Customer Service Thread

Okay but too be fair i get not called a lot. I ordered contacts in early january and finally called them a week ago to ask where the hell are the contacts I ordered over a month ago (but politely. actually politely, not just me covering my ass.) and they told me "yeah, those have been here for like a month. We've been waiting for you to come pick them up."

They never called.

 

I always just put my eggs and things in the part of the cart where a kid or my purse would sit, so I'm not constantly trying to balance them. Or I'll put stuff on the metal bit before the conveyer belt.

 

people call my work all the time to ask if their cake order is ready and if so could they come pick it up early... like a week in advance. dude, trust me, you dont want your order to be ready this early, unless you like eating cake that tastes like a dry sponge.

 

I agree that sucks. I'm talking people who come in before the date it's due--on the receipt that we give them in big font and then that I read to them--and then mope and make sad faces about how they came all this way and it's not ready??

 

Today also featured a LOT of people who were very offended that I didn't drop the current person I was helping to help THEM instead. I called for extra help but everyone else was busy so like...idk what I'm supposed to do, corporate won't give us enough hours to have enough people around to actually get our work done. I can't magically make everyone un-busy. One guy left in a huff because he had to wait a few minutes for someone to come open the locked paint cabinet for him.

 

Put the fragile things further back on the conveyor belt so you can put the heavier things in front?
That's how I do it.

 

Things that didn't occur to me before working a drive thru: hot or assembled food takes longer to prepare than drinks.

Relevant Advice/Request: If you're at a place which primarily serves drinks (coffee shops, that is), order your food first so it can be started while you order your drinks. If you order your food last, that's additional time in your wait (and our timer) that can't be made up for with speedy service.

Unrelated: I've been waiting over a month for size large gloves. We are a very small store & all the regular staff are AFAB, so they typically stock medium gloves. My hands do not fit in the medium gloves. They rip 80% of the time, and the other 20% they are very stiff and slow to get on. I have worked here since August & I barely know the sandwich prep because I have no fucking gloves so I can't make sandwiches ever. Please remember to get a box of large gloves this week, manager.

edit for clarity: I am also AFAB, I am just built large.

 

i will literally mail you all the large gloves from my work bc thats all our manager ever orders and i have tiny baby hands.

 

If you're using a cart, I've found it can be effective to put the delicate stuff in the part where you can put your kids so they can sit comfortably. I actually prefer thst if it's possible because I'll forget and fuck up my delicate stuff.

Also occassionally when people don't load up their cart right away you run into the issue of 'there's no room and I don't wanna crush the eggs.' so putting them first has its pros and cons.

 

Whoops sorry didn't realized we moved on. My bad!

 

When you get people who insist that you do something so they can use their coupon even though it's an item the coupon won't work on.
"Sorry, it's on sale. This coupon is for regular priced items."
"Can't you just override it?"
"I can't do that."
"Put it back on regular price and then apply the coupon!"
"I can't do that."
Customer gets pissy and storms off and I just... put the fondue pot under the desk and call the next person.
I just...

 

Late to the party, but regarding cart and conveyor woes: I put fragile stuff in the child seat so it doesn't get crushed, and when it comes to loading the conveyor belt I put heavy stuff along one edge of the belt and fragile/light stuff along the other edge of the belt so that I can pack my bags evenly and without ending up with bags filled exclusively with heavy/light items.

But the real reason I came here was to complain about groups of customers deciding they're going to hold a conversation in the busiest and smallest fresh aisle while I stand around waiting for them to move, holding a huge case of bacon. And no matter how many times I have to ask them politely to move so I can put the goddamn bacon out, by the time I have returned with the next case of bacon they have moved back in front of the bloody bacon again. Why? They continued in this manner the whole time I was working the bacon cage. There is literally a cafe RIGHT OUTSIDE, why not go talk there??

