No matter what kind of customer field you work in, either it be retail, over the phone, or shoveling manure on a ranch, which, I’m sure has less manure then my current job, you’re always going to have customers. To ask the question, “Have you ever been in customer service?” is like asking if you’ve never worked with people before. Even on a ranch, you still deal with people.
I find costumer service, a crass, and contradictory kind of field. When a job advices there is a lot of costumer service involvement, it’s their kind way of saying “Oh, your going to get PLENTY of rude people, I hope you can handle it.”
What I find most entertaining is making fun of the difficult clients. During the moment, it’s hard to be funny. Like one of those bad sex sessions, you just fake it all the way through, and just hope the end comes quickly. The end is never as near as you hoped, and the other person is getting a better ride out of this then you are. Their outcome always looks much better then your outcome.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a bad phone call, where, I wanted to tell them “This isn’t Walmart, the costumer isn’t always right.” One has to like the classic lines of “I want to speak to your supervisor.” Gladly! After the supervisor kindly tells them, the SAME thing you just said, and that phone conversation was much quicker. It’s funny how the word “Supervisor” gets the most action done in the quickest amount of time.
Stereotypes are the, oh so fun, of the job. That particular group of people in Canada, that speak too fast, and want things done, yesterday, and have a listening problem. They can hear just fine, they just have a listening problem. Another fun one is when you get a woman named Dolores on the phone who sounds like she’s smoked since the age of three, and has a hangover on Monday. I adore my Texan men, never had a problem with a one of them, but, head up to Chicago, and oy vey, you swear Al Capone was riding up his daisy dukes. Go to the mid-west, and you would never think chatty, flirty, Mel was a married man with three kids. Let alone, a racist bastard to boot. And you have that infamous, Craig, who, claims he knows your supervisors, and can do your job with his eyes closed.
There are those stories we can all relate to, and then there are stories, that are so off the wall, you can not make up.
I loved the story a friend of mine told me recently, about a ninety year old man taking a limo to the peir. The limo driver pulled to the side of the road, took the man’s bags out, and kindly told the man, he couldn’t deal with anymore, he was too annoying. The ironic part of this whole thing was, this was New York, and about twenty blocks away from his destination. The older man calls up, and talks to my friend and asks her to pick him up and bring hin to his destination. He said he was a very prestigious person in New York, and has never been treated so rudely. I’m thinking, HOW can he possibly be THAT annoying? For one, he’s ninety years old, and two, in a LIMO? You have to be sitting in the front seat poking the driver with a cane or something. Or talking politics. That usually about does it in the states. The even funnier part is, calling someone, very far out of state, and asking them if they could pick them up and drive them to their destination.
Either New York city has gotten less tolerable, or he was really, just, that annoying.
I can’t imagine that.
Hearing that he looked better in speedos then Neil Armstrong sounds much more believable.
Then again, NO ONE looks good in speedos.
