"The Customer Is Always Right"

[Retros_x]

Who are the REAL customers?

Some would say it's not those who are buying the toys, games, and other items made by Hasbro, but those who own the stocks.

Thats not how the term customer works. Customers buy the product. Without customers, your business is a failure. Those who own the stock, own the company. Of course the business benefits them, otherwise they would not want to be an owner of it. But thats different than being a customer.

part of being treated fairly and with respect is being prompt in your resolutions. Not having me wait in a checkout line and then sending me to a customer service line to wait in another line. Not making me wait 10 mins on a manager in order to obtain a refund after the restaurant screwed up my order

Reading your comments: you have not worked in retail or only for short term long time ago, right? You are confusing here a clerk treating you fairly and respectfully with a company designing their processes and guidelines.

If you wait in checkoutline with a service problem (although your problem ofc can occur at checkout spontaneously) you are in the wrong line. You get sent to service line because a) customers behind you are waiting for their checkout. b) the clerk at checkout tries to do their "first level support" and will soon reach their limit. Service line usually has training specified for that and time for that.

(Also customers always think their problem is super simple and wonder why nobody knows how to deal with it. In reality often as a clerk its the first time in two years you encounter this, so of course you do not know immediately how to handle it. Most common problems that occur on a daily basis are known and easily fixed by normal clerks.)

Waiting for a manager for refund is also not a lack of respect by the clerk, its company guideline that they are not authorized to give you a refund (because company doesnt trust them). Manager is not a stand-by job, they do other stuff too, so you need to wait for a moment.

These are structural problems you have with the stores and restaurants, but not the clerks being unrespectful to you. If you react to them like they do this to you personally out of disrespect, I am not surprised you get snide sideremarks from them.

 

[Corinnguard]

Reading your comments: you have not worked in retail or only for short term long time ago, right? You are confusing here a clerk treating you fairly and respectfully with a company designing their processes and guidelines.

If you wait in checkoutline with a service problem (although your problem ofc can occur at checkout spontaneously) you are in the wrong line. You get sent to service line because a) customers behind you are waiting for their checkout. b) the clerk at checkout tries to do their "first level support" and will soon reach their limit. Service line usually has training specified for that and time for that.

(Also customers always think their problem is super simple and wonder why nobody knows how to deal with it. In reality often as a clerk its the first time in two years you encounter this, so of course you do not know immediately how to handle it. Most common problems that occur on a daily basis are known and easily fixed by normal clerks.)

Waiting for a manager for refund is also not a lack of respect by the clerk, its company guideline that they are not authorized to give you a refund (because company doesnt trust them). Manager is not a stand-by job, they do other stuff too, so you need to wait for a moment.

These are structural problems you have with the stores and restaurants, but not the clerks being unrespectful to you. If you react to them like they do this to you personally out of disrespect, I am not surprised you get snide sideremarks from them.

Every store has a SOP on how to handle customer problems. If a customer has a problem, the cashier will be the first to try fixing it. When they can't fix it or don't have the authorization to fix it, they'll call a shift supervisor or a manager to help them and shorten the wait time of any customers who might be behind the first one. The shift supervisor or manager will then try to do their best to help the customer. They will also do their best to explain what might have caused the problem in the first place.
If they fail their Persuasion checks at helping the customer out, then they might give the customer the company's customer service number and let customer service deal with it.

You can't make everyone happy.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think there's a general breakdown here and the people caught in the middle are both customer service staff, and customers who actually need help and aren't just time-wasters or the like.

What I've seen is that customer service are being increasingly used almost as "human shields" by businesses who are behaving pretty abominably and increasingly realizing that they can get away with it, and what really demonstrates this is that customer service people seem to have less and less and less power to actually fix any problems or really in any way help the customer beyond pressing buttons for them that the customer could have pressed anyway.

Combine this with other bad policies, cheapness, skirting the edge of the law, and particularly increasing low-quality automation that actually wastes the time of customers, and we're kind of seeing companies just slamming customers they've made angry into customer service people who they've given no power to help said angry customers. And this wears down the customer service people too as they keep having to tell customers they can't help, and aren't allowed to say "It's because this company is run by wankers who don't want to help you".

