I am new in here. I am just so fed up from companies treating me like I am dirt. Is it just me, or have you experienced this new climate in the business world? It is like their charter is how to squeeze money out of you, by hook or crook.
Well, they do work for their shareholders who want to maximize profit, so squeezing money is what they are supposed to do. But, yeah, some companies are not doing to well on “customer relations”. My bank comes to mind…
Sounds like you’ve been dealing with AT&T. Man, I hate those bastards. :mad:
And, how much are you willing to pay for better treatment?
Customer service is costly, so if you’re doing things on the cheap, you don’t usually have great customer service.
It’s the difference between walking into Walmart an Neiman Marcus. Or, between buying a Dell PC or buying a Mac. (Dell has one of the worst customer service reputation. Apple the best).
Let’s take a look at the airlines: Before deregulation, you were treated quite nicely. You were given full meals with real plates and silverware. You were given pillows, and had a grand selection of magazines and newspapers to choose from. The airlines fussed over you, and made sure you were happy.
Once deregulation took place, people started shopping for the cheapest fairs. Discount airlines like Southwest prospered while old standards like Eastern, TWA, Braniff, and Pan Am went under. Thus, airlines went for the cheap: No more pillows, no free lunch, no legroom. It’s a flying bus and just be happy you have a seat and not sitting in an overhead compartment.
One of the most popular airlines in Europe is Ryan Air which goes out of its way to make your life miserable. And, if you complain, you’re simply told you can take your business elsewhere. Everything costs extra. The CEO has even talked about turning the on plane lavatories into pay toilets.
Yet, more and more people keep choosing them and coming back. Why? Well, they’re now advertising 6 Pound (about $10.50) flights from London to all over Europe. I just checked, and can book a flight from London to Rome for just $25 each way. Sure, I’m treated not quite as well as a cow in a slaughter house, but it’s only $25 to Rome!
So, if you want good service, you just have to be willing to pay for it.
I use to work for a major department store 10+ years ago. They treated their customers, you are lucky we let you shop here. And they treated their employees the same way.
I was mostly referring to banks , credit card companies and mortgage firms
Other people said it in a way but I will restate it more clearly. Businesses don’t exist to treat customers in any particular way, they exist to make money. That’s it, the end. Treating all customers well as a blanket rule is one common strategy for doing that but it isn’t the only one. The customer isn’t always right. Sometimes they are abusive to the staff or, even worse, they end up costing the business money due to level of demand they have based on what they are paying. Most businesses would be better off if they could just “fire” some of their customers and some do it in various ways because they are more hassle and money than they are worth as a customer.
None of this is a problem unless their is a mismatch of goals between the company, its employees, and its customers. A very service oriented company like an upscale hotel chain may need to take a loss on individual customers sometimes to maintain their reputation. A Motel 6 that is booked up every night anyway probably won’t care as much if you are inconvenienced. The airlines have formal policies in place about ranking customers based on cash models. A full-fare first-class passenger is worth any reasonable thing they can do to help get from point A to point B comfortably whereas a passenger with a discounted coach ticket is often not.
A lot of people take the statement “the customer is always right” as a general doctrine when that is only an indirect business goal that only applies to some types of businesses.
You have to remember good customer service doesn’t = sales.
When I worked at a hotel, I got involved in Six Sigma. I was a firm believer in customer service. For my Six Sigma project I did a study on strict adherence to proven scripts versus excellent customer service.
I was STUNNED to find out the results. When the desk clerks and res agents stuck to the proven script and did not veer or let the customer (guest) have his say, they made sales and LOTS of them. Our business went up always 50% or more for the three times I tried this.
When we tried, taking our time with guests and giving them the best possible service, our sales fell off dramatically and while people liked us better, the comments cards did improve greatly, the sales never came out of being treated nicely.
This is more suited to IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
See? Shunted from one department to another.
That’s like complaining that your dominatrix is spanking you too hard.
Bad customer service is bad customer service.
But then again, working in customer service… Every goddamned person in my department quietly makes comments about how they need to find another job, how stressful it is, how much BS we have to put up for our relatively low pay. And the bottom line upon questioning comes down to the same thing I feel with it.
