Customer Service Thread

I'm sorry about the terrible customer, Choco.

 

@Choco jesus christ, I'm sorry :(

 

@tickingnectarine @ZeroEsper ahh, is okay but thanks. i was pretty proud of how calmly i managed to deal with it, and today all my customers were really kind & patient and one of them had the tardis noise as their ring tone, so it evens out

 

Very nice customer lady orders a plaque.

"Can we put our logo on that?" she asks.

"Sure," I say, "can you e-mail it to us?"

Very nice customer lady picks up a pencil. "I can just draw it for you!" She starts a very wobbly circle. NOPE. NOOOOOOOOOOPE.

ma'am. ma'am no. not to diss your artistic talents but no. please. e-mail.

ETA: the "customer supplied artwork" drinking game could be a thread of its own tbh

 

About nine in the morning, a lady walks in and says she wants to get her passport taken. I say i can help with that as soon as I'm finished ringing up another customer, and she wanders off into the store for a bit.

When she comes over to the photo lab, she takes out her glasses from her purse and starts cleaning them. I ask her to please take the glasses off, she says no, why should she? She's had her glasses on in her passport before, and in her driver's license picture. (I have a driver's license and wear glasses constantly. I do not have my glasses on in the picture)

I tell her it's store policy because we can't have anything obstructing the view of your eyes, and this is how i was trained to do it, but she won't have it and insists on wearing the glasses. Well okay, fine.

I take my usual 3 pictures, and she doesn't like any of them. So we take another four pictures. She still doesn't like any of them. I take another three pictures, go back to the kiosk, and she picks the picture from the now TEN options she has. She picks one from the first set of pictures that not only has three lines of glare on each lens of her glasses, but is also slightly blurry.

I process the order and tell her it'll be done in around ten minutes. Meanwhile, I'm still the only cashier on duty, and the manager and i are both ringing up customers. I finally get the pictures edited, printed and cut, she comes over to pay for them and i find out what she was doing in the store earlier. The cloth she used to clean her glasses was from our store, she just took it off the shelf and opened it.

After ringing her up for the cloth and passport pictures i ask her if she could please not open products before paying for them in the future. And then she goes over to the manager to talk to her about my attitude!

Thankfully the manager was in complete agreement with me on this.

And to top if off, she was wearing a picture ID badge from her job... where she wasn't wearing glasses.

 

I work the fresh department in a supermarket, and today a customer asked me where the ice cubes were. When I led her to the freezer section, she exclaimed in genuine surprise "Oh! I thought they'd be in the chilled area!" And like she was super sweet and all, don't get me wrong, but... I just can't stop laughing?

And the best part is, when I mentioned it to my colleague, she told me she had the exact same exchange with a different customer yesterday? What is going on??? I am currently sat with my head in my hands, genuinely beginning to question my understanding of how water works...

 

Dear valued customers of [redacted coffee chain]: While you are waiting for your order, please do not reach over the counter. Yes I know you can clearly see the stuff we have back here. You're still not allowed to reach over and grab it. It's a health hazard. We can grab that stuff for you because we're all required to wash our hands basically at least every hour. We have no guarantee that you have washed your hands at all, ever, so please do not reach over the counter with your grubby hands and put them all over the stuff that goes in/on other people's drinks, thank you.

Also: if you completely ignore me when I smile and say hi as you come in, I will let you walk all the way to the bathroom in the back, try the door, poke at the keypad, and then come slinking back to ask for the code, which I will give you happily because I am excellent at faking friendliness, and I will be snickering on the inside because if I have to fake friendliness to someone who doesn't even appreciate it the least I can get out of it is a little mild schadenfreude.

Also also: Either know exactly what you need to tell me for your order, or give me the items one at a time so I can ask you the questions I need answered. If you barrel through three drinks and two food items, I'm just going to be standing there until you're finished so I can ask if you wanted whipped cream on the first one. And then what the other four items were. Or, if the person on drinks is standing right there, they'll get started on your drink right away, and if it turns out you wanted decaf, or soy milk, or less sugar, whoops, we have to start again. Sorry for the wait. :^)))))

It was a rough day at work today. siiiiiiiiigggggghhhhh

 

A customer once maintained that a drink absolutely had to be made with nonfat milk because the person who would be drinking it was allergic to milk fat.

She also insisted that we put whipped cream on top.

 

That's ... special.

My first job out of college was for a computer antivirus company, back in the days where viruses were things that got passed around on floppy disks etc. Unfortunately some viruses were not careful to make sure the system they were infecting was actually compatible with them, and it was specifically the case with the Form virus and Novell Netware or Windows NT systems, both of which it rendered immediately unbootable.

