Best/Worst of Customer Service

[Venetia]

why the fuck would a man ask a girl to handle a drunk and disorderly maniac?? why did he think the girl'd be able to handle it better?? I mean I would have told her to call the police, but only a GIGANTIC pussy would run inside and tell the minimum wage GIRL to handle a large belligerent drunk guy with a weapon.

jesus people these days

 

[moog]

untraversil wins this thread

 

[skirtboy]

My best and worst customer service experiences were both at WalMart.. on the same purchase.

I bought a new hard drive, but when I opened the box, the "hard drive" was actually several pieces of drywall taped together. I take it back and the return clerk refuses to accept the return, because I was "obviously" ripping them off. I get angry, she gets snottier. The manger notices the commotion (the girl flat-out refused to cal him) and, on being told what the problem was, immediately ordered her to allow the exchange. He went in back and got me a new hard drive. The girl grabbed it and opened it, so she could prove that this was, in fact, a hard drive and keep me from trying to steal another one with the same "trick".

It was also drywall.

 

[Venetia]

hahaha that's awesome

when I worked at circuit city someone tried to buy a laptop case, all zipped up. when i looked inside, it was stuffed with music CD's. I just started ringing them up with a smile on my face, and when i got to the total, the customer (a young black man go fig) just flat out RAN out the door. it was hilarious.

 

[Xephyr]

My best and worst customer service experiences were both at WalMart.. on the same purchase.

I bought a new hard drive, but when I opened the box, the "hard drive" was actually several pieces of drywall taped together. I take it back and the return clerk refuses to accept the return, because I was "obviously" ripping them off. I get angry, she gets snottier. The manger notices the commotion (the girl flat-out refused to cal him) and, on being told what the problem was, immediately ordered her to allow the exchange. He went in back and got me a new hard drive. The girl grabbed it and opened it, so she could prove that this was, in fact, a hard drive and keep me from trying to steal another one with the same "trick".

It was also drywall.

XD, that's pretty kickass.

hahaha that's awesome

when I worked at circuit city someone tried to buy a laptop case, all zipped up. when i looked inside, it was stuffed with music CD's. I just started ringing them up with a smile on my face, and when i got to the total, the customer (a young black man go fig) just flat out RAN out the door. it was hilarious.

hahahahahahahahahahaha

 

[moog]

(a young black man go fig)

what is this supposed to mean.

I demand you stop these racissm's. :p

 

[Venetia]

hey you want the stereotypes to stop you need to tell your brethren's to stop followin' em so closely

 

[Boxboy]

Sorry about that, Venetia, just had to have my Bonnie Tyler fix...

Not many idiots at the Bell this week... however, two events come to mind.

1. One woman ordered a few things, and as she got to the window to pay, she hands me her card. I run it through, the credit machine says it's expired. Curious, I look at the card. "Exp. 05/08"

<Blink>

I can understand if it was one month, but SEVEN months? You have no excuse! Don't banks send you a new card or a letter stating "Dear card user, your card is almost expired?"

Thankfully, she remained pleasant throuout the entire transaction.

2. I'm just a regular grunt, though due to my 'senority', I am the manager when none are present. Cue the following:

Moron: You guys messed up my food!
Me: Sorry about that, how can we fix it?
Moron: You forgot my quesadillia!
Me: Did you check the bottom of the bag?
Moron: It's not there! Where is it?
Me: Sir, I put it in that bag myself. I should be on the bottom. (you know, beneath all the other stuff you ordered.)
Moron: I wanna speak to your manager!
Me: I am the manager.

The look on his face was priceless. We eventually sorted out the mess, and he left without before I could harness my dormant mental abilities and murder him with my mind. I just live drunk people.

 

[Venetia]

The credit card thing isn't that big of a deal ... I have atleast 4 cards in my wallet I can think of right now that are like 2+ years expired. And one of my licenses is from California (which I left for FL in 2004). They're duplicates. Sometimes people just suck about cleaning out their wallets. They could have handed you an old duplicate. Happened to me once; they all look the same, so what? You smile at yourself and give them another card.

