Customer Service Thread

There was a guy who called maybe 3 times over the course of a year. He said he was working on his social anxiety and would ask if he could tell a joke, I'd say yes, and he'd deliver some corny dad-style joke.

I wonder a) if it was true and b) if it actually helped.

 

Today I had a customer show up to pick up their picture order "a little early." And by a little early, I mean an hour and 20 minutes early. That's not "a little", ma'am.

 

Please. Do not. Reach around the register to scan your own loyalty card. I know you're trying to make things faster, probably, but that doesn't make it any less distressing for me or less against store policy.

 

Oh man, people reaching for things. Bad enough on the deli where most of the product was wrapped, but on the meat and fish counter? Where everything is both air exposed and raw? What do customers think the huge bit of fucking glass is there for, decoration? Or people trying to come inside the counter which inevitably led to them getting shirty with me when I shooed them out because hygiene.

I remember one time a guy came up to me when I was in full whites, hair net, boater, apron - full on PPE - and told me there was a spillage on the floor in aisle one. I dutifully stripped my PPE and decontaminated and there in the middle of the household aisle was - it was shit. Just a fresh turd chillin on the polished floor like it was no big thing and I just. Blink blink. Like what even the fuck. Not 10 metres away from the public toilets. And this guy looks at me and says "So are you going to pick it up or what?"

I told him that hell no I wasn't cleaning it up, I'm in charge of one of the most dangerous departments in store from a hygiene point of view, I wasn't going near it let alone cleaning it up, and I wasn't going to let anyone else near it either unless they had a body kit with them.
This guy looked so disappointed as I went back on department, scrubbed up, put on PPE and wiped down with chlorine mix. He stood and harangued me about public health risks for like 10 solid minutes and I was like, why do you not connect the dots and learn why I didn't pick it up then, hmm?

 

Customer lady, I ask how people are doing as a part of making conversation. By all means be honest, I just kind of wish you hadn't taken it as an invitation to go into detail about your husband's kidney stones.

 

Spoiler: Me @ work (fire emblem reference)

 

I have a deep hatred of customers ordering from the passenger seat. Sometimes I don't notice, sometimes the person speaks clearly enough that it doesn't matter, but that's not the case like 80% of the time.

Today a customer came through, she and her passenger both went back and forth ordering, changing what they wanted without saying what if was they wanted changed, and added and removed things multiple times, with a line of people behind them. We don't have screens to check order accuracy, we are a tiny ass store with 2, MAYBE 3 people working. One of them is at the register dealing with the person currently paying, so ONE person has to remember the entire order that the customer themself does not remember entirely.

I honestly have to think they don't understand how confusing, inconvenient, and detrimental this is to us, because even people who don't care at least sometimes fake sheepishness.

Less irritated, more helpful comment: when the employee repeats back your order, they usually say it in the way that's easiest for you to order it next time (or at least we do). Ex: Saying "large hot caramel swirl 3 cream no sugar" lets us 1) grab a large hot cup 2) add caramel swirl 3) add cream 4) skip sugar. We're supposed to write the order on the cup, so tell us what kind of cup we need first, that's the most important part of a smooth order at this chain. If I don't know what to write it on, I can't write it down. Telling me "a caramel swirl coffee" doesn't let me take any actions other than to ask you a bunch of questions.

 

That is really helpful, thank you! I always get nervous ordering at drive-thru places.

 

This is actually a customer service positive thing but I have 3-5 clients/types of clients I love.

1) Older women who compliment me being a (woman) in a STEM field
2) Lady who gives us chocolate a lot
3) Scott and his service dog, Buddy. Who of which gives me and only me slobbery doggy kisses.
4) Lady who gives us homemade jam a lot
5) British and Australian clients because so far they've all been so bubbly and fun to talk to even in the face of "yeah your computer is deader than a doornail". Also talking to them for long periods of time turns my manager and I's internal monologues into an accented version of ourselves. It's quite fun.

 

@prismaticvoid You are welcome! :3

 

i got screamed at today!! it was awesome!!

so okay, story time: our store has all returns centralized to just the .com desk, my desk. there is a sign above us, but it does not helpfully say CUSTOMER SERVICE or even .COM or RETURNS or anything. there are no signs anywhere in the store that inform customers that returns are in the back. so you can imagine the kind of shit i have to put up w/ from people who wait in the long lines at front at the women's registers only to be told they have to go back to the back of the store.

and i get that it's frustrating, and i really really try and beg all of the women's/men's associates to please for the love of god pay attention to your line and if you see someone who looks like they're doing a return tell them they're in the wrong spot before they get up to the counter, but it gets busy up there, and a lot of them don't have the time/attention to catch everyone. but what i don't understand is why they come and yell at me about it, like dude, buddy, pal, my guy. I AM AT THE BACK OF THE STORE!!! I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE YOU PEOPLE ARE!!! I HAVE LITERALLY NO CONTROL OVER THIS SITUATION WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING AT ME JUST LET ME DO YOUR RETURN

and i get most of them are probably just frustrated & venting but like... i can't fix it for you! believe me, if i could just build a helpful robot to stand by the doors informing people where returns are i would. you are not the first person today who has complained about this. i have asked, multiple times for a sign they will not give me a sign please just, stop screaming at me. please.

oh and a fun fact: or a brief time right after christmas (during our busiest return season which, oh god, was just So Fun) we had signs. several, taped to the doors and in front of each of the registers that said in nice big letters RETURNS/EXCHANGES ARE AT THE DOT COM DESK. and yet, i still got yelled at, because the signs weren't big enough or in the right spots and at that point i don't even know what they want from me.

