We all have customer service horror stories, and so many of them involve customer service reps repeating the same old irritating bromides.
There’s the tried-and-true “I’m sorry, but I can’t make that change in the system,” to the classic buck-passer, “I can pass you on to a manager, but she’s just going to tell you the same thing.”
And of course all customer service reps “understand your problem” and are “very sorry to hear that you’re unhappy.”
So here’s your chance to vent about those tired phrases you could go the rest of your life without ever having to hear while trying to resolve a bill, track a package, get a refund or prove that you’re not dead.
Sound off in the comments and thank you for shopping at Consumerist.
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I’m tired of getting people in India.
I absolutely detest when a customer service rep tells me for the thousandth time how sorry they are. You just know they’re rolling their eyes. JUST FIX THE PROBLEM ALREADY. I always try to call early in the morning – after coffee, but before they’ve had a chance to become fed up with customer complaints for the day. My other favorite is the fake supervisor, who’s really just a different customer service rep echoing the same old line and getting his/her friend off the hook.
When you call? Try working the customer service lines and having to say these phrases for 8 or more hours a day at least 5 days a week….for a year and a half. And most of the time I did understand and feel sorry, but company policies suck. It’s not nice to have about 20 people threaten to sue you personally each day, at least 50 swear on you, a dozen or more tell you you’re stupid or lying, and half of the people shout at you.
/end bitter rant
BTW: Upset is understandable, but when you cross into irate no one will willingly help you.
None of them really get on my nerves.
Provide a quality product, at a fair price. That’s seriously all it takes. Any more effort is wasted on me.
The sales department is staffed 24/7, but to cancel services you have to call back during banker’s hours.
“Let me transfer you to another department.” Another huge pet peeve. You wait on hold 10 minutes to talk to someone, they answer the phone, route you, and you end up back on hold.
“I’m not authorized to handle that, you’ll need to talk to ___________.” Blank is either another department, or a supervisor. Similar to my above complaint, the guy who answers the phone is only authorized to sell you new services and tell you how much your bill is, if you want to cancel, get a bill adjusted, or ask a technical question that’s another department.
“How can I provide you with excellent service today?”
- Erm, by providing excellent service?
“Can I please get your account number?”
- You mean, the one I punched into the phone tree already?
As a long time retail employee, I can honestly say that whenever I said “I can’t make that change in the system” it was the complete truth. Same for “I can pass you on to a manager, but she’s going to tell you the same thing.” We’re not idiots, nor are we LOOKING for a fight. In MOST cases (NOT all, but most), if we tell you we can’t change the system, it’s because we can’t. We know you’re going to whine and cry about it. We don’t want to hear it. If we could avoid it, we would. As for the manager, we say that when it applies (get the manager to change the system, for example). We don’t program our point of sale systems, and most are not NEARLY as “open to changes” as most customers seem to think.
As for our “understanding your problem” what would you prefer us to say? We have to be polite, no matter how much we want to tell you where to stick your whining and crying. So we have to say something fake like that. Do we care that you’re unhappy? Not really, other than the trouble you’re causing us. We don’t get paid enough to care. What’s that? Get another job if we don’t like retail? Right, cause entry-level jobs are so easy to get.
Stupid customers don’t seem to understand that the people who are “serving” them are underpaid and overworked people who most often don’t give a damn and don’t have real reason to give a damn. You treat us like crap, we are scheduled crap hours, and we get crap pay.
First and foremost, let me say that we, the employees of the customer service field, are human beings just like the rest of you. We have families, friends, lives, and bills. We have good times and bad, great accomplishments and horrible tragedies. Just like you, we do have emotions, and just like you, sometimes our emotions can get the best of us.
I’ve heard it said by many people that if you work in the service industry, you should be prepared to always put on a happy face and give each customer the most pleasant and wonderful shopping experience they’ve ever received. Typically, those same people say that if you aren’t prepared to perform that way, then the service industry isn’t for you. This, oh arrogant customer, is a crock.
There are very few people who work at CheapMart because their dream was to spend their career stocking shelves at CheapMart. It’s quite unlikely that the guy who makes your burger at Cheeseburger Champion does it because it was the greatest aspiration he had for his life. Sure, there are people out there like that, but the number is likely to be something like one out of every thousand. Yes, I pulled that statistic outta my head. I base it on the number of people I’ve worked with over the years. Over a decade of retail experience and I have never come across anyone who felt they were working their “dream job.”
