Customer Service Thread

Today I wrote a customer a 10-12 pc custom order (most people usually do 1-2) and scanning the order form to ring it up crashed two successive registers before my manager decided to key everything in by hand. (Our ordering computer generates a slip w the price that we then have to scan into the register. )

Also she was from a nonprofit so my manager had to approve tax exemption for each item individually. (Because of the whole keying in by hand thing.) The customer herself was v nice but apparently our computer system just decided it was TOO MUCH INFO to process.

 

...and then I had a customer who is apparently notorious for taking up hours of employee time and never buying anything. Manager told coworker she would buy me a coffee if I managed to close the sale. (I did not.) Mostly by the end of it I just wanted to throw this lady out a window.

("Do you have x color?" [I show her.] "No, *x color*." [I show her a slightly different shade.] "Yes, this one...hm...no actually I don't like it. What about y color?" [Etc, I show her a third color and she rejects it after comparing it to the previous one and then asks for x color again. Rinse and repeat for 15 mins. Also constantly asks if we carry a thing, is told we don't, insists we do, I suggest she try another store, she claims they don't have it and asks again if we do because we have "everything".] )

There's a certain point you get to where you're like "does this person have memory issues, are they trolling me, or are they *actually this indecisive*?"

Edit: also after finally settling on a design she walked saying she'd come back later to buy it because she "didn't know" it was our policy that you pay everything up front and don't just leave a partial deposit. Except according to my manager she's been here a bunch of times and done the exact same thing each time.

 

Ugh those people are the wooorst

 

Hoo boy. I just discovered this thread, and as someone who has been working for about a year in a run-down second hand electronics shop where all the customers are arseholes, management is incompetent and nobody gets any actual training on literally any one single aspect of this complicated, convoluted, stressful job, I feel like I'm going to have a few things to contribute to this thread. I'm trying to think of an actually interesting story, so in the meantime I'm just going to be bitter and vent about our queueing system.

So, our shop gets super busy. Like, it's like the Saturday rush hour all the time in here. We're always understaffed and our queues stretch to the far wall at least once a day. Generally we have three tills for people who want to buy stuff from us and three tills next to them for people who want to sell stuff to us. Each till takes from a separate queue, because if somebody just wants to buy a single video game they don't want to be stuck waiting for half an hour whilst the person before them sells us 250 DVDs, a couple of games consoles and ten shitty low-grade smartphones. Here's the thing though: for some reason I can't fathom, nobody bothered to put any signs up to let our customers know about the two till system. We have a divider that sort of splits the waiting area into two queues, and there are signs on the floor, but one says "Buy here/We sell" and the other says "Sell here/We buy" and sure I can be sarky about it but I will begrudgingly admit that the floor isn't the best place for them, especially when we always have super long queues so most people will be waiting five or six people behind them, plus the wording isn't really very clear if you're just skim-reading it.

The point is, we had no real way of explaining our queues to our customers. Pretty much the only way we were able to let customers know was for them to join whatever queue they feel like and then we tell them that they're in the wrong queue when they get to the front. Hoo boy, that was always fun, especially when customers have been queueing for half an hour or longer. It's not like we wouldn't serve them for being in the wrong queue, either. Unless it was something ridiculous like a person trying to sell a buttload of CDs in the buying queue during lunchtime rush hour (which isn't actually much busier than normal) we'd just let them know what till to be in next time and serve them like normal. Even if they're regulars who consistently queue up wrong every time they come here. Anyways, loads of people still got disproportionately angry about us telling them, and I always think "Look, you were just complaining that our queues are nightmares and we're explaining the only system we reasonably have to fix this that doesn't involve chasing customers out of the doors with muskets. It's not that big a deal that you're in the wrong queue and I'm not personally attacking you for it so just shut up and let me book your shitty iPhones in for testing."

(I've been using the past tense for this: a few weeks ago, our new manager put ginormous hanging signs above the tills to clarify which are buying tills and which are selling tills. I think it might be the only decision he's made since he started back in August that I agree with, and I have no idea why it's taken literal years for someone to get around to doing it. Having visible signs hasn't done much to lower the number of people who join the wrong queue because expecting our customers to pay attention to the world around them is an extreme ask, but it has at least slightly reduced how much they shout at staff. Thank god.)

 

Once again, a slightly different kind of customer service, but. I have spent the past 4 days answering so many emails from students that could have been answered by either A) paying attention to my previous communications, B) following the tutorials I made for them, or C) reading the lab manual.

Is it wrong of me to expect a modicum of... effort from them?

