Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Pleasing The Public


We've all heard the story of the JetBlue flight attendant who quit his job after he had a go with an unruly passenger. He grabbed a beer and slid down the emergency slide, making headlines worldwide.

Whether you agree with the guy or not, one thing is for certain...any job that requires working with, and pleasing customers is hard.

I have worked directly with the public for more than 26 years. There have always been challenging or hard to please customers, but in the last five years something has changed. Customers have become unusually rude, and unreasonably demanding. Sometimes even violent. Recently, a lady went nuts at a McDonald's drive thru because she wanted Chicken Nuggets and they had already started serving breakfast. She physically attacked the drive thru attendant through the window! Heck, my own father told me to go into Lowes and "get loud" the other day when we waited five minutes for someone to come load a grill into our truck.

So today I had an extremely difficult customer. He didn't seem to have a legitimate complaint, he was just angry. He fussed about the way something was worded on his bill. He fussed about the way something was worded on the credentials he had from our company. He was rude to me, and insulted our company and our employees in front of several other customers.

I apologized for all his inconvenience and tried my best to answer all his questions. I told him I would pass on his concerns about the verbiage. Then he said in a condescending tone, "Oh thank you. You've been ever so helpful today." then he mumbled something under his breath as he stepped aside. I couldn't resist the urge to say "Excuse me?". He didn't look up. I said "Did you say something else?". He never looked up. I let it go and took the next customer in line, but I was physically shaking by the time it was over.

For the past few years now, customer service people across the country have been taught they must "totally satisfy" the customer. The idea being that "satisfied" customers are not loyal customers. Only customers who are "totally satisfied" will remain loyal to a company or brand. Many companies, including mine send out comment cards to customers. Only the ones with perfect marks count. I've even had desperate sales people beg me to mark any survey cards I might receive "Totally Satisfied". At my company we don't beg. But we are instructed to say "I hope you were Totally Satisfied today" so as just to plant the idea into their heads in the event they should receive a card.

Also, those dealing with the public have been trained to empathize with the customers. "I understand how frustrating it must be that we're serving breakfast and you can't get your Chicken Nuggets, ma'am". It's been beaten in to our skulls that the customer is always right.

Well, here's what I think. This system is starting to backfire, giving American consumers a twisted sense of entitlement. The customer is NOT always right. Often times the customer is looking to pick a fight with someone because they are bitter, miserable human beings. Or possibly they have been out partying all night and need to get some grease on.

I'm a consumer. I know how frustrating it is when I have trouble getting what I want. We're all time-starved and there just aren't enough hours in the day. We want what we want when we want it. Cheap and Convenient. But when we don't get the grill after five minutes, it doesn't give us the right to walk into the store and start yelling at people, any more than it gives incompetent employees the right to be rude to customers. Employee or Consumer, manners and common courtesy don't fly out the window just because I want to hurry home and have some bison burgers!

I predict the tide is going to shift. I think we're going to see more and more instances where low paid customer service representatives across the country snap. I believe the JetBlue guy was just the beginning.

1 comment:

Puddin said...

You're absolutely correct -- the customer is not always right; but the customer is still the customer.