The majority of service workers are doing the job for two reasons: They needed a job, and (insert company name here) hired them. Plain and simple.
The common notion out there seems to be that if we don’t like working customer service jobs, we should get out of that field. Right, because it’s just THAT simple! Hate to break it to you, but not everyone has a degree to get a job in their preferred field. Not everyone has the money to GET a degree in their preferred field. And while a degree isn’t necessary to get a job, the majority of the most easily accessible jobs out there that don’t require a degree involve customer service in one form or another.
For that matter, many don’t even HAVE a preferred field because they haven’t yet discovered something that they really enjoy doing. It took me four years after high school to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. In the meantime, when you’re a teenager with no work experience under your belt, who is going to hire you? The answer, of course, is the customer service industry. Sure, there are other companies here and there that might want to take a chance on an inexperienced teenager, but the majority of job opportunities come from the service field.
And that’s what most customers don’t seem to understand. We are just working our way through college. We’re working a second job to pay bills. We’re trying to buy cars, pay off student loans, pay auto insurance, etc. We’re not trying to sell you a pack of paperclips at Office Supply Land because we have some kind of absurd passion for office supply products, we’re doing it because it was the job we were offered, and it pays the bills – or some of them, anyway. You can’t expect us to be all happy-go-lucky about leading you to the toilet paper aisle or extra-sizing your french fries. It’s not exactly a very fulfilling lifestyle, but for most of us, it’s a temporary necessity. If you told an unhappy retail employee to get another job if they didn’t like customer service, they’d likely respond with, “I’d love to. Who’s hiring?”
Then there is the human factor that no one ever seems to take into account. As I said, we are people with lives just as much as you are, and we experience emotions too. I remember an incident at Computer Galaxy when I almost got in trouble because some over-sensitive customer got all upset over something that had nothing to do with her. We had three long lines at all the registers, and we were trying to get people out as fast as we could. One of our salesmen brought up a cart full of stuff – a computer, monitor, printer, cables, etc – for me to ring up. Then he decides he forgot something and runs off, telling us to wait a minute. I started to get pretty annoyed because we had a lot of people waiting and the salesman had stopped my line dead. Well, this customer saw me shaking my head slightly, and when the salesman returned, she demanded that he summon the manager because I was “huffing and puffing” over having to ring up their sale.
I didn’t have a problem with her before that, but you can be sure that AFTER she jumped to that absurd conclusion, I was pretty ticked off at her. It infuriates me how customers LOOK for things to complain about.
If an employee is taking a personal call at the cash register, most customers get annoyed. What if it is an emergency? What if they’re getting an update on a sick relative? What if the babysitter just called to tell them the electricity had been shut off? Customers have no idea what’s going on in these people’s lives, yet they whine and complain if they aren’t helped in less than thirty seconds. I refer to it as the “God Complex.” If people aren’t worshipped as gods the second they walk through the door of any business, then employees should be fired and free product showered down from the skies. That’s right; should something happen that offends them, nothing less than the unemployment line for the offending employee will satisfy. If someone loses their cool and tells you to “Shut up,” you respond by demanding that person’s job. Should the employee have said that to you? No, of course not. Should he lose the ability to pay his bills and feed his family for it? Absolutely not. We are human beings. We have emotions, and we make mistakes. Get your heads out of your rear-ends and move on with life.
And while we’re on the subject of pay, let’s talk about the money issue. Many customer service employees work two jobs. Sometimes three. Why? Because we get paid next to nothing while the world is expected of us. Take my cashier job at Computer Galaxy, for example. For $7 an hour, we were expected to sell Product Replacement Plans, Training Classes, Tech Services, Unmatched (Another phone/training service), Computer Galaxy Credit Cards, Add-on products, and internet services. The phrase “Ask Every Customer” was pounded into our heads multiple times daily. Our numbers were closely monitored, and we were ripped in half when we didn’t reach our goals. And don’t be so foolish as to think that we were given commissions or spiffs for those things. For a short time, commissions were a part of the Computer Galaxy pay structure, but they were so small it was laughable (we’re talking $10 for meeting your goals for a week), and they didn’t apply to cashiers anyway. So, given all of that, how enthusiastic and happy can you really expect an employee to be?
