When you work in customer service, you will regularly come across a person with a bad attitude they are anxious to pass on to you. I just had one, and for the purposes of this post, I will call him Mr. Pompous. He sent us an email to express his overwhelming discontent with us. We don’t like people to be unhappy with us, but notes such as his are more worthy of a laugh than concern. We are concerned anyway.
From the content of his complaint, it was obvious right away that Mr. Pompous is well read and possesses considerable intelligence. Customers such as he can, therefore, be stubborn when they encounter a problem, sometimes they see themselves as overly worthy of VIP attention. He had received a piece of correspondence and, upon looking at the signature and title of the signer, envisioned some corporate hall of grandeur which he had to infiltrate to get to the source of the problem: in other words, whoever wrote the letter deserved a piece of his mind. In person.
Naturally customer letters are not really royal decrees, and any company worth their weight in salt empowers their service associates to answer any questions about paperwork going into customers’ hands, but Mr. Pompous was not having any of it. He complained instead that we served as a circle of bodyguards to protect our superiors and were shoving spears in his face to prevent his access.
He didn’t tell us what the problem was, so we sent a general response offering him help for the most common situations we encounter from our customers. He wrote back and thanked us for what he termed, in so many words, a “duh” moment, since he did obviously need help, but he still did not specify the problem. All that was in the email was line after line of well-crafted pompous prose with verbiage worthy of a PhD. It told us absolutely nothing.
I wrote back and offered help again, stressing that we needed to know what letter he received and what questions he had. I hit “Send” and waited for what I expected to be another pompous reply.
He did not disappoint. By the end of the day, he replied and said that we were beating around the bush, and that if we emailed him again it would go into his unwanted email file of shame. What a pity, since he would never get his answers, because he never gave us his question.
I mentioned Mr. Pompous to a co-worker who is experienced in looking into the finer details of a customer record, and we figured out that Mr. Pompous had simply forgotten to pay his bill, and apparently a letter inviting him to get back on track irked him for reasons unknown. So the corporate guru in the hall of grandeur and we will never know what was on the mind of poor Mr. Pompous.
Folks, don’t be Mr. Pompous. If you have a question or concern from a business that serves you, call and ask your questions in a focused and polite manner. We will help you. And we promise not to laugh.
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