Trying to fix this over the phone was, um, fun. This was back in 1994 or so. The repair procedure for this, in the absence of them having a tool available, was to get them to use the DOS "DEBUG" command, which was a memory viewer + disassembler + binary editor of memory. We would first have them type in a series of hex bytes to assemble a simple machine code program to load the damaged boot sectors into memory, then have them enter more hex to fix the corruption, and then write another little machine code program to save the memory back to a boot sector.

Doing this at 3am was ... a certain kind of fun.

 

i feel like we could all relate to this post

 

My favorite question from a customer continues to be, "Is your brewed coffee gluten-free?"

 

Tis the season I have to stop working every 5 minutes to open the locked spray paint case for someone (There's supposed to be someone from the regular part of the store upstairs to field those requests so we can get orders done in peace, but in practice, it doesn't usually happen)

Also I can't tell you how many times I have to explain that spray paint will not work on floral foam because it's not meant to be painted. ITS NOT STYROFOAM. ITS MADE FOR STICKING FAKE FLOWER STEMS IN. THAT'S WHY IT SAYS FLORAL FOAM. STOP TRYING TO MAKE SCHOOL PROJECTS/HALLOWEEN COSTUMES OUT OF IT AND THEN RETURNING TO THE STORE WITH IT, ANGRY THAT THE FOAM SUCKED UP THE PAINT LIKE A SPONGE LIKE I TOLD YOU IT WOULD


working here has just given me a deep loathing for spray paint. I mean it's useful, sure. But people think they can use it for everything.

 

"Why did you remove PC Accelerator?"
"It is a virus. It was only serving to harm your computer"
"Okay but why did you remove it? It was really helpful."

 

Last week I was working in the pharmacy and had a customer complain because the cost of their prescription had gone up from $0.00 to... $0.40. They had to pay forty cents. I would LOVE to pay forty cents to get my prescription, personally. I mean. I suppose on principle i understand why they were upset? But for fucks sake you would pay more for a candy bar at the front of the store.

 

oh Man this is the best customer service blog out there : X

 

This made me laugh out loud

I've definitely said things like "have a good nay" because I realize what I'm saying halfway through and panic.

 

Oh my god, this just reminded me of a thing.

Spoiler: sunday opening hours and why they're Not Fun

The shop I work in opens 10 til 4 on Sundays (standard trading hours for a big store - most people are aware of this, I thought) but despite this we still end up with people queueing outside from about 9:30. Which isn't a problem... except for the fact that when the staff start showing up for their shifts, the customers try to follow them through the front door and have to be turned away. Repeatedly. (And I want to establish that it's pretty much the same crowd waiting outside every week. They know full well what time the shop opens, they just don't seem to understand that we actually cannot serve them before this time, and NO they can't come in now.)

Anyway, on one occasion a customer did successfully manage to sneak inside after a member of staff. He wandered around the dark and empty store, picking up his little bits of shopping for about 5 minutes before someone grabbed the duty manager, who found the guy waiting by the unmanned checkouts (somehow this didn't clue him in) and had to explain that, sorry, we weren't open yet. Of course, the customer took this really personally, and couldn't seem to understand why we couldn't just serve him (like dude there are no checkouts staff anyway, they all start when the stORE OPENS??) and it took the manager explaining that we legally cannot trade before 10am on a Sunday to get the guy to actually leave.

And I'd love to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume he just genuinely thought we were open, but I also have to deal with Sunday closing time and experiencing week after week of people just not leaving despite the repeated tannoys of "this store is now closed, can all remaining customers please make their way towards checkouts"... no. I don't believe it.

But anyway, thankfully we now have a security guard whose primary job is turning people away outside of opening hours on Sundays! :D

 

Dear customers, if you tell us to "stop fucking calling" we will indeed stop calling you. We will also either cancel your application for credit, or freeze your existing account. If we do not have some way to call, we will not lend you money to buy things. Try actually finding out who is on the phone before doing that maybe?

Dear other potential customers, yes, we do have to ask for those documents, and it does have to be one of the things we listed. No, your lease will not work, or that letter from XYZ. We have to meet very specific criteria in verifying ID before we can lend you money, just like a bank does. Blame the government, not me.

Dear assholes filling out fraudulent applications. You are morons. Try not using the same phone number/address/email for 5 or more apps. It's pretty obvious. Using a dead persons social security number pretty dumb too.

 

This morning, my first customer of the day... I ask him how he's doing, and he says, "I'm about to be doing a whole lot better because I'm gonna get some motherfucking junk food!" And I'm like, "Yeah, awesome," but then he says "Yeah, ku klux klan loves that shit!" and i'm like wat AND THEN I SEE THE WHiTE POWER TATTOO ON HIS THROAT and I'm like, please gods let me get this asshole out of my store without him saying anything that makes me want to kill him, i don't need that kind of stress this early...