Office Supply Land was the same way. The only “technicians” they hired while I worked there were recent high school graduates who were not certified. Why no certification? So they could pay them $8.00 per hour, of course. Honestly – what kind of quality tech work can you expect from that kind of employee?
Then we have to face the ramifications of all that. We ask every customer to buy every service we offer because our bosses demand that we do it. So, of course, every customer gets angry that we’re badgering them to spend more money. They see us as money hungry employees trying to squeeze every last penny. In reality, we’re just trying to keep our jobs. And when our inexperienced “technician” screws up your computer because the company wouldn’t put out the money for a real tech, the customer service reps have to take the heat from the customer for it.
We’re getting paid like crap to pretend we care while you scream at us for something we didn’t do, had no power to stop, and have very little power to fix.
Customers don’t seem to grasp any of this. The phrase “The customer is always right” seems to have brainwashed people into thinking that they should get their way no matter how absurd their demands are. And as you will see from the stories in this book, they can get QUITE absurd. I read online about a woman who got angry because an employee tried to stop her from cutting ahead of a line of people waiting to have their receipts checked. The employee grabbed the woman’s purse to try to hold her back. Now, I’ll be the first to say that the employee had no right to act the way that he/she did, but at the same time, this lady really thought she was justified in cutting ahead of everyone else who had been waiting because she only had one item and was, as she put it, “in a hurry.” How does that make you more important than other people? The whole thing could’ve been avoided if she hadn’t thought she was better than everyone else.
Then there was the story of the customer who tried to use a taser on a Cheeseburger Champion employee who got their order wrong. How about the woman who called a technical radio show to get help stealing her neighbor’s Wi-Fi connection? People just don’t understand how ridiculous their behavior can be or the hassle we go through in dealing with them, yet they expect us as service people to always be happy and enthusiastic.
You want good service? Here’s the one and only tip you’ll need: You know how you expect us to treat you when you walk into our store or call our company?
Treat us the same way.
I promise you’ll have more good experiences than bad that way. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of lazy and uncaring employees out there who don’t give a damn whether you’re polite or not. But for the most part, you’ll get a far more pleasant experience with an understanding and friendly attitude than you ever will with anger and threats. Just keep in mind that sometimes, no matter what you do, you won’t be getting your way.
Because the truth is that the customer is not always right.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27796
http://retail-ramblings.blogspot.com/
Pass up the grief.
I’ve been a retail manager for over a decade now. There is no way I could have said this better.
Thank you.
You actually don’t know that your supervisor will say the same thing. I prefer your supervisor to speak for themselves, thank you.
Actually for the company I worked for the manager would typically ask the customer service rep what the best course of action would be for the situation. I’ve had many times when I would offer some sort of credit for something as a courtesy that the customer really shouldn’t have gotten and ask for the supervisor only to get nothing because the customer didn’t accept the offer they were given and the problem was caused by something they did.
@ Speedwell: You’ve never worked somewhere where your own manager told you “Alright I’ll talk to them but didn’t you tell them I would just tell them the same thing?” Or how about been a manager/supervisor yourself and just repeated the same thing to the customer?
Irregardless if you have or haven’t, the fact remains that a lot of customers will want to speak to a a manager even if they’ve been told that the manager can’t do anymore than the agent could simply because the customer just wants someone HIGHER UP to listen to what they are saying.
“I’m real sorry about the problem you’re having with that and I hope to better understand your problem and get that solved for you today as well as provide you with excellent customer service. In order for me to serve you better, please repeat the problem you’re having and unplug the cord from the wall. Thank you, in order for me to service you better please hold, thank you.” Click.
As a log-time customer care agent, unwillingly turned customer care manager: That was beautiful.
Oh, preach it my good man! Amen!
Well said and spot on!
