to-face situation, smiling is a wonderfully passive-aggressive way of annoying them, too.
Next, it’s often a good idea to immediately mention what happened to your supervisor. Don’t get upset or anything, just calmly say something like “Hey, just letting you know that this patron was rude, it was uncalled for, I followed the usual procedures, blah blah…” or whatever the case may be.
That way, you get a chance to vent about it, and your supervisor knows the details ahead of time. If Rude Patron decides to call and bitch about you, your supervisor will handle it appropriately. You will have already diffused the situation, and quite frankly, as long as your supervisor/boss/whatever has no problem with the work you do, then don’t worry what obnoxious customers think.
Smile sweetly. Talk calmly. Do what you can to solve their problem with the service you are providing. Know internally that while you may be able to get them a fresh soda, you, even you, can do nothing for the pit of shit they must encompass to have to spew assholish behavior this far and wide.
And hand it over to a manager. (I love working jobs where I only have to do the easy part and the big bucks go to the guy who has to deal with the icky parts. I ring up sales, the manager explains to the irate biker that he really can’t buy cigs without an ID.)
I’ve been known to say that managers should stay away from the people who are doing the real work - their only purpose is to hire, train, provide the workers with the tools to do their job, and be there when some idiot is screaming. I’ve told managers that, too. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at dealing with odd situations, and I’ll tell you, they don’t come much odder than hotel work.
I’ve had two experiences with customers that I felt I handled pretty well, given the circumstances.
I had a customer at the pharmacy at 4 PM on a Saturday. The pharmacist had just left to go to the bathroom, so the pharmacy was locked. The pharmacist was 8 months pregnant, and had not gone to the bathroom all day. As soon as she left, EvilCustomer came up.
EC:I need to get my prescription, and can you ring up these few things? (chucking 15 or so items on top of the “5 Items or Less” sign.)
Me: Well, ma’am, the pharmacist just stepped out to use the restroom. She’ll be back in about 5 or 10 minutes.
EC: Well, why don’t you just go back there and get my prescription and I’ll take it to another register? I have to be at a wedding 10 miles away in 15 minutes!
Me: Ma’am, the pharmacy door is locked. I can’t go in there. The pharmacist is 8 months pregnant and now was the first chance she’s had to use the restroom all day.
EC:<insert a string of curse words that would make ghetto gangstas blush, criminals apologize to their mothers, and Marilyn Manson go to church>
Me: Ma’am, do you kiss your children with that mouth?
She threw all of her stuff on the floor, and I promptly told her that she had to pick it up, I was calling security, and that I would be glad to have the pharmacist transfer all of her prescriptions elsewhere on Monday. Then I walked away.
I also had a fundie come in and tell me the necklace that I had on was evil and that I was going to hell. (It was a small silver ankh, on a beaded necklace.) When I told her that my best friend made that necklace for me and he was in the hospital in a coma dying, she shut right up. (The necklace was made by a friend who died after being comatose for quite some time, but this nutjob used to hassle everyone at our pharmacy.)
Some people just need to be stopped dead in their tracks every once in a while. (Not rude, just blunt, polite, and to the point. POW!)
My usual modus operendi with jerks is to get exceedingly polite, “excuse me, sir” sort of thing. The ruder they get, the more polite I am, just shows off their jerkiness to an extreme.
OTOH. Once this is what I did.
Working a fast food place, folks came in about 2 minutes to close. I said “I’ll be happy to get your sundaes, but we’re closing in about a minute”. They said fine. I got their sundaes, and started walking into the back to get stuff finished back there, and the female part of the couple said “Honey, we should leave, they’re trying to close”. he replied “They can’t close with us still in here”.
So, I came back out into the dining area and proceded to put up every single chair but the two they were in. By the time I came back out with the vacuum cleaner, they were gone. (ps - that was my one excusion into the world of ‘general customer service’ - it wasn’t my forte)
At first I try the kill them with kindness approach but if the nastiness continues I get really dumb and ask them to please tell me how it should be done in excrutiatingly minute detail… oh and could you repeat that again I didn’t get it. Sometimes when they hear just how ridiculous they sound they quit. Sometimes people are just assholes.
