The customer is not always right. In fact, in my experience, customers are wrong until proven right.
Most of the time, the customer is the one asking questions. And they are usually right to ask questions because they don't KNOW very much about what they ask about. Of course, I'm generalizing, but stay with me here. I've worked in several different types of customer service jobs, and they all taught me the immutable truth: People that want things suck. As in they drain. They drain time, energy, resources, souls, ect. And plenty of times, it’s not their fault, not always. They don't have to be dumb people, they don't have to be organized or in large groups, they don't really even have to ask for the thing they want. But people in need of something tend to drain one thing or another from those trying to help. I'm positive I am the same every time I show up somewhere as a consumer. And it’s not going to change anytime soon.
Customer service is the art of a few different crucial skills. The art of compartmentalizing your own needs to put someone else before you. The art of listening and responding appropriately. It is the art of knowing your business well enough to be able to help and serve. But see, there's more to it than that. In many instances, customer service is the art of getting yelled at, either subtly or overtly, and standing together. Customer service is the art of knowing what to expect, because of assholes that want to ambush you to make themselves feel better. It's having the knowledge of every possible thing that can go wrong, every conceivable way that the product or service that you offer can fail because, frankly, you've dealt with them all. It’s the art of knowing what people want to hear, what they need to hear, and what they’re supposed to hear.
Based on my experience, customer service is like the offensive line of the business world. I mean, you never hear about customer service for good reasons. No one comments on customer service like, "Oh that company was great! I called them and they sent me the exact part I wanted and I was so impressed." Or, "Oh my goodness, they sent me the wrong part. But then they made up for it and I was so happy with them, they really stepped up to the plate!" Bullshit. You comment on customer service if it sucks, and if it doesn't, you barely notice. You barely remember it even took place. It’s expected. I learned a while ago that bad news travels 4 times as fast as good news. All the time you hear about people that were screwed over that want their revenge. They want retribution, and they’ll preach on the pulpit how craptastic your thing is. Far fewer people want to preach about a good experience that they wish to share.
Thus is the similarity between the offensive line and customer service. For you football fans, I want you to think of 5 prolific quarterbacks without having to look them up anywhere. Just think of their names, real quick. Got it? Okay, now list 5 great running backs. Done. Good, now list 5 of the best left tackles you know.
Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Having trouble? That’s okay, list me 5 linebackers. Now list 5 pass rushers on the defensive line, any position. Now 5 all-pro offensive linemen, any position. Still tough, isn’t it? See what I mean? You don’t remember these guys despite the fact that they’re the ones in the trenches. They are the ones who get beat up on every single play. You can have an amazing offensive line and an average running back, and you will have much more success than an amazing running back with an average line to protect him. Same thing with business. If your business has an average to shitty product, but you have people there to support it and apologize for you, you will stick around a lot longer than if you have a great product but no one to support it when there are problems or questions.
If your business has enough money to have customer service, they basically have the ability to set up a human buffer zone for themselves. A human spit guard. When you have this department, what you're basically able to do is wait for someone to come and have a problem, and you call over to this guy, you say, "Hey Larry, come here for a moment. Just stand right here, right here between me and our customer here. He's gonna yell for a while and I want you to tell me what he says, but you do it because I already have his money and I don't actually give a shit. So it's your job to give a shit. So just stand here."
So Larry gets yelled at and comes back and is like, "Yeah, the customer wants a better product for less money, he wants it today or tomorrow, he wants you to deliver it on a silver platter and he would love to punch you in your face after he gets exactly what he wants."
And then you say, "Ok, so this is what I want you to communicate to him. I already have his money, I make the product I want to make and he is welcome to purchase or not purchase that product. I make it at the pace I choose, I deliver it in the way that's best to me, and I would snap his neck if he wanted to throw down. Go ahead and tell him that, see what he says."
Larry says all that, and the customer yells some more, and says, "The customer says screw you and he wants a refund and he's going to tell everyone not to buy your product and that you have a microscopic penis."
So you say to Larry, "Okay, Larry, are you writing all this down, tell him this. Tell him that I’m laughing at him from my office, and that I wiped my ass with the money that he gave us for our product just to do it. And that he's a slimy, inbred, worthless shit bucket who was too dumb to live without us and our product. You can paraphrase all that if you need to."
Poor Larry would probably come back like, "I need to put in my two weeks notice. I just don't think that I can keep doing this."
And then you, being the boss, you come back at him like, "Ok, Larry, what you're going to need to do is go into the bathroom, and look yourself in the mirror, and you're going to tell yourself that you are a degenerate and you have no life and that without this job you would be on the street. And that you can't quit and you'll be here for-fuckin- ever and your life is basically ruined. And do it quickly because when you come back, I'm gonna have you say some more shit to this customer."
I work in a customer service job right now, and it’s mostly over the phone. And honestly, in spite of my complaints, I know that my job could be a lot worse than it is. I know that I'm getting by just fine for now and that I have a lot to be thankful for. The main reason I am reminded of this is because of my memories from previous jobs.