 

Unfortunately, some people will never be satisfied. Believe me, i've had similar issues happen with our sales policy at the store. It says on every single sales tag in the store that sale prices apply with the rewards card. Yet every single week, if not every day, there are people who don't seem to understand that. Some of them will say it doesnt say "sales apply with rewards card" on X tag for Y item, but i'm like no, actually it does. Right there. Look at it.

 

I just got reminded of the worst/best customer service story I've got. A couple of years ago, I was a receptionist and assistant at a high-end hair salon. We did a lot of wedding hair and makeup, and I always worked bridal parties because I was scheduled Saturdays. So I got really good at handling eight tipsy excited women and fussy brides that ran over their appointments.

Prior to the wedding, the bride had to book a hair (and makeup if they were getting that) trial, 2-4 weeks beforehand, so they could try out several styles and their stylist wouldn't have to undo all her work on the day of if the bride hated the first one. A bridal hair trial is an hour long appointment, and unlike the wedding day, when we try to schedule just the wedding party, the stylist has other appointments, because they don't make money without an ass in their chair. I got to work early one Saturday morning, because we had a busy day starting promptly at 9 when we opened. At about ten after nine, the phone rang. It was the bride we had scheduled for a trial. She asked if she could still keep her appointment (at 9:30) if she was thirty minutes late to her appointment, saying she was driving in from out of town. I don't know why the hell she thought that anyone would take her half an hour late, but she did! I told her no, that after fifteen minutes past the appointment time we considered a client a no-show and that they would have to reschedule and that in any case we only had an hour booked for her hair trial and could not get her hair done with only half of that hour left. She said okay and hung up.

Now, the salon wasn't open on Sundays, and we closed early on Saturday, at 3pm, so Saturday was the busiest day and hardest to get in on. We maintained a waitlist for people who couldn't get in with their stylist. I asked the stylist to look at the list and see if she thought she could get anyone in that spot, and it turned out one of the women on it lived right up the road and was delighted to get in. I was happy I'd filled the spot and gotten the stylist some money and thought that was the end of it.

Turns out, when the bride said "okay", she did not mean "okay I understand what you said and will reschedule when I'm not in traffic". She meant "okay, I will be there only fifteen minutes late" (I'm pretty sure she just wanted to sleep in a little more). When she walked in the door, I had to explain to her that by telling me that she would be half an hour late she voided her appointment and would have to reschedule, as her stylist had already taken another client. It took ten minutes of repeating the same information in a different way for her to realize that I was serious and wouldn't just make the client already there leave or make the stylist take her. She eventually rescheduled, but she was really huffy about it. And the entire time I was thinking "if you tell me you're going to be late, I believe you! You didn't tell me otherwise, what the he'll am I supposed to think?" Appointments are called appointments for a reason; it's because they're scheduled for an appointed time!

Edit: my favorite thing she said was "what do you mean she can't take me, I'm only fifteen minutes late!" Honey. You missed a quarter of your appointment time. You would have screwed your stylist's entire schedule because that shit is jam packed on a Saturday. We see other people, miraculously, and have to cater to them, not just you.

Edit x2: not that lateness is a cardinal sin that destroys everything - shit happens and the stylists and I had a routine worked out to make things run smoothly even with hiccups, but her attitude was really ugh. We want clients because clients give us money, but there is only so much I can do.

 

At my store, employees in my bracket are trained to do three or four different jobs out of like six or seven jobs total, and eventually we figure out what few we're best at and do mostly that. It's a pretty good system--people get to learn how to do many different jobs around the store and can help if someone doing something else really needs it, and you get varied training that will help in future jobs. One thing I really like about this is that in our bracket, someone who is helping you one day is your immediate superior the next and the person you're telling what to do the day after that. No one becomes The Boss if you vary who is the boss day by day. (Well, obviously the managers are above us all, but that's normal.)

Coworker X is usually on the same level as me, hierarchy-wise, and sometimes ordering me around. I've been training to do the same job as him recently, the ordering around one, because I'm good at it and we need several people who can do it. But tonight he was my immediate superior and I was doing what he said.

The problem is... well... we're both good at the job on slow/average days, but neither of us did this on busy nights before. Coworker Y (light of my life, my noonday sun) always did busy nights, but he's gone and moved away now (I don't forgive him) and neither Coworker X or I are good at working busy nights yet. We're training, we're getting the experience, but it's HARD, and we're just not good at it yet.

