Customer service - poor service can be the customers fault

Tweet

I see a lot of people whining about poor service from a company. I worked in customer service for years, primarily in the telecommunications industry. (First for Sprint, then Qwest.) Sometimes you get a genuinely nasty rep - it happens. However, the majority of the time when someone has a bad experience with customer service they leave out a LOT of details. They whine about how the person was rude, didn't help them, etc. What they don't tell you is what THEY did in that situation. I had a couple of situations where someone asked to speak to my manager because I was being unreasonable. Both of these times the manager took my side. Why? Because I wasn't being unreasonable. Often times there are things to alert managers when a rep is having a bad call, and they typically hop on and start listening before they ever speak to you. I can say with 100% confidence that the majority of issues that you call in for are usually problems you caused. We don't tell you that, of course, but it's true. Sure, billing errors happen every now and then, and sometimes you get charged for something you didn't use. But the majority of the time you caused the problem somewhere along the line. My big thing is when I offered several solutions, none of which a customer liked, I would then ask them what they wanted me to do. The response was usually some sort of compensation well beyond what the problem was worth. I even had one guy who's internet had been out for 2 days. He didn't bother calling us until the second day though he was well aware that it wasn't working before then. It was when the Rockies were in the World Series, he wanted to buy tickets but couldn't get online. I went above and beyond to try and help him out. Because he didn't call until 6PM on the day he could purchase tickets there was no way for us to get his internet on. (It was shut off due to non-payment.) He had to wait until the next day for someone to be there to turn it on. Well, he was planning on purchasing the tickets from craigslist. I offered to pull up craigslist on my own computer and get him information on some of the tickets for sale. That wasn't good enough. I knew where he lived and saw that his local library was open until 9PM. I told him he could go there and use their internet, but no. He felt he should be able to use his home internet because now his bill was paid so it should be on immediately. I gave this guy every solution I could think of, but none were good enough. He then wanted to speak to my supervisor despite the fact that he could do nothing either. No one was available to flip the switch and turn his internet back on. They were all gone for the day and it wasn't OUR fault that he waited until the last minute to pay his bill. The supervisor took my side and was finally honest with the customer. I'm not mean, I'm not going to tell you that honestly this was all your fault. But a lot of supervisor's aren't so nice. My supervisor told the customer he can blame no one but himself for not paying his bill on time and that if the tickets were that imporant he would've called in before then to purchase them. I had offered him several solutions to the problem which I wasn't even obligated to do. Anyway, that's just an example, but that kind of stuff happens more often than not. Most of the times it's an unreasonable customer who finally gets treated like they're treating the rep. I don't work in customer service anymore because as far as I'm concerned, if your a jerk when you call, don't expect to be treated any better. And the majority of people are jerks.