What's a lot worse is when I'd do the store's accounting at Staples -- I managed the Lost and Found on top of the cash, and a whole section of the L&F was all credit cards and driver's licenses. One dumbass left his ENTIRE WALLET behind (with Social Security Card and DL and credit cards in it -- he's lucky I'm too lazy to break the law). And never reclaimed it :/
Yeah that happens all the time too but it's a hell of a lot stupider.

 

[ultimaodin]

Well customer service for me. Ha ha me give service!

I have a tendancy to be a natural smart arse!

One time I was closing the store (I work at coles shopping centre) and a customer tried to sneak in and I told them we were shutting. He said he only wanted a couple of items. !0minutes later he reappears with a whole trolley of shopping. When he goes to leave he says thanks and I reply with whatever.
He turs to me and asks if I have a problem and I say he has more than a couple of items.
He tells me I nee to learn to shut my mouth. Not caring about consequences I tell him he needs to learn how to count.

The guy look like he wanted to kill me but I just twirled my gate grappler around and the friendly security guy walked up to see what was happening.
The guy left and I might be about to get promoted to 2IC of Grocery. (Second In Charge)
^_^

 

[Glitchfinder]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about this thread. I might as well give a new one. I still work at the same place, by the way. That said, this story isn't specifically about that job.

I was headed home from my shift one evening, and decided to stop at a Target on the way home from work. I had already pocketed my nametag, and was just browsing for a few items I wanted. Then, a customer comes up and asks me where to find an item. I tell them that I don't work there, and that there are plenty of Target employees nearby who would be perfectly capable of helping them. (Note that I'm still wearing my black OfficeMax shirt, and my khaki pants + belt, while Target employees are required to wear a red shirt.) The customer goes away, and I go back to looking for the stuff I wanted. About ten minutes later, the customer comes back up to me, this time with a manager in tow. They point me out and say how I'm the one who gave them such terrible customer service, and demand I be fired. The manager says the same thing I did, that I don't work there. The customer apparently didn't understand the concept, because they demanded again to have me fired. The manager basically said "OK, you're fired." To which I replied something to the effect of "Sweet! I'm outta here." At this point, the customer had the most self-satisfied look I have ever seen on a person. (Imagine Garfield after having just been told he had won an endless supply of his favorite everything.) As I was waiting in line at the front to buy my items, the same manager comes up and hands me a gift card, and thanks me for not making a big deal over what the other customer was doing.

tl;dr - I got fired from Target despite having never been employed there, received a $10 gift card as compensation.

 

[Venetia]

haha that's awesome.

That actually happened to me a lot back when I worked at Staples, but I wore a red shirt, and was always too lazy to change before going shopping at Super Target (which has a grocery section; I don't think they exist in California?), so it was more understandable.

I'd always just say, "Oh, haha, sorry, I actually work somewhere else and just got off work, but hey, I know the store pretty well, so maybe I can help?" 9 times out of 10, I could tell them what aisle to go to, just because I shopped there enough to know where pretty much everything was.

For most people that was cool, and they were actually super happy that just a random fellow customer would help them out.

One time though a woman just looked at me strange, and said "gluten-free peanut butter".

I didn't realize peanut butter even HAD gluten in it, but I said "Oh, I think they have peanut butter on aisle 2? But again, I don't work here, so don't take my word for it."

She replied, "... Well aren't you going to SHOW me where it is?"

I said, "No? I'm busy shopping right now, just like you. Again, I don't work here."

So she left in a huff.

I wandered like 3 aisles down to look for something else, when she came back up to me. She goes, "It wasn't there! You lied!"

I said, "I'm ... Sorry? I could have sworn it was on aisle 2."

She stomped and yelled, "Not the gluten-free kind! What kind of person ARE you?! Do you want me to die from eating gluten?! I'm telling your manager!!"