Like my former job, working at a rental car location. It doesn’t matter which one, because I’m guessing working at another rental company would be pretty similar. Understand, this newer job I currently have, it’s all on the phone. It’s a call center, with people calling from all across the country and Canada. It can be very interesting, never knowing where someone was going to call or email from. But I can always put them on hold, I can leave the desk where the phone is if I need to. On the side of renting cars, people were calling from local areas, and then coming to see me in person. This was not optimal for me. At all.
I have learned from the days I worked there, that customer service roles done in person are not for the scatterbrained, the flippant, the panickers, the eccentric, the uninformed, the nonchalant, the independent thinking, or the hungover. I wasn't all of those at any one point (to my knowledge) but I'm sure I was each of those at one point or another when I was renting and servicing cars. The office that I ran was located right down the street from my apartment at the time, near downtown Madison, WI. So it was convenient to get there and to get home afterwards. And at the same time, it was always close, it was always there as a reminder of all the shit there always seemed to be left to get done.
I took over the location as the sole agent there, but I had an experienced guy with me for the first week or two, to get the hang of what was going to occur. And for the most part, it was a smooth couple of weeks, and I was comfortable and felt confident for when it was just me, flying solo. So obviously, my first day alone at the job consisted of several events that had not occurred to us during my training, including this dude that paid by check, having to turn away customers due to credit checks, running out of cars, having to leave to gas up cars with people there waiting, stuff like that. And then there was one particular customer, whose name I have adjusted for this story: Taylor Redd.
Taylor had rented a car two days prior. She had returned the car while my training supervisor and I were working there. Basically, she or someone in her family smoked in the car. A lot. To where it smelled a lot like any other car that's been smoked in. We also found a lot of ash underneath the seat. Both I and my supervisor saw it, we both asked Taylor if anyone had been smoking in the car, and she denied it both times. Now me, I wanted to bring her out to the car and ask her, and show her what we were looking at. My supervisor just said, 'Okay, go ahead and leave.' And that was that, at least as far as what he had to do. I took pictures, we wrote up the report, and arranged to charge her the additional fees, roughly about $250. Sucks, but that's what you get, right? Case closed, yeah?
Nah.
One of the first calls I got from my first morning alone just happened to be from Capital One, and it was in regards to a customer who had been overcharged for a car rental and had her credit pushed over the limit as a result. The name rang familiar the second it was said over the phone. I tried to explain to the Capital One woman what was going on and why it was occurring and that there was nothing I could do to change the charges. She calmly responded that Ms. Redd would be in later to discuss the charges with me in person. Wonderful, I remember thinking to myself.
So that day, amid all the other shit going on, I took my lunch break at the restaurant next door and tried to uncoil. It had been a stressful enough morning, and I actually had forgotten that I should be expecting Taylor’'s arrival. But as I walked back to the office after lunch, an interesting thing happened. I passed by some of the cars parked in front of the office, and someone stepped out from between two cars and behind me for a few seconds before darting back between two other cars. He was a younger looking black dude, had a pick stuck in his hair, had baggy shorts and a blue t-shirt, and was walking really goofy and gangly. That's seriously the best way to describe his walk. It was creepy and strange, and yet the guy looked so goofy that I remember laughing about it in my head at the time.
So I open the office back up, and in comes Taylor and 3 relatives, and they line up at my front desk, in what can only be described as an assault formation. As a formality, basically pretending I didn't remember what was going on, I turned to one of Taylor's relatives and asked, politely and as aloof as possible, "What can I do for you all?"
Taylor Redd's exact response: "You can give me back the money that you mother fuckers stole off my credit card."
I mean, she laid into me in a way that I had not previously known. She went all in, then went back-to-back. It was ugly. And while Taylor was going, the lady next to her was trying as hard as possible to keep it reasonable, trying to provide actual arguments and logic for why the money should be returned. Next to her was the same goofy kid that had followed me in the parking lot, who was laughing at all of this and really must have just tagged along because he wanted to see what was going to happen. I wasn't so much worried about any of them. I was more concerned about the 4th member of the group, who was standing off behind Taylor, with a deranged look on his face, not saying anything but just standing perfectly still, arms folded, with his bulging upper body barely covered by his wife beater shirt. That was the guy I was really worried about, because I've never seen anyone who was later convicted of premeditated murder, but I saw this guy’s face. He looked like he was meditating about murder.
Anyway, my boss ended up coming by and basically giving them whatever they wanted, which meant that we had wasted everyone’s time by trying to enforce the rule that was very clearly broken. Awesome. I take the brunt of this for hours on end and it basically was all for nothing. And this is what I’m talking about. The idea of blocking shit from someone just so that when they finally get past me, the person behind me just gives up the ball, so to speak. I would have liked to think that if I held out that long repeating the policy that was dictated to me, that the person above me would at least pretend that it was for an actual cause. I posted up and blocked for as long as I did and basically the quarterback that I blocked for just panicked and threw across his body into the zone of … you know what, it’s not even like that. The QB I blocked for ran into another lineman’s ass and fumbled the ball. Or handing it to a linebacker rather than get tackled, something like that. And that customer, and all the other customers that got to witness all of that, will more than likely remember nothing more than that our location had poor blocking.
When blocking is good, you remember the running back or the receiver or the quarterback. When the blocking is bad, you remember the blocking.
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