I haven’t had to deal with a customer in five years or so, but when I did, I’d kill them with kindness, then pass them over to my manager. They never paid me enough to put up with assholes.
yes yes politeness is indeed the best way. And it can be surprisingly satisfying when they get agitated and you just smile nicely and continue talking politely but just ignoring their increasing vile.
Although in one particular case I worked for this guy, big guy, ex-marine, but also polite. When some guy wa getting himself worked up I just stuck up my hand in his face (1993) said “You’ll have to talk to the manager” and walked away the hand thing shut him up and when my boss stepped up the guy quited right down and explained his case much more civally. BTW this was at Taco Bell.
When I was in a Call Centre (possibly one of the most evil and diabolical inventions of the late 20th Century), I used to get customers that appears to have sand in their, erm, private areas on a regular basis.
My usual trick to appease the customer that would not listen to me would be to say “please hold while I put you through to my Team Leader”. I would then proceed to place them on hold for two minutes, twiddle my thumbs, answer emails, scratch my arse etc and then i’d come back to them with a different accent (usually Indian, New Zealand or South African) and i’d claim to be the Team Leader, i’d say exactly what I said before and then they would be satisfied and hang up.
Some dickheads out there just won’t take the word of someone that is not in a supervisory capacity.
I could also tell you about how I managed to win a customer service award by hanging up on 1/3 of my customers, the time I had to fabricate a story after one of my funny accents backfired on me and how I called my team leader ‘fucking useless’ and a ‘clueless bint’ to her face, but those are at least three or four different threads.
Becoming self-employed was the best move I ever made, I think.
With rude people i usually become extra formal and extra polite. Like, this one bitch who got mad at me because i was doing my job of asking her what she needed before i went to the evaluator to see what could be done. She was yelling at me, so i went back, talked to the evaluator. I then realized as i was walking out there i could do one of two things: Get very impatient and curt, or lay on the sweetness. So, i laid on the sweetness. I explained things in the sweetest, nicest most sugary voice i could muster. She was still rude. There were witnesses all around, so there was no way it could have been claimed i was equally rude.
So, after this bitch left, i went to the director of admissions, and told her what happened. My director being the cool boss that she is then wrote this student an email, and also the professor this woman was most likely to go to to bitch about me to. This professor knows me and took it upon herself to “warn” me that i needed to be “more careful”(i had another incident with this same customer before). The email told this student that student assistants are there to help and that it is our job to ask questions. She also stated that this student was not to be rude to one of us ever again, or she’d talk to the student personally. That student was nice the next time she came in (although i didnt deal with her that time).
One thing I like about my job is that the staff are prettymuch my supervisors. They get to explain situations to students if we student assistants arent able to, or if we have rude and abusive customers. I usually remind myself that these people are idiots and they aren’t that worth getting angry at.
I recall one time a few months ago at the DQ (I already posted about this). This woman was trying to scam free hot fudge off us, and Rémi our cashier was politely preventing her from doing so (in English). She started to rant and rave, rattled off a string of ethnic slurs against the Quebecois, and finished with “Je ponce que vous ne comprenne anglay tray bien!”
Here I am thinking, puis moi, je pense que tu parles français comme une conne westmountaise, but whatever. Poor Rémi is almost in tears by this point, so I grab the sundae, put on more hot fudge, give it back to her, and tell her to have a nice day.
When the beast died, the customer was understandably in a sweat to get the thing running again as he was losing production time.
The most irritating thing customers did was breathe down the back of my neck, continually asking “When is it going to be up? How long?” This would start about 5 minutes after I walked in the door and truthfully, I had no idea at that point.
The best way to handle these folks was to take the question seriously, give it your absolute, undivided attention. Calmly button everything up, pack the tools, and then set the guy down in a corner and start telling him, in excruciating detail, EXACTLY what you were planning to do, the diagnostic sequences, the expected results, the fallback strategies in case the diagnostics didn’t find the problem and finally, whether we would have to wait for spares or not and approximately how long.
Usually, a single treatment was sufficient. After that they would wait until I reported to THEM before asking that question again. The strategy satisified me, got the customer off my back, and also kept them from calling management and bitching about me.
Having worked in a call center for several years, I really can’t describe my new approach to customer service without getting this thread moved to the Pit.
(ps - that was my one excusion into the world of ‘general customer service’ - it wasn’t my forte)