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Why you shouldn’t be jerks to customer service reps

Fair warning, I’m writing this on mobile so ignore any spelling mistakes you see.

I work as an operator at a roadside assistance hotline, one of those membership based type of deals. Now our mentorship program has a lot of rules and regulations to it and because they didn’t read the fine print our members sometimes aren’t aware of them until they call in for a request that we can’t do so I’m often the bearer of bad news. However, our regulations aren’t set in stone, depending on the situations our members are in we can make exceptions for them at the operator’s discretion.

Member calls in, he wants his car towed. Not a problem, we do this all time. Except this guy was a massive prick. He must have already been pissed off before he called because this guy was so irritable. Constant frustrated sighs, an angry tone, dropping a liberal amount of f bombs, and snapping at me for the dumbest things. For example I asked him for his vehicle information and his reply was “Can’t you see it on my file?” He had more than one car on file.

In between his angry/snappy comments and angry sighs, I manage to piece together his story. He had actually had his car towed earlier that day, but the garage he been towed to was charging him a crazy price for repairs so he wanted to get towed elsewhere so he could get a better price. Now this is one of those things that’s against regulations, we don’t do retows. For example, if a member gets towed from A to B, and then later wants to towed from B to C, their membership would not cover that second tow. This is one of those things where depending on the specifics I could have made an exception for the second tow. You know what? In this case I actually could have done it. That place it was towed to is kinda locally infamous for charging stupid prices, my supervisor said it was okay to authorize retows from there, all that was needed was my go ahead.

But at the time, my only thought was “fuck this guy” so I just didn’t do it. I broke the bad news and cited the no retows policy as the reason. He tried to argue the point, but I just apologized to him and said it was policy, out of my hands. Dude eventuality gave up, not before telling me to shove that policy where the sun doesn’t shine, and hung up.

And that ladies and gentlemen is why you don’t take out your frustrations on service people tying to help you. The motivation to go the extra mile just won’t be there.

submitted by /u/F_S_Rocks
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How’s this for a scary perspective on customers…

Stabbed in the face