(Originally Posted May 19, 2019)
What makes a good customer? Good manners. What makes good customer service associates? Same thing.
We seem to have forgotten that over the past few years. Being on the giving end, I see many bad customers, and I hope nobody ever perceives me as being bad at my job just because I give news a customer doesn’t like, but some folks try anybody’s patience without even saying anything.
My customer contact is small, but in my office are several dozen people taking phone calls, and a few miles away I know that a branch office gets many visitors every day. If you’ve worked in customer service for a while, you know you’re bound to deal with people who get the day started by being annoying. The worst? First call of the day. It sets the tone for the next eight hours, and the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet (for the customer or the associate).
It used to be the bad customer was once a week if that often. Now it can be two to three times a day. Sometimes it’s by the same person all three times, especially on the phone. When you work in a phone contact center, it’s not hard to pinpoint who is dealing with a difficult person. The conversation usually becomes a shouting match, and it’s the phone associate who gets their ears pounded.
In public contact jobs, it’s important to be civil and service minded, but we call come to work in different frames of mind, and if you find somebody behind the counter who is having a hard time giving a good first impression, yelling won’t help.
If I could give a future customer with a complaint one bit of advice, I’d say take a step back before you storm in. Start your experience with a polite greeting, then say you have an issue and be prepared to state your case calmly and with facts only.
The two most annoying words ever uttered by a customer might well be, “you people.” It’s in emails and uttered a few times a day by fuming folks who would serve their blood pressure better by pausing a minute before launching the big guns (namely their vocal chords) at somebody. I would like to remove them from usage. Imagine having a bone to pick, and you start out by making the person who can tip the scales of customer satisfaction in your favor start to doubt if the encounter will end without somebody exploding first. There is no conspiracy brotherhood in customer service aimed at making your experience bad, and besides, we are all people.
A person recently read off a phone rep for calling her ma’am because she said that was similar to using the dreaded “N word.” The person fielding the call was black. So much for starting off that experience right, your ladyship. Plus, I never heard of that reference anywhere (if somebody has, please clue me in where it started). Anyway, this particular person had a religious title revealed only after this exchange. That was on them.
Sometimes a bad customer simply talks over the person trying to help, as if filibuster alone will solve everything. Simply listening to your customer associate will impart plenty of knowledge and a sense of what may have gone wrong, if you give them a chance to get it out.
One time I got an email from a customer which started out saying our website sucked because they could not log in. The problem was not the site: the customer had simply never opened an account to log into. No, I didn’t tell them that it was they who sucked, because it was a simple issue with a simple answer.
We have all been guilty lately of mouthing off prematurely and not respecting ourselves or others’ sense of decorum. A customer service call should be a civil statement of a problem or question, followed by a resolution. If you get an unsatisfactory answer, you can escalate your complaint, but don’t give yourself (or us) a stroke. We’re all stressed out, it’s true. The news is full of chaos and bluster. However, the purpose of business is to provide and satisfy a need, receiving funds to continue the business and pay those who run it. If something goes wrong, don’t be a thorn in somebody’s side. Step back before you speak, and save the soapboxes for the politicians.
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