While some companies try very hard not to allow their people to use words like ‘no’, and ‘can’t’, some companies like mine realize that it is sometimes necessary in order to do our jobs.
So while our first tier of support has certain expectations on how they are to act and an entire list of words to avoid :rolleyes:, these become something more like a suggestion for the second tier of support. We are very specifically told in our training and in our daily work that we in Tier 2 are empowered to say NO. That we have the ability to do this, and that the company expects us to do it in the furtherance of our duties and in accordance with company policy.
You demand that I replace your product without cause? Or compensate you for the time you had to spend to call us? That’d be a NO. You make physically impossible demands? Sorry, I can’t do that. You demand I get a VP or the CEO on the phone? NO, I CAN’T DO THAT. See how it works? Thus, me telling the person that I can’t do something that I can’t do is not some “OMG, he’s not qualified for this job! No CSR should ever say ‘no’!” moment, it is just another moment in doing my job properly.
Because as insane or unreasonable as it may sound to people who expect people in the Customer SERVICE field to be subservient cowards who grant their every whim, there are still some rational people on this Earth who realize that just because you’re in the service field doesn’t mean that you have to throw away your dignity, or lie to the customer, or damage your company’s interests for the sake of mollifying unreasonable people.
It’s this kind of reasonable clearly stated post that convinced me from the beginning.
It certainly makes sense that somewhere in the chain you expect to deal with people as if they were rational adults who can understand basic communication. When a problem would get to a store manger at my former employers, the store manager often gave the customer a clear choice of what we were willing and able to do. If a customer started making unreasonable demands in an “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do” tone the manager would calmly say “No you’ll have to choose one of the options I mentioned there are no others” and he would repeat this until the customer picked one or left.
Many moons ago in my first retail job I fielded customer complaints because I felt it was part of my job and my responsibility to the company. A customer called with a computer issue and I tried to explain the customer service number offered by the manufacturer.
The customer demanded that since he had given his money to us that he wasn’t going to call them and expected someone to come out to his house right away to solve the problem. Wanting to head off a long protracted waste of time I said as calmly as possible,
“Look Mr Smith, Nobody is coming out to your house to fix your computer and there is nobody in this building you can talk to who will make anyone come out to your house to fix it”
a long silent pause.
“Nobody’s coming out are they Dan?”
“Absolutely not”
“Okay so what do I do?”
he needed someone to tell him bluntly that he wasn’t going to get exactly what he wanted but we were still willing to do what we were able.
It’s worked for me fairly often when it gets to that point.
Consumer law does not just protect the consumer. They also protect the merchant or business man.
I think what you’re talking about is the idea that a company can’t send you something when you never had a contract with them and then bill you or even expect you to pay shipping.
They also can’t send you a more expensive model than the one you ordered and insist you pay more. That’s what receipts are for. I think they are protected from being taken advantage of for an honest mistake. If you’re suggesting you get to keep the mistake as a gift and still insist on getting what you originally ordered I think you have seriously misunderstood the law.
Or perhaps Chimera could have been less ambiguous in the OP.
I was originally in the customer was an ass, but maybe Chimera’s solution was a legitimate complaint. And the longer Chimera avoided questions over the confusion over the solution the farther onto that boat I headed.
But then he did answer the questions and I’m willing to accept that Chimera intended to offer was reasonable if she’d listened.
I will say that if he did include “sell” in the first few words he used while trying to explain what was going to happen he’d have been better off not.
So, basically Chimera did here what he did at work. Once the assinine baseless screeching started he said “fuck it, I am out here for now”. Once all the idiots finished venting, he calmly came back in and explained reality again.
Wait, but isnt this the SDMB where everybody is smarter, more considerate, more educated, and has a better vocabulary and critical reasoning skills than the average bashit crazy consumer that calls a customer service hotline?
The place where unwarranted assumptions are verboten, profiling is teh evil, and any claim must be backed by a cite.
I think its funny as hell that so many of you acted just like the asshole Chimera was complaining about.
My first boss on this job got moved to another area and a young guy got promoted to supervisor. Every time something would come up, his entire pattern of speech was centered around “I would have said”. Hell, I would score a perfect 100% on a call evaluation and he’d still pull out an “I would have said”. Finally I stopped him cold and explained that while HE might have said such-and-such, I am not him. Nor are any of the other people on our team. That he needed to worry less about what he would say and start considering that we are all unique individuals with our own manners of speech. That the other, darker side of what he was saying made it sound like it was all about him.
He got the message and stopped doing it.
I basically don’t have a lot of patience or respect for ex post facto “you should have said this”, or “you made a mistake using this word”. It is always easy to look at what happened after the fact and make judgments based on the results of events. Learn from experience and move on, don’t waste your time worrying about what you “should” have done, because you can’t change the past.
That’s funny, because how I learn from experience is realizing, “Yeah, I should have said this instead of that. I’ll remember next time.” Weird that you don’t.
No, you can’t change the past, but you can learn from it.* Since you can’t control the woman’s actions, you can only look at your own and see if there was anything to improve upon for future calls. Many posters in this thread do indeed think there was, namely your choice of words. She may have been largely unjustified, but quite a few people have pinpointed a particular phrase as the spark that set her off, which might have been avoided with some different wording, which also might help stave off future explosions. You disagree. Hence the, ahem, spirited discussion.
Gee that’s nifty. The next time you’re in the same exact situation talking to that exact person about the same thing I’m sure that will help.
Guessing at what you might have said differently and how she might have reacted doesn’t seem that helpful. Having others guess at it after the fact, especially to the degree they insist it all would have magically changed if only you’d used a better phrase, is even less helpful.
Hell even the same person on two different days might respond differently to the same words.
So yeah you can guess that a different phrase might had yielded better results but it’s just an empty guess with nothing to back it up. Yep, that’s learning alright.
Damn, you’re really reaching. What’s so useless or arcane about “Don’t suggest to a wronged customer that the solution is to buy more”? It’s basic customer service.
I mean, hell, if you’re going to go that route, you might as well just answer each call with “Yeah, what the fuck do you want?” I mean, you can’t know how some people will respond to it; some might even react positively!
