Do you really support the customer’s reaction to the situation?
There would have been no reaction if the SM had done their job correctly.
We accept that she did not do her job correctly. Given that she did not do her job correctly, do you believe the customer’s reaction was in proportion to the mistake made?
Being pissed off? Sure, why not, wouldn’t you be pissed off if you made a trip for nothing due to a fuck-up on the part of a SM, and they won’t even admite their mistake? And they keep arguing with you and calling you a liar? (Or at least that is what it will seem to you, anyway. ) What was their reaction? They got pissedoff, they moved their complaint up the chain, and got what they wanted. What’s wrong with that?
Thank you for answering the question that was asked.
While you acknowledge that it would only seem to the customer like she was being called a liar, not that she actually was, you appear to believe that the customer’s irrationality is the manager’s fault. Sure, if the manager hadn’t made the mistake she did the customer wouldn’t have gone bugnuts, but the fact that the customer goes bugnuts at honest mixups is nobody’s issue but her own.
As it should, since “you” were actually lying. If you don’t want to be called a liar, try… oh, I don’t know…not lying?
Actually, they lied and acted like nuisances and toddlers to get what they wanted. I’m not interested in living in a world where people can act that way without consequences, so I try to reward that behaviour as little as possible.
I remember one of the names now.
Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. It is not possible to function at 100% perfection constantly. However, it takes a conscious decision to persist in acting like a belligerent asshat in the face of people who are apologizing and trying to help you.
Especially when, less than two minutes up the road, that oh-so-nice salesman working on commission who talked you into buying this printer in the first place has stock of the printer for the identical price, but you’d prefer to spend 20 minutes hanging around demanding the impossible and threatening to have people fired and exposed on national television for their heinous crimes. In the time spent berating us , you could have purchased the printer from the other guy, gone home and begun setting it up so you could use it to fire off a letter to our head office criticizing our service.
What is the deal with price matching anyway? If it’s going to be the same price, why not just get it from where you are standing, and not bother to go to the second store? You just lost time and spent gas money to get to the new store…
I guess your store has better warranty and service policies than the first place.
The customer is not always right.
Not really. Remeber, the SM did talk about it being in stock. True, it was in stock at the competitors, but can you tell me for certain that the customer didn’t honestly think she heard that it was in stock there?
“The sales manager said she wasn’t asked if the printer was in stock and didn’t say that it was” that’s not apologizing, that’s aguing with the customer and blaming *them *for the SM error. The customer doesn’t have to ask if it is in stock, if an employee tells you they will match the price, the assumption must be that the items is in stock, otherwise the price is moot. Even Cazzle admits the SM screwed up.
Sure Cazzle apologized, but Cazzle didn’t screw up. The SM screwed up, and according to Cazzle, did not apologize, but instead started arguing and blame shifting.
Note I never said Cazzle was wrong, I said the SM was wrong and tried to blame shift her way out of it.
She did also apologise, DrDeth - I apologised, the duty manager apologised and the sales manager apologised. I doubt any of us would have argued about who said what were it not for the repeated accusation that we were hiding stock to avoid fulfilling our (advertised, therefore legally obligated) price matching policy. If the only accusation was that we said it was in stock, I doubt anyone would have wasted their breath trying to convince her otherwise. She was accusing us of committing an offence that could incur a fine from the Department of Consumer Affairs, and we were not guilty of that, only of poor customer service.
Sometimes the price matching makes sense - yesterday I price-matched a competitor in the next town. The customer had seen the item when he was there earlier in the day and thought it seemed like a good price, and when he had to stop in to get something from us later he checked our shelf price and realised the first place had it cheaper. To save himself a trip back to the other town, he got us to price-match. We get a lot of people price-matching from catalogues because they’ve decided to comparison shop. Also, we price-match Melbourne stores, saving people a two hour drive. Other people for whatever reason might have a grudge against the other store and won’t shop there so they buy from us instead (I’m quite sure that goes both ways).
I still can’t figure out why these particular people came to us for price-matching instead of buying from our competitor. No matter how I look at it, it doesn’t make sense. They obviously live nearby because they were in the store quite quickly after phoning, and the distance between the stores is so insignificant that I can’t see how it would be more difficult to go to one than the other. They didn’t ask about our warranty, and neither store does in-store servicing. We don’t offer credit facilities, the other store does - not that they inquired about that either. At the time I had an uneasy feeling that something was going on that I didn’t understand and I can’t shake that feeling. Part of it was because of the praise they lavished, unprompted, on the other salesman. Part was that they brought in a printed and signed quote from the other store, which I’ve never seen anyone else do, and that they requested it back when I was done with it so they could remember the salesman’s name for next time. I just can’t figure out what they achieved.