Tonight was the busiest the store has been in a while. We were slammed constantly with waves of people from the fucking netherworld. Service times were horrible and things were going badly. Coworker X is a guy I like and respect and I usually have a lot of fun working with him because he's polite, playful, and always trying to help everyone else.

He fucking flipped tonight. He was stressed as fuck and he was clearly stuck in a bad thought loop because he kept swearing at himself and doing little angry things and saying 'I'll do it, I'll do it' every blessed time I tried to help him. I get it. He was mad because he wasn't doing his job well and customer service was slipping and he wanted to be doing better. But he lost it. He started getting mad at the cooks. He was WAY terser to me and the other girls than he usually is. Honestly? It was scary. I was glad the younger girls weren't in the kitchen. I was a ball of jangling nerves because I just need to keep my head down and do what they say and not make them angry when people act like that. I was actually trying hard to keep asserting myself despite the atmosphere this night. My other coworker, who was meant to be helping him, couldn't approach him because she has serious anxiety and she couldn't. I kept trying to do things for him and he refused to let me. He would take things out of my hands. I'm trained for the same goddamn job he is and was working it just this morning. Working it well. He knows I can help him, I've backseat driven his job before and it's blessed helped.

I love this guy. I usually love working with him. I didn't want to be close to him tonight. I begged a manager to walk into the kitchen and stand next to him and HELP HIM because he had to let her when he wasn't letting any of the rest of us and he was clearly losing his shit and going into a panic spiral but he's a MAN so he had to double down and try harder to do it himself I GUESS.

/ criticism of the thought patterns generated by a narrow view of masculinity that prohibits men in charge from accepting help, especially from trained and capable women.

I was nervous as hell but keeping it together until I had to ask for some extra food from the cooks, who were, understandably, stressed and terse. (Almost all of them stopped talking. Not a word for hours. These are people who usually banter with us and communicate really well and work really hard. They just let their manager yell for them. I don't know if Coworker X noticed. God it was a night from hell.) They yelled at me for specifications, I yelled back, and I got annoyed because I thought they were refusing to give me something I needed for a customer (in retrospect I think they just couldn't hear me because I was scared), when the manager I mentioned earlier (the one I begged to help Coworker X) told them, loudly, to stop being hostile and give me the shit I need to do my job. I jumped and apologized because I was not doing well by then and was deeply into a people pleasing headset because of all the anger and nerves. Then manager told me I should never have to apologize to asking for food I need and that I needed to do my job more than they needed to bitch about it.

I didn't cry a lot >u< Just a little. I kept it down. It was one of those moments where someone being nice to you is too goddamn much because you're already emotional. I just sort of shook for a while as I waited for my goddamn food when a really sweet coworker said "Mouse, I can take the food out if you need a minute." Which was almost too much again? But I was like "nah, I want to take it out" because, well, basically, I was the only one who knew where the customer was, there was no indication anywhere of where this food was going. As always, they need me to do my job here. Then I really aggressively put on my customer service cheer to snap back into a working head space for the rest of the night. Then Lilly and I bought fish!!!!

The next time Coworker X and I are in a similar position in the kitchen again--it happens all the time because we're two of the most trained and specialized workers they have right now--I'm going to look him in the face, full name him, and tell him that he's letting me help him. If we have a serious rush, fucking goddamn it to hell, I'm doing half the job and he's doing half the job and we're both going to do it well. Don't give me that look. Aside from managers, I'M THE ONLY OTHER PERSON WHO CAN KIND OF DO THIS JOB LIKE YOU CAN. COWORKER Y IS GONE AND WE HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT. YOU WILL LET ME HELP TO THE BEST OF MY ABILITY INSTEAD OF SHAKING ME OFF.

I swear to fuck.

 

Related, your business model probably shouldn't involve having your best workers routinely work 10-12 hours days including both lunch and dinner shifts because you need your best workers literally all the time.

We get used to it and it's usually ok. Usually.

 

M a n does that sound like the bullshit the franchise owners are pulling at the place I work. I'm super glad I only do catering, but one of my roommates is the market trainer so I get to hear about how they are killing the company.

 

@littlewhitemouse that sounds super stressful! I hope your next shift goes better.

 

people do this to me all the time w/ our coupon exclusions!!! "are you sure? can't you just try it anyway?" yes i can. oh look, the computer is telling me this coupon doesn't apply. no i cannot just *give* the coupon to you, because it doesn't work!! i scanned it and it doesn't work and now we're done & you're holding up my line and technically, honestly, this is the returns desk you are holding up the people i'm actually supposed to be helping because you want to save four frickin dollars.

and the expiration dates oh my g o d

 

Speaking of coupons! In pharmacy, apparently there are manufacturer coupons for certain medications that can only be used once in a lifetime by each patient. Which no one told me until I'd already tried to take one for a patient who already used one.

 

@tickingnectarine Huh, I think I may have used one of those before (my first month of one medication was free because of it, which was great).

Also, off topic, but I just now noticed your name is tickingnectarine and not tickingtangerine. XD