 

Get a transfer in from a tier-one rep in the Philippines, and the poor guy had already spent a while dealing with this grouchy old man who can't figure out that calling a student loan servicer and saying "I want to talk about my account/my loan/similarly vague shit" doesn't actually give the phone menu system enough to work with to transfer you to a specific department (bc ofc you want to talk about a loan, why else would you be calling a student loan company?), and if you keep not taking a hint from the specifics examples it gives you and say something like "I've got a question about my payment" or "I'm in school!" or "I need your address!", you get hung up on so the next person who can follow instructions gets your spot in line.

This had apparently happened to this guy a couple times, so I get him being frustrated, but he apparently decided to take it out on the rep by throwing a shitfit about the calls being recorded (again, ofc they are), telling the guy that he was recording the call too just to see what he'd do, and the rep got flustered because after all of this, he's now required to give the "You do not have my permission to record this call" speech, and predictably, Grouchy Old Man goes off, asks the rep where he's located, and then demands a domestic rep.

He's perfectly nice to me, we fix his problem (he just wanted the fax number, and got suspicious that the number he got from the Filipino rep was different from the general fax, which I explained was because we have a dedicated fax # for the specific program he's applying for because yada yada, but. That was it. That was the entire issue. The IVR could have told him the fucking fax number, and this would have taken him like 2 minutes.) But then- and this is where I got genuinely pissed instead of just lackadaisical about humanity- then this sterling example of the species sits there and tries to share a chuckle with me about how he was being mean to the offshore guy just because he was mad and what did some Filipino know anyway, he was probably trying to get him to send his paperwork somewhere wrong on purpose or something. FUCK YOU, he did everything exactly the way he was supposed to, you nasty smelly racist non-directions-reading old man, and I hope you get a splinter under your toenail. >:(

I've been that rep, and no, it's not funny to be a dick to someone who's trying to help you just because you can't figure it out yourself. That's what we're there for- to help you when you can't figure a thing out yourself. GODS. Some people!

 

I asked for clarification (like, did he want the same font italicized? did he want an actualfax script font?) and...

Just sent him another proof, we'll see if I managed to decipher this properly.

 

lol what

 

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

This client brought in this computer on Thursday. 2 days ago. Not even, more like a day and a half ago. We don't promise anything less than a week, and this week we've been saying 2 because we have over a dozen computers and that number just keeps climbing, I'm amazed we're at 9 at the time of writing this. 8 of those 9 are ahead of her. 2 of those 8 need to be out the door by tuesday. 4 of those 8 are looking like/are complete factory resets. But this entitled BITCH has been calling every day since she brought it in bitching and moaning about how we don't have it done yet. The problem? An internet java-based game isn't working. Boo. Fucking. Hoo. It's a fucking game. She has a computer at home it works on. If she's this antsy about it working that she has to yell at me a minute after I open and before I've even clocked in, SHE NEEDS A DIFFERENT FUCKING HOBBY.

The worst thing is she's a return client, she KNOWS our policy by now but nooooo this fucking game is just SO IMPORTANT, ISN'T IT.

 

Ugh, that is such bullshit. Also do they not let you refuse to answer the phone before you're clocked in? because making employees work off the clock is super fucking illegal and I just got a check from a settlement when my job got a class-action lawsuit for just pressuring people to have their computers started up and all the programs open they need for work before they clocked in. You might be able to make a complaint if you want to bother with it.

 

Unfortunately no. It's technically my fault for not being clocked in - but I can always edit my stamp to reflect the time I actually turned on the open sign at any time, it's just a web app. I'm not bothered about that, just that... It's like. I opened a minute ago. Cut me some slack, lady.

Thanks for the concern though! We're a small shop of 4 employees, so pursuing that isn't really in my best interest.

 

I literally just got home and I get a call asking if I want to pick up another shift
f r e e m e

 

Oh, good, okay. Where I work, we can't edit our own timestamps, so I was like "they're making you take customer calls before you even get to clock in? Geez."