And the companies that do actually offer good customer service and empower their people suffer because there are so many bad actors in this space. Sometimes you run across a company who are just incredibly helpful, but their trappings are the same as the larger number of companies who are just trying to avoid doing anything at all (least of all fixing a problem that might cost them money to fix), so it's very unexpected.

On top of all this, sometimes you kind of do have to give the right person a slightly hard time in order to get a proper resolution. That doesn't mean being nasty or whatever, but for example, I had to spend 3 hours on the phone to convince a company to give me back £200, and 45 minutes of that was grinding down/no-selling someone I knew could solve the problem, but who was trying to convince me that going from 50mbps to literally 2mbps (cable to primitive DSL) wasn't a downgrade and was totally fine. But you have to work out when that's possible and when not, and many of the companies involved have policies for the customer service people to obfuscate what they're actually empowered to do.

(My biggest current frustration here is that countless companies insist a chat window or some kind of form is the best and quickest way to get help, but in practice, they don't actually do anything unless you phone them! My main ISP is like this - the will do anything to make you use their form, but if you do, all you get is endless holding emails saying they need two business days to respond. Phone them? Engineer round next day!)

 

[FrogReaver]

I think there's a general breakdown here and the people caught in the middle are both customer service staff, and customers who actually need help and aren't just time-wasters or the like.

What I've seen is that customer service are being increasingly used almost as "human shields" by businesses who are behaving pretty abominably and increasingly realizing that they can get away with it, and what really demonstrates this is that customer service people seem to have less and less and less power to actually fix any problems or really in any way help the customer beyond pressing buttons for them that the customer could have pressed anyway.

Combine this with other bad policies, cheapness, skirting the edge of the law, and particularly increasing low-quality automation that actually wastes the time of customers, and we're kind of seeing companies just slamming customers they've made angry into customer service people who they've given no power to help said angry customers. And this wears down the customer service people too as they keep having to tell customers they can't help, and aren't allowed to say "It's because this company is run by wankers who don't want to help you".

And the companies that do actually offer good customer service and empower their people suffer because there are so many bad actors in this space. Sometimes you run across a company who are just incredibly helpful, but their trappings are the same as the larger number of companies who are just trying to avoid doing anything at all (least of all fixing a problem that might cost them money to fix), so it's very unexpected.

On top of all this, sometimes you kind of do have to give the right person a slightly hard time in order to get a proper resolution. That doesn't mean being nasty or whatever, but for example, I had to spend 3 hours on the phone to convince a company to give me back £200, and 45 minutes of that was grinding down/no-selling someone I knew could solve the problem, but who was trying to convince me that going from 50mbps to literally 2mbps (cable to primitive DSL) wasn't a downgrade and was totally fine. But you have to work out when that's possible and when not, and many of the companies involved have policies for the customer service people to obfuscate what they're actually empowered to do.

(My biggest current frustration here is that countless companies insist a chat window or some kind of form is the best and quickest way to get help, but in practice, they don't actually do anything unless you phone them! My main ISP is like this - the will do anything to make you use their form, but if you do, all you get is endless holding emails saying they need two business days to respond. Phone them? Engineer round next day!)

Exactly this.

 

[Belen]

(My biggest current frustration here is that countless companies insist a chat window or some kind of form is the best and quickest way to get help, but in practice, they don't actually do anything unless you phone them! My main ISP is like this - the will do anything to make you use their form, but if you do, all you get is endless holding emails saying they need two business days to respond. Phone them? Engineer round next day!)

My IT guy asked to put a chat bot on our website and I said ‘he’ll no.’ We leave the number up and a contact form that goes to a person. Chat bots are garbage.

I go back to companies making things worse on purpose to save money and cut corners. People waste their time trying to get things fixed.

I go back to Apple. The next day they locked my son’s account and now I have to wait for some faceless person to ‘review’ the account. They cs reps can do nothing because they either are not trained or do not have access.

They purposely screw things up but ask you not to get angry when they provide no viable way to resolve the issue and now I have spent 5 hours to add a recovery phone number that they then locked the account with no way to recover it.

This breeds rage.

 

[FrogReaver]

My IT guy asked to put a chat bot on our website and I said ‘he’ll no.’ We leave the number up and a contact form that goes to a person. Chat bots are garbage.

I go back to companies making things worse on purpose to save money and cut corners. People waste their time trying to get things fixed.