+20
I am sorry. I can totally relate to the pain that you have to deal with when working in customer service, having done the job myself for several years (retail grocery store). However, for most of this post, my only reply is: “Waaaaaaaaaaaah.” Yes, the job is hard. It requires you to be different things to different people fifteen times an hour depending on the customer’s needs, management doesn’t care, and you get evaluated based on numbers that don’t actually correlate to how well you serve the customers. Frankly, the job sucks. But, that job that pays some of the bills has a key component. You as a CSR are not getting paid to merely occupy three dimensional space within the building or put on your phone headset. You are being paid to make the company you work for look as good as possible to the people who pay the bills. If you can’t or won’t do that, then at least fake it well enough to not actually damage the reputation of the company who pays you and start looking for a new gig.
“Have good one!”
I hate when the robot message is incapable of understanding a calm, clear “no” and has to tell me “Next time, please tell us X so we can properly direct your call”
I have to call FedEx a few times a month as part of my job, their voice-recog is exceedingly annoying about that.
Try pressing “2″ when the system asks you to SAY “no”. 1 = yes, 2 = no. This works on many systems. i think i recall FedEx is one of them.
I just say “Customer rep” and then when it asks “Are you calling to ship a package?” I say “No.” It only takes a second, but sometimes it goes “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that, blah blah blah.” Most of the time I get to a human pretty fast.
“Please unplug the device and look on the bottom and read me the upsidedown model # that starts with an “R” and has a jumble of zeros, ohs, ones, els and eyes. No. thats not it. That’s the serial #. OK, got it! Now whats the serial #?”
Being told how I’m supposed to fill out a survey, namely Sprint telling me to “please select ‘yes’ on the survey asking you whether your issue was resolved.” My response was, “That depends on whether or not the issue ends up being resolved satisfactorily.”
One air-headed rep saying they’d do something (ship a replacement phone), which then doesn’t arrive, necessitating that I call back and be told, “We don’t ship phones anymore, here’s an e-ticket for you to go into a Sprint store on your own time and let them evaluate your problem.”
Related to that, “I absolutely agree with you ma’am, that should not have happened,” but nothing being done to follow through on the initial promise.
Dead time on the phone. It is REALLY HARD to tell whether I’ve been disconnected or not. I check to make sure it hasn’t, but isn’t that what hold music is for?
Identifying myself EVERY TIME they switch me to a new department, because apparently none of their shit is interconnected.
Yeah. Guess who got to spend over an hour on the phone with Sprint earlier, because no one knows what they’re doing.
them: ” I noticed on your Checking Account you dont have overdraft protection?”
Me: “That would be correct. We dont believe in writing checks we dont have money for”.
them: “Well, It can be quite a safety net if you have it”.
Me: ” Maybe you didnt understand me. We dont bounce checks period”.
Correct response: “We’re not interested in overdraft protection. Please don’t ask again.”
Well I have seen it from both sides…..
As a customer I hate it when it takes eons to get someone on the phone. It’s not the CSR’s fault but the higher ups for cutting corners so that they can pay less, but still….
CSRs who do the least possible for you so that they can get you off the phone as fast as possible.
CSRs who upsell at every possible opportunity, like the Comcast CSR who when I called to dump my cable tv as my bill had risen and I would rather have had their internet without the cable to make the bill cheaper, she offered me a triple play package instead, I had to remind her that I was out to save money and not to spend more. She then refused to transfer me to retention or lower my rate, I had to make another call to do it.
FLIP SIDE AS A FORMER CSR
Managers are not wizards, in many cases the CSR has done their best and the manager can’t do much more if anything given how disempowered or ignorant some of them are.
It’s not the CSR’s fault that it took you so long to get a live person on the line, many companies are understaffed when it comes to peak calling time. Write a letter to corporate or something.
Lets face it, in an ideal world things should go so smoothly that you never need to call in past the routine stuff!
Oh so very much THIS! I get it all the time from customers who entire living is made working on a computer.
right before you get transferred to a CSR, the computer says You have been randomly chosen to be a participant in a survey to improve our quality assurance. After your call please press pound to continue on to the survey…. or occasionally it says to tell the CSR to transfer you to the survey.
1. i’m never telling a CSR to transfer me to the survey. i’m scared that they’d probably assume i’m pissed and screw up my account in retribution for what i might say
2. When exactly do I hit pound?? never works.
3. who wants to spend MORE time on the phone after you just spent 30 min on hold and 20 min fixing your issue.
Hi, I’m the automated voice fembot who was programmed by a retard and can’t understand a word you say. Please tell me why you’re calling today.
