For many of my 45 years working, I have worked in the complaint department in some capacity. Until about ten years ago, customers had usually been reasonable, docile, polite and easy to interact with. Once every few weeks or so, we would have a particularly difficult person call in, who proceeded to make everybody’s life miserable, and the entire story was often the topic of talk in the cafeteria (which has replaced the water cooler in the hallway as the place to congregate and share camaraderie).
Today, the number of grumpy people outnumber the pleasant ones by a large margin. Our hundreds of call center associates working from home field an average of one grumpy call from what are known as Karens (or Darrens) for every dozen or fewer. It’s non-stop abuse for eight hours a day. Fortunately, only once did I bear witness to a serious threat to one of the call takers, and the result was an immediate visit to the customer’s home by a man in blue carrying a badge, bringing the status of our customer to a rather quick and embarrassing end.
Fortunately, I moved on from the days when I took customer phone call complaints to email complaints, but that doesn’t make the job much easier to do. People still manage to be cruel, demeaning and rude in emails. Even when they misspell or use improper grammar, their messages are clearly meant to make the recipients feel bad about existing, for the simple reason that they, the customers, are in a bad mood.
This is the one aspect of my life in which I am eternally grateful to all the bullies who made my school days a living hell, because my emotional callouses are too thick to be penetrated by most derogatory invective I see in emails every day.
Sometimes the source of the problem is the complainer’s own doing. One email opened with, “Your website (obscene term for a love-related activity) sucks, because I can’t log in.” Upon examining the user’s account, I was pleased to politely inform them that they misspelled their email as a “dot con” instead of a “dot com.” If you misspell it the first time, I think you should have to misspell it always, just to remind you not to pick fights when there are none (just kidding).
Occasionally customers suffer from what I call Rumplestiltskin Syndrome, named for the woman who received help from an imp in exchange for her first child and then forgot about the deal. This occurs when we offer customers a year’s worth of the moon and the stars for practically nothing, and when it’s time to pay at a later date, they forget how much we did for them and complain about not authorizing this or that, or the service costs double what they originally paid. It’s called half-price, discounted, free, limited time or “with your acceptance of this, you get that.”
The offers are not fine print, either; it’s all laid out in regular type, in brief but clear English. Some people don’t complain well in their native language, however, which makes them angrier. A stipulation which says “new customers within three months” becomes “old customers anytime.” Poor translations like that have started military conflicts, but for us it’s a daily drag.
I sometimes sit back and watch videos by Scott Seiss, a fellow whose sense of humor dealing with customers is a source of great relief for those of us who can’t use his witty comebacks. An example is when a customer asks to have an expired offer honored. His reply is that to receive such a bargain, one would have to travel back in time.
The real challenges come when a customer actually takes a second to find out your name and then personalize what they’re directing at you. For every ten people who email back to say, “Thank you, Susan, for helping me,” I’ve had that customer who has gone off on a tirade to say, “Susan, you are (foolish, arrogant, a poor example of customer service) and *#@^# disgraceful because you won’t give me something that nobody should be allowed to get, and I’m going to keep harassing you until I crack you psychologically open like an overripe melon and destroy your sense of self, because your destruction will be a bonus to me when I get what I want (which won’t matter to me by tomorrow, because none of the tantrums I have truly get me anything which makes me happy, but I’m stuck in this loop and you’re the one going to share it with me this hour).”
My advice to you when you are a customer is to remember that you are interacting with a real person. Our job is essentially to make you happy, so if you aren’t happy, let us know calmly, have information ready for us, be patient and listen to what we have to say. Maybe both sides can walk away somewhat satisfied. And no uniformed officer knocking on our door.
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