I tried to tell her I didn't work there but shrugged and went back to shopping.

Some time later she and a manager shows up to the aisle I was in. They stood at the end of the aisle while she screamed at him about me. I looked up and smiled and shrugged. He shrugged back and walked her off. Hopefully he didn't have too hard of a time figuring out how the fuck you could tell if peanut butter were gluten-free. This was years before "gluten-free" shit was in-style and there weren't special sections for it.

People are morons. It definitely got me to stop wearing my work shirts to Target though. But, funny thing was, I'd still get stopped and asked.

I think that if you look and act like you know where you're going and what you're doing, people just assume you work there.

 

[Ellie]

I just take a hoodie with me and slip it on after work, I *always* get asked otherwise. My uniform is a plain black shirt, tie, trousers, just like every other shop in the country seemingly.

 

[Jason]

Think I told you this last year... buuuuut:

Last year I went to meet my mate after he finished work at Tesco, he'd just come out as I got there... I said I was going in anyway to buy a game, Max Payne 3 by the way, and he said he'd come with me, fair do's. As we were going up the escalator, I asked if I could borrow his work shirt to have a bit of fun, he happily agreed, don't worry, he had a long sleeve on underneath lol... anyways, as I was at the gaming isle, some woman, who looked derp as fuck, came up to me and asked if I knew where the mice are... I was like "Umm... I don't work here", she looked at me puzzled and said "But... you're wearing a uniform?" "Oh yeah, I am aren't I? I guess that means I DO work here", and you could tell by her face that she was proper confused, so I directed her to the computer mice "If you go back down the escalator, and they're on the third isle, just up from cat food, you'll know when you see them"... yeah, she didn't specify which mice... stuffed mice cat toys count, right?

As I was going back down the escalator with my mate, she came back and shouted at me "THESE ARE NOT MICE!" "... Yes they are? Look, it says on the box" and she gave me a proper dirty look, and said "I'M GOING TO GET YOUR MANAGER, I'LL GET YOU SACKED FASTER THAN YOU CAN SAY IT!" "... Sacked? I'm sorry miss, but I hope you realise, I AM the manager, and I'd appreciate if you'd leave the store"

Then she just threw the toy mice to the floor and stormed out... I wonder if she ever went back.

Yeeeeaaaaaah :shades:

 

[Xilef]

Best customer service? I've had good service from HTC in the past.

My worst is difficult. I have aspergers so I'm not so great with situations when I get lied to or someone pulls me off my path, I asked for a diet coke at a cinema, the guy gets me a sprite and I say "sorry, I meant a diet coke" and his reply was "no you didn't you said sprite" and I started crying and took the sprite, it was around 2 years ago so I was about 19 years old?

Then there's one recently in a Costa coffee, I ask what's in the spice latte and the lady's reply was "stuff", there was a pause until "spice". I then ordered something else and asked for a giant bourbon biscuit they had and she said of course, she then tries to charge me for the person behind me's order, gets my drink muddled up and forgets the bloody biscuit.

 

[Glitchfinder]

Probably the best customer service I see on a regular basis is at a restaurant near here, called BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse. They're known for their sports bar and chicago-style pizza. They're also known for consistently having a lot of background noise. It's their only bad mark on local rating sites. Which causes trouble when I'm placing orders, because I'm not always as loud as I should be. One time we were there, I tried to order their fish and chips, and they accidentally misheard as the fish tacos. When they brought out the food and I mentioned that, they immediately took it back and had the fish and chips out in very short order. It made me feel bad though, because that was a perfectly good meal being wasted, even if it was something I didn't like.