“Customer Serviceâ€
I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Tell me again, by saying something like “I want to spend a shitload of money†or “What are the best sexual positions in the Karma Sutra�
“I WANT TO SPEAK TO A REAL PERSON!â€
Sorry. Your speech sucks so bad you must be a total loser. Let me try to find someone who is fluent in Ebonics or bizarre regional accents…..
Click…dial tone…
I hate when customer service transfers me to a different department and when they put me on hold, they disconnect the call so I have to call back, explain my problem all over again and then get transffered. This used to happen all the time when I was with T-mobile.
Oh I had one on the line from Charter the other day and after she asked me for the 5th time if she could ask me another favor (Do you use your internet for gaming or watching movies? prolly trying to upsell me on internet speed.) I said “Let me ask you a favor! My problem is solved, may I hang up now?” After which she said “Let me remind you……click” I hung up.
“Thank you for holding, your call is important to us”
What a crock….
When they say that after they help me they’d like to discuss my service options. If I wanted that, I’d call for that. I hate upselling.
Thank you for calling…your call will be answered in the order it was received.
Should be: Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.
I hate it when someone tells you their policy, you explain why it doesn’t make sense for your situation, and they simply repeat the policy verbatim as a response.
“As a one time courtesy we will refund the…”
Typically, the above sentence ends with “…money we stole from your account and refused to give back for the past several weeks”
Or, for the corporate apologists on this board, the above sentence often ends with “…for the duplicate fees we charged to your account due to a technical issue our 3rd party software development team, who in no way is an agent for, or otherwise associated with, our corporation, is responsible for causing.”
As a corporate apologist, as a one-time courtesy I’ll overlook the implied sneer at people who aren’t responsible for the error but try their hardest to fix it for you anyway.
That said, people who don’t even try, or who make a half-assed stab at it and quit or lie, are beneath contempt
This is to the COMPANIES, not the phone staff.
–Interminable hold times. I know you’re understaffed, but you’re eating into my cell phone minutes, or keeping me from doing something else, especially if I’m at work.
–Incessant apologies. I know you make your CSRs do it, but it’s irritating.
–Upsells. STOP IT. If you keep doing it, I’ll stop using your company.
And the number one annoying thing:
–Not giving your CSRs the power or training to actually help customers. You might have to pay them a little more, or spend more on training but believe me, it WILL help your bottom line.
Please take a survey after this call and be sure you rate me as excellent in all categories
Thank you for calling, your call is important to us, please stay on hold as waiting is faster than calling back.
Blaming an impasse on “the system”…as in, “the system won’t allow it.” What are you, controlled by HAL? There’s some great big machine/computer calling all the shots, and you’re helpless to stop it? No. A human designed “the system”, an that human is either the boss or has a boss, so there is a human somewhere with the authority to override the system. Transfer me to him/her, please.
Also, telling me whatever I want to hear just to get me off the phone, knowing full well that when your promise fails and I call back, I’ll get someone else clear across the room/state/country/planet and it’ll be their problem. One silver lining from this: the next CS rep I get is likely to be more helpful.
You’re not really so naive as to believe that a customer service rep on the floor actually has the ability to put you in direct contact with corporate executives, are you? Because that’s what you think we have the power to do.
Gee! I have never heard of this before let me do some research ,may I put you on hold– no I don’t want to be put on hold—- please hold —-hold for ten to twenty minutes—- The supervisor will get back to you within two hours……supervisor never calls
” I’m sorry you don’t understand the way this system works, it’s like this “
– I understand how it works, I just dissagree
” Well i’m sorry I can explain how it works”
“Your call is important to us”
I work on a helpdesk, and a lot of good things have been said already, but remember, however pissed you are when you call, we’re dealing with people all day long who have no idea what is going on.
Riddle me this Batman, how can someone call their computer a modem? If they don’t know what a computer is, why do they know the names of the parts inside?
In any case, a lot of times, there is no manager available. It doesn’t take many people to ‘oversee’ a room full of folks on the phone. Sometimes they go to lunch, the bathroom, and yes, meetings.
We don’t like it either.
I do, however hate having to tell someone the same info I just put in the automated system. There’s a trick to that too… say things that don’t make sense, and you’ll get a person.