I go back to Apple. The next day they locked my son’s account and now I have to wait for some faceless person to ‘review’ the account. They cs reps can do nothing because they either are not trained or do not have access.

They purposely screw things up but ask you not to get angry when they provide no viable way to resolve the issue and now I have spent 5 hours to add a recovery phone number that they then locked the account with no way to recover it.

This breeds rage.

Yep. 5 hours wasted. That’s almost a days work. At some point you should get paid as a customer service rep for servicing yourself.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I go back to companies making things worse on purpose to save money and cut corners. People waste their time trying to get things fixed.

Indeed, and that puts customer service reps and customers at odds, when we really should be mad with the companies involved (and the governments that refuse to regulate them or punish them imho, but that may be a very European opinion I admit). The continual disempowering of customer reps I honestly suspect may cost these companies more than they think. But in many cases it's kind of a captive audience - most people in real terms have to have a mobile phone and mobile service provider. And those companies are not competing on service, they all have dreadful customer service, and they know that as long none of them improve, none of them will have to do better, so you get a kind of de facto Phoebus Cartel but for terrible customer service.

They purposely screw things up but ask you not to get angry when they provide no viable way to resolve the issue and now I have spent 5 hours to add a recovery phone number that they then locked the account with no way to recover it.

I think the very important thing to remember is that "they" here is the company. Not the CS reps. They're being screwed too, for the most part, and losing their jobs or hours or steady contracts to crappy AI that only makes the customers madder with them.

So don't get mad with reps, get mad with the company.

(I should note I worked customer service for many years in IT. I've been screamed at, cried at, told I'm lying countless times, told that I'm going to be fired by people who, in theory, could do that, used as a therapist or even one memorable occasion, a religious adviser (don't ask lol), and I'm lucky that pretty much none of it really affected me. The one comment that stuck with me was a senior partner who made like £500k+ telling me "I could do your job!" and I was like "It pays £25k, do you want the job? We're hiring!", which seemed to modify his attitude drastically for the better.)

 

[FrogReaver]

My IT guy asked to put a chat bot on our website and I said ‘he’ll no.’ We leave the number up and a contact form that goes to a person. Chat bots are garbage.

I go back to companies making things worse on purpose to save money and cut corners. People waste their time trying to get things fixed.

My company uses an IT chatbot for internal IT issues. I’ve probably had a 10-20% success rate using it. It doesn’t give pushback on sending you over to a tier 1 IT chat rep when you request though.

I do take a few minutes going through the links it provides because if I don’t have to deal with the IT rep that probably will have to escalate to tier 2 anyways it’s worth it.

My least favorite is the automated phone prompts that refuse to send you to a person when you know your problem is more complex than anything it can help with.

 

[FrogReaver]

Every store has a SOP on how to handle customer problems. If a customer has a problem, the cashier will be the first to try fixing it. When they can't fix it or don't have the authorization to fix it, they'll call a shift supervisor or a manager to help them and shorten the wait time of any customers who might be behind the first one. The shift supervisor or manager will then try to do their best to help the customer. They will also do their best to explain what might have caused the problem in the first place.
If they fail their Persuasion checks at helping the customer out, then they might give the customer the company's customer service number and let customer service deal with it.

You can't make everyone happy.

‘Hi, I’m from customer service. Thanks for waiting in line 10 mins for me. Please take 5 minutes explaining your problem to me so I can ultimately tell you I can’t help and that you’ll have to repeat yourself to my manager after you wait 15 minutes on him because he’s busy.’

IMO. If you (general you) respected and valued my time you wouldn’t be following SOP’s to the letter that intentionally do not value my time.

Customer service voice: ‘I said it nicely so I’m not being a jerk.’ ‘If the customer complains about our wait time or SOPs he just needs to understand this is reality’.

 

[Maxperson]

Yea, I don't want an involved conversation with a retail worker either, but I don't think thank you or good morning reaches that level.

I was in Vegas with my wife a number of years ago and we went to a casino restaurant. The server was nice and started with polite chit chat, which was fine. But then he started getting in a full conversation and we learned waaaaaaaay too much about his life. Then I kid you not, in the middle of that conversation, he just sat down at the table next to me without asking and continued talking. I rarely complain to management about a server, but that guy went way beyond the pale.