Maybe they thought they could wrangle some kind of discount or free gift out of you by making a scene.
As someone in Electronics Retail Management (whose experiences exactly mirror the ones described in the OP and by several other posters), I’ve noticed customers tend to use Price Matching as a weapon to get a discount- “Oh, but A Competitor has this product cheaper!”. About 70% of the time we’re too busy to call and check and just match the price anyway (if it’s for a low amount, usually around $20-$50 or so, depending on the item), but often when we do call the competitors are out of stock, have a different price (or the sale has finished), or don’t carry the item at all. “Price Matching” is now almost a code for “I want a better price”.
Similarly, we don’t haggle over the price on most items. That displayed price there on the ticket is the price, take it or leave it. If you’ve seen it cheaper somewhere else- AND we can confirm it (ie, an advertised price, not a special deal worked out by the sales guy at the other store for you), then we’ll match it- but otherwise, we don’t set the prices at store level and we can’t simply change the price because someone forgot we’re not a Moroccan Bazaar and wanted to spend all day haggling with us over the price of a DVD player.
Some of our competitors offer a deal whereby they’ll beat a cheaper price by 10% (usually of the difference, but not always). I’ve had several customers throw a major hissy because I won’t do this for them- People don’t seem to understand there’s very little margin in laptops, digital cameras, and LCD TVs, and in some cases knocking 15% off the price can put an item below cost. At any rate, there’s a price point at which it’s better (from a profit perspective) to simply say “No, I’m sorry, I’m not going to sell this item at that price, and if one of our competitors will, then more power to them if they want to take a loss on it.”
You can’t win, as I’m sure you’re discovering. Electronics Retail is not a pleasant industry… the customers are increasingly angry AND stupid, the sales budgets keep increasing, and we’re under pressure to make every sale but also to make sure we maintain a profitable margin- a task which is increasingly becoming an oxymoron.
And don’t get me started on faulty goods! People carrying on at me because a $59 DVD player conked out after 11 months and I can’t give them another one because they don’t make them anymore, TVs that have to go away to Sydney to be repaired (try explaining to someone that they’ll be without a TV for a month), and anything to do with faulty iPods… I need a strong drink, I can tell you.
Amen to THAT!
Sheesh cazzle didn’t you know? There’s no such thing as a “bad” customer. It is your duty to everything in your power, up to and including mind-reading, to make your customers happy. That is their God-given right, theirs merely by virtue of being in your store, or place of business. They simply can’t be wrong, it’s a scientific impossibility, once they are a (TA DA…choir of Angels) customer, they are without error or sin.
That is what you signed on for when you became a customer service rep, after all. If even one single customer has a tiny solitary moment of unhappiness or dissatisfaction, it is YOUR fault, and you’ve obviously chosen the wrong “profession” if you don’t like it, and worse, can’t fix it.
What is wrong with that, is that if they’d have shut their stupid mouths for half a nano-second, the employees would have been able to get a word in edgewise and solve their problem (contacting the other store) without several minutes of screaming and berating by the customers.
Their actions were rude, out of proportion to the “sin” committed and completely illogical where “getting their way” (if “getting their way” was truly to just get the printer) was concerned. The idiot mom and daughter wasted the store’s time, other customers’ time, and their own time with the whole shrewish-fishwife-out-of-control-make-the-retail-workers-pay routine.
They weren’t really interested in the printer, what they wanted was to get out their petty little frustrations on some helpless retail worker. And people like that will use the smallest excuse they can, just BECAUSE they can. And those types DO exist and they DO behave that way for that specific reason (that is, they merely want to yell at someone), and not because they’re sad innocent victims of poor customer service (which yes, does exist, but this is NOT an example of such).
I realize that the contingent on this board of folks that VCO3 described is a very small one, but it’s a rather obtuse and narrow-minded one, and you are part of the problem, not the solution.
I’ve been lucky in that the only time I ever worked in retail was for an owner/proprietor who was a big man, short-tempered and unafraid of any-one or anything. We’d get Cazzle’s customers in, they would open their mouths
- "I know what you do, you buy things at auction for $10 then sell them here for $20, what a rip off! -
and he would frogmarch them out the door, arm bent up behind them if necessary.
Most satisfying.