Applesauce Gorilla Battleship Toothpaste – Never fails.
Yes, some call center folks suck, but think of it this way… No one calls customer service just to say hi… they deal with angry, irrational, and sometimes downright stupid people all day long.
Every once in a while we get someone who knows whats going on, but not all the time.
Me (CSR): Can I have you unplug your router?
Customer: What’s a router?
Me: The box with the antenna.
Customer: Oh. Where would that be?
“I’m sorry to hear that and I understand how frustrating that can be…” So. Sick. Of. That. One.
The problem with all customer service centers is management. The reps are entry-level and treated as such (or worse). I worked in a call center for 5 years for Sprint and Verizon Wireless and I can tell you that many reps find “creative ways” around the impossible stats management holds you to. The whole “There is no record of your last call†line is BS. I trained people in back-systems that show every time a customer calls in. If a rep TOUCHES your account, it is tagged with their employee number, date and time. Period. Reps have to log onto the system before they can take calls. Lots of reps are not aware of this “backup system.†I’ve seen reps purposely not note an account because they flat out lied to a customer to get them off the phone. Little did they know, I could prove they were in the account when the customer claimed to have called and spoken to a rep. That rep was not fired, not punished, nothing. The managers told the customer “so sorry, you never calledâ€.
As a rep, you are expected to deal with irate, screaming, crying, out-of-their-mind pissed off grown adults. These people are already pissed because of the billing issue/tech support problem they had and then are then put on hold for too long. When you finally get the call, they are fuming! I’ve had people not even say hello and jump right into “I’m going to kill you and your family!” LOL. WOW, OK You are threatening my life because of a $5 fee sir? Then, you have to resolve their issue (without giving them any $ credit) and up sell them on a product all in 5 minutes or less. If you don’t do that, you are penalized and down the road you could lose your job.
These companies make errors, don’t consistently train their reps, then hold the reps 100% accountable for everything. If you complain about the job, they will tell you to find another one. They don’t want you to stay with the company, they want you to leave after a year so some 20 year old pot head will come in and do the job for 8 bucks an hour and a fresh attitude.
“Your call is important to us.”
So you dont want me to verify that the system pulled the correct account or that you didnt fat-finger part of the account info? So which would make you angrier, spending 20-40 seconds telling me your phone number and address or spending 15 minutes troubleshooting with the wrong account on the screen because of something out of the control of the person you were speaking with? In my experiences, about 15% of the time the account that shows up is an old account, the wrong account, or no account came up because data was entered wrong or the system didnt make the connection.
I love when I get connected to someone in India and they tell me their name is “Betty” (or some other strangely uncommon American name) in a thick Indian accent. In my experience, the Indian call centers are the most likely to NEVER deviate from the script. Extremely frustrating when you have a problem with say, your router, and they just keep telling you to reboot. It took me 4 hrs on conference call with both Linksys and Verizon in India for anyone to figure out why the router wouldn’t work…
**and for the record, I’m Indian, and can’t stand the call centers.
why wasn’t the router working, out of curiosity?
I still don’t know. Verizon has some weird modem that requires you to change 6 different settings. I had to bridge and unbridge several times in different locations. Just all around bad communication between devices and bad UI design.
Hi, folks. I have to say, I’ve been doing customer support for YEARS. Tech support, no less. I have to say, on behalf of all customer service reps…we understand you don’t want to screw with answering questions about your account, you don’t understand why we ask so many questions about your account, etc…
It’s because we have to. It’s called Safeguarding. It’s a process that is there to protect you from other people stealing your identity. We know it’s annoying and it’s tedious, but it’s there for you.
I understand that it’s even worse if you’ve been calling us multiple times for the same problem, and it’s not resolved, and you have to go through the process of the automated system AGAIN. We understand. But the automated system isn’t going away any time soon. Also, keep in mind that there are alternatives to calling phone support. There’s email support. Some companies even have chat support. It’s not all about the phone. Some companies, like Verizon Fios, have programs you can install on your computer to help with simple issues like ordering remotes.
But, no matter how much you hate the process, remember this: The phone reps are required to do all that. We get graded on our calls. There’s certain things that, if we don’t say them, we get zeros on quality. It seems absurd, but it’s true. Just roll with it, and let the customer rep do what he/she needs to do to pull up your information, and don’t give them a hard time. We have some of the most difficult jobs you can imagine. Hell, the majority of people calling us will probably have Christmas day off, and New Years Day off.
