A person who has just won a million dollars might cry for joy: I cry for joy when people are polite, because it just doesn’t happen often anymore, at least not when dealing with customers who are total strangers.
Occasionally I field customer emails, and more often than not they are about problems or complaints. A few times a week I have a compliment for coworkers or praises about how a service we offer was helpful to somebody. Unfortunately, the majority of emails wind up being gripe ridden paragraphs in which somebody is letting off steam. Often we are not the main problem, though, and I realize that. Folks wake up late, they ran out of coffee, all the kids have afflictions which leave them gushing at all ends, and when they get to us–a few numbers down the to-do list–they are not ready for something else to happen that they are not expecting.
This doesn’t mean, however, that passing on the bile is the best solution. When an email starts out with “Your website is the worst since so-and-so’s,” or “Your site is (expletive) and I want to (perform a senseless act of violence upon) your web designers,” it’s a sign that more issues than this are involved.
What has usually occurred is that the system imposed a security block after somebody has relentlessly hit a login key multiple times under the mistaken impression that keystroke number one thousand and two may just make the system give up and proceed to the next screen. But it is our web designers, in their minds, who have ganged together and decided to make our customers’ lives as miserable as possible. So much for preventing illegal access and identity theft.
Earlier this month, a customer sent a ranting complaint because they wanted to pay a bill which was late (actually it was due next month), ignored the answer provided and wrote back to complain about accessibility issues on our site. I mentioned that we do care about accessibility as well as security, and mentioned a free service as an example: the customer wrote back even angrier because I had mentioned “selling” something else. Since when is a free service selling? Selling involves money, doesn’t it?
After months of email vitriol, a customer finally wrote in with the following: “There seems to be a problem and I cannot log into the website. Can you assist me?” I put my pen down and stared at the screen for a minute. Was I the subject of a prank? No, it was a real, honest-to-goodness attempt to state a problem without being rude. If I were about a decade older, I could’ve packed up my cubicle and retired a happy woman. As it was, I was tempted to write back and thank them for being so nice.
This is not what we are coming to: it’s what we are allowing to continue. We have to take a breath and go back to how things used to be, when the red-faced customer whose blood is boiling over essentially nothing is the rarity instead of the rule. I and other customer service associates could do with more politeness. It brings tears of joy to the eyes.
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