 

Heres a Positive Retail Experience: I work at Lowes and the highlight of my day like every day is getting to meet the dogs people bring in, and there's this one. This one dog. I love him so much. He's a purebred Great Dane named Sir Von Rah who is the unofficial mascot of our local Lowe's and he's actually recognized by the mayor of the city and has met with like 2 congressmen, been in parades, and has his own facebook page. And he's SO SWEET, he's the nicest most obedient dog ever, and every time I see him his owner is picking up flowers or other gardening stuff and I tell her hi then go "Hi Sir Rah! How are you today!" and he leans his head against my belly while i pet him. I can't emphasize enough how glad I am that we allow dogs in the store because legit like 6 employees quit what they're doing every time Sir Rah comes in just to pet him. He's so good.

 

So time for another whine of the nature: why fucking are people like this.

So, it's wednesday 1pm the sample driver just stopped by and left us a fuckton of blood from the ooh (out of house) docs as is his job. It's just me and my boss in the lab which is usually ok on wednes because the oohs are all closed wednes afternoon.
So we just get started sorting and centrifuging when the lady from our obgyn doc shows up. Now the obgyn is incredibly chaotic (bonus of working in the lab: you know exactly which docs have their shit together. This one? Not so much)
Turns out they're getting a new order-entry system which should make things easier on us so yay. Except the first fucking Patient they brought for this? Emergency Patient. Naturally the new system doesn't work. Boss starts trying to figure out how to fix this while obgyn employee stands by and complains how slow this is and Emergeny and what have You.
Now here's the thing: obgyn is right fucking next to the Hospital proper. If they have an actual ohgodsomeonewilldie emergency they would wheel 'EM into the ER. Which is naturally not the case here.

So my boss spends half an hour sorting this mess while i gotta run the rest of the lab by myself, rotating on the spot while doing bloodgrouping on the side. And obgyn lady just... Keeps complaining.

 

Bonus round: ooh docs who abuse the emergency marker system to mean 'i would like to go home early today so do the thing faster' and then complain when we have not magically done the thing within ten minutes of the sample showing up here.

Or: declare a thing emergency, make a note that you wanna be called for results and then don't pick up your phone and inszead call back 3h later. WHY.

 

A weird thing I've noticed working at Lowe's is the trend in people asking for help locating certain items because 85% of the time they're looking for
-furnace/air filters
-trash bags
-a specific piece of hardware
-a specific tool
Which are.... literally all listed in the descriptions on each aisle.
Aisle 11: Furnace Filters; Heating
Aisle 5: Cleaning Supplies; Trash Cans (you'd think the trash bags part would be impled.
Aisle 15-17: Hardware
Not to mention the huge fucking banner that says "TOOL WORLD" where we keep, you guessed it! Tools. Like please yall use your reading comprehension skills.
(At least ive memorized enough aisles that i can point someone in the right direction without having to call anyone from a different department tho so thats good)

 

It ain't just lowe's, people do that at grocery stores too
I try to not get too salty about it bc my particular store is right by a hotel so people might not be familiar with the layout but like.... reading. Is a thing.

 

@otiorin
...Do you work at a CEX?

 

At least at my store it’s usually old people, so they get a pass. Not the rest, though. :l

 

In hindsight, my attempts at not naming the place were very definitely in vain.

 

I recognised the till setup. xP I spend too much at the CEX in my town...

 

That moment when a customer asks for a shirt that matches a pant on the store and you scrounge every single other mottled gray shirt in the store and the customer is upset because none of them match exactly and she wants to wear the outfit immediately. Like. Man idk maybe realize you're buying a neutral colored pant and can still be considered acceptably fashionable wearing literally any other color with it?????

I am too casual for this mysterious store of young adult female aimed clothes connected to a popular lingerie store.

 

American Eagle is probably great if I wasn't cranky and cheap.

 

Today, my boyfriend had to bring me my medication at work because i forgot it. He came in, six feet of nerdy emo shyness, and, naturally, the first response that came to mind when i saw him before ge saw me was to yell "YO DAWG WHERE MY DRUGS AT?"

I work at an ice cream parlor. The woman I was serving literally clutched her necklace in shock. She wasnt wearing pearls though, so I don't get to cross "make an old woman clutch her pearls" off my bucket list.

 

clearly we need a witnneressed rating option.

 

Someone locked the door to the stall in the men’s restroom and crawled out, leaving it locked. This meant I had to crawl under the door, on the floor of the men’s restroom, almost on my stomach, to get in and unlock it.

I really hate people.