People doing tech support, usually, we’re there. Somebody is always there for tech support, even if they are US call centers. Be thankful we’re there, that you can call and bitch about having to talk to us.
Please remember these people are REQUIRED to say certain things to you on the phone. CS is the lowest regarding department in any company, and they take your sh!t and the companies all day long. They’re also the lowest paid in the company, and generally do not have access to the information you are demanding of them. Please try to treat your CSR with some respect and see where that gets you. After all, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I have been a CSR at 3 companies and a waitress. Most of you would not believe how rude people are to complete strangers.
Instead of music on hold, firms have a long prattling message about offers you can’t live without.
You can’t talk with anyone while waiting or you might miss it when the rep finally comes on line.
Being subjected to marketing pitches while waiting for someone to pick up.
Being forced to listen to the same 5-minute recitation of instructions and menu options and other phone numbers etc. etc. every single time you call. Especially after they’ve disconnected you.
trying to decipher the accent.
So what you’re saying is, if you’re unhappy you don’t want me to explain that I’m empathetic to your situation (common as it may be) and you would rather I not offer condolences for you being subject to it? I’ll keep that in mind…
I only want to hear you are sorry if you sound like you mean it. If it sounds like you are reading it from a card, skip it.
I also only want to hear sympathy in conjunction with a solution. Sympathy alone I can get from the family dog.
no, seriously, if we can fix something, we’ll do it. If we can’t fix it, it’s because our managers have told us we can’t fix it.
I used to HATE calling customer service for anything.. Long waits, indifferent agents, absent management… so much so that I would just not call for anything short of apocalyptic horror.. Then I read this wonderful article here on the Consumerist, and I’ve faithfully followed it ever since..
“How to Mind Control CS reps..” and it works.
I had an issue with my-then wireless provider, Sprint. I’d paid the bill, and they kept wanting me to pay it again, even shutting off my phone. Numerous, long, horrible calls to the outsourced Indian call center were useless. No, they cannot help me, so sorry, sir, no, we cannot transfer you to a US call center, and no, we cannot be bothered to follow your by-now very lengthy explanation..
Then I read the article.
Called Sprint back, followed the advice. Got a manager in less than 5 minutes. Told said manager that he was going to fix my issue today, and calmly and rationally explained in short detail what the issue was and what he was going to do to fix it.
He did. I was amazed.
No longer with sprint, but look up the article.. It’s worth it.
you all think you’re sick of hearing these mealy-mouthed, nithling phrases?
try being required to spew’m day in & day out like a demented parrot upon pain of job loss.
Exactly.
So ATnT took over Alltel today. Best one evah. Needless to say, there were problems.
CSR: :”What’s your password?”
Me: “Try this (a bunch of times).”
CSR: “It’s not working”.
Me: “OK, email me a new password.”
CSR: “OK, what’s your password? I can’t send you a new one without you giving me the password.”
I had a delightful day with no interruptions. I think I’ve discovered something.
After standing in line at the grocery store, finally putting my items on the conveyor belt and then finally making it to the cashier who says to me “did you find everything you were looking for?”
I am always tempted to say, “no, I love the checkout experience so much that I buy in small quantities, going back into the store multiple times until I ‘find everything I’m looking for” DUH.
Just one more reason I LOVE the self-checkout line.
…you know, if you don’t like people saying things like that, complain to the manager. Most of the lines people say are scripted…believe me, we get tired of having to say crap like that.
Being a Customer Service agent I find myself saying these things daily. I do try to switch up the phrases because I know they are tired. What people don’t realize though, is that we *have* to say these things. These phrases are drilled into our heads with such force that we actually say them outside of the workplace with some frequency.
And, at some places of employment, if we don’t say these phrases we are actually docked (pay, points, etc).
And as for people getting upset at Tech Support wanting you to do “stupid” things like power-cycling the modem and/or router.. They have to. If they don’t do that they can lose their jobs..
Bitching about a “career” you haven’t worked in is stupid. You know nothing of what we have to go through a daily basis to help assholes like you.
Your call will be ordered in the order it was received.
Well what other order will you use???