Some of the worst customer service I've had was a few doors down, at an IHOP. They used to have someone there who would consistently take 20 minutes to so much as show up and take your order, then take an hour or more to get your food, and finally would end with you paying cash because "the computer was broken." It got to the point where my family vowed that if he was our server again, we would ask to be moved to someone else's section. That's quite impressive considering both of my parents were servers when they were younger, and they both absolutely hate the idea of complaining at a restaurant. (The one time I know my dad complained, the service was some of the worst I'd ever seen, and he didn't even TELL us what he was doing. He just excused himself to go to the restroom, and next thing I know the manager is giving us a free meal and assigning a different waiter to the table.)

On the other hand, let's go back to OfficeMax. There was a period of six or so months after we fired one of my former supervisors where we got customers coming in looking for him because he apparently gave them sweetheart deals to make the sale. (He was fired because he had committed fraud.) So we would have customers come in asking for some kind of ridiculous sale, or additional changes to an existing sale (usually on things like printers and computers), and when they were told that we couldn't do that, they would reply "But [former supervisor] would do it for me!" Our response to that was always "That's why he got fired."

 

[Glitchfinder]

Best customer service? I've had good service from HTC in the past.

My worst is difficult. I have aspergers so I'm not so great with situations when I get lied to or someone pulls me off my path, I asked for a diet coke at a cinema, the guy gets me a sprite and I say "sorry, I meant a diet coke" and his reply was "no you didn't you said sprite" and I started crying and took the sprite, it was around 2 years ago so I was about 19 years old?

Then there's one recently in a Costa coffee, I ask what's in the spice latte and the lady's reply was "stuff", there was a pause until "spice". I then ordered something else and asked for a giant bourbon biscuit they had and she said of course, she then tries to charge me for the person behind me's order, gets my drink muddled up and forgets the bloody biscuit.

Xilef, that really sucks. The guy with the soda should not have done that. I know a few friends who do or have worked in theaters in the past, and if someone had complained to their managers about them contradicting a customer like that, they would have been canned on the spot. (It doesn't help that they had nasty managers, but the fact is, around here you're not supposed to contradict a customer like that, especially if it implies that the customer lied to you. There are legal issues involved with that, the same kind of issues requiring news companies to say someone "allegedly" committed a crime, even when there is crystal clear video footage showing them do it. As for the one at the coffee shop, it's either that she was overwhelmed (too few people on a busy shift) or she was poorly trained or new, or a combination of the above. I know full well that any place that serves food around here is required by law to make sure employees can give enough of a description of what's in the beverage or food that someone can figure out if there's something in it that they might be allergic to, and if all she can think of is "stuff" and part of the beverage's name, she's not doing it right at all.

That said, you shouldn't let stuff like this ruin your experience. I'll give a piece of advice I recently gave a friend because he was having trouble dealing with bad customers, but that can be applied to other situations as well. If someone is getting on your nerves, giving you a tough time, or ruining your day, stop for a moment and imagine what they would look and sound like with Iago from Aladdin perched on their head commenting on everything they were doing. Try to avoid laughing as you do that, since nobody likes to think they're being laughed at. But still, that kind of idea is fairly simple to put into practice, and it can make your day a hell of a lot better.

 

[Ellie]

So today I left work in a black tie and shirt, with a red jacket on, went to see the new New Street station, and found myself giving directions, until I ended up with a long queue due to the whole place being new and I had to find somebody who actually worked there to take my queue off me!

 

[Ellie]

Today a customer informed me that I should not be working on the Lord's day of rest.

Another informed me that I look like a "bad lesbian". (Bad as in bad not as in rad)

 

[Toams]

Today a customer informed me that I should not be working on the Lord's day of rest.

Another informed me that I look like a "bad lesbian". (Bad as in bad not as in rad)

Man this is the worst.

Nobody should have to take shit like that.
I mean if your self esteem is big enough, (which it should be) then you'll be able to shrug it off and go on and about.
However I know a ton of people which would be off their game for the rest of the day.
I don't get what people get out of genuinely offending others.

I'm in such a different place though, people come to me asking to work for them.
So if anyone gives me a hard time, I'd stop working and get the fuck out.
No need for anyone to take shit like that, so I don't.