You can have a pleasant experience with over 90% of your customers, but it is the small minority that wears you out mentally and emotionally. The terminally stupid. The angry demanding assholes. The greedy lying scam artists. Those are the ones who, bit by bit, slowly kill your soul and make you stop caring and stop providing good service to the good people. Like with Police Officers who have been on the job for many years, you’ve seen the worst of it so many times that you come to expect it and start seeing it in everyone. A customer comes up to you, or calls you, and there is the slightest bit of question about something and you immediately start asking what fucking game they’re playing with you and you start being less than pleasant. Why? Because you get that call, or that person, every fucking day, and if you are not prepared for it, you get burned.
Then on the other side of it, and this is the real WHY of bad customer service, you have cheap ass “by the numbers” companies who don’t give a shit what kind of scam artists and assholes you’re dealing with, they just want you to maintain the same call flow, the same numbers, and they don’t want to see any complaints. They want to pay you the bare bones minimum they can to keep the flow of bodies into the operation, and they want to beat you fucking silly with petty assed rules and procedures to ensure that you do exactly X and Y and are at your desk or post for N minutes and that they can harass you out the door with those rules and procedures and fill your job with another body the moment you show signs of disgruntlement.
I am beginning to suspect that if Slavery still existed in a modern society, the slaves would not be doing field work or manufacturing (machines being more efficient), they would be doing customer service work.
I like the OP’s user name and hope he or she sticks around.
As for me, I think there’s a connection to the larger society’s decline in civility. You can hardly expect customer service to do anything but reflect the society it serves.
On the other hand, now Southwest has just about the best customer service reputation for airlines in the US, but still can usually undercut their competitors. So there are definite exceptions to the rule.
Also, frequently when customers complain about getting treated poorly, they aren’t asking for reasonable things. A friend worked customer service for a bank. Asking to have fees removed because you bounced a check due to miscommunication with your husband ONCE. No problem. There were people who would call every week because they were writing checks where there wasn’t money and wanted the fees reversed.
Here’s a couple of secrets of being a good customer, and thus, getting good service;
No, you’re not right just because you’re the customer. I’m not stupid and neither is my company, so stop throwing that old canard in our faces because we both know it isn’t true.
Try Being Nice. You’re an asshole to the CSR, you get treated like an asshole. No big shock, you do the same to the people you deal with. Be nice, we’ll generally be nice, and I’ll often go out of my way to help people who are pleasant to deal with. Along the same lines, I’m just some tech guy on the telephone. I’m not the personification of my company and I’m not being paid to put up with your abuse. Neither is the cashier at the grocery store, or the teller at the bank.
You need us just as much as we need you. It takes two, a buyer and a seller. Don’t act like you’re doing us such a great whopping favor buying from our company that we should kiss your ass, debase our staff and lose money on the deal. No company on Earth needs your business that much. If this is what you insist on from service staff, then you are mentally ill and need a great deal of therapy, starting with some reality based rejection.
The more you ask a company to suffer and lose for your gain, the less likely you are to receive what you ask for.
You must be joking. You expect decent customer service from the same people who caused the economy to collapse? They don’t make billions in profit by treating people fairly. I have to have a credit card, but I otherwise never do business with banks, opting for a credit union that doesn’t have shareholders and scam artists to worry about. If it wasn’t for the air miles on the credit card, I’d dump it like week-old fish. Yeah, I’m a bit of a whore in that respect.
You should always try to get revenge. 
I agree that there should be more effort to serve the customer but jebus, some of the customers we deal with on a daily basis are just ridiculous.
I work for a scuba shop and we had a bad review because we would not take a man’s teenaged daughter out on dangerously rough seas to complete her dive certification. He wasn’t happy with the second location offered and honest to god was furious that we didn’t risk her safety (and the safety of our crew) to make him happy. Give me a damned break. I think the instances of idiot customers far outweigh the bad service from companies, but I’m sure I’m biased since I’m in customer service.
And try being nice FIRST. Being an absolute asshole to the first person you encounter, and then getting escalated to the next person up can backfire. The first person might very well inform the second person “Hey I’ve got a problem customer here”, or the second person might have been listening in. And usually I HAVE found that being pleasant seems to get me a better response (from my point of view) than being unpleasant.
Now, I used to have a boss who wouldn’t do anything unless a customer was nasty to her, in which case she’d bend or break rules. And then she wondered why we had so many bitchy customers…it was because she rewarded bitchiness.