Customer service

Few things anger me more than poor customer service. I’ve had great customer service, and bad customer service. I’ve only ever once blown up and gotten aggressive on the phone and that was with a small minded individual at apple which was an isolated incident and quickly rectified by someone with a more professional attitude (We wont talk about the people I brought my car from)

I’m close to blowing up, and again I’m really close to blowing up. Virgin Media. Having sat on both sides of the table, I struggle to understand how you can provide such atrocious customer service, and how on earth no-one is capable of taking ownership or responsibility for a case, or someones actions.

But what I cannot stand more than anything, is people using any excuse to get you off the line. Look, If you’re due to go home, tell me, I’ll call someone else. If you’re late to your lunch break, tell me, I’ll call someone else, because frankly I know what it’s like to be on the other side and late for everything and getting pissed off. I understand.

But for gods sake, done use excuses to get me off the line or palm me off to someone else. Why, why is it in customer service, the front line, do we let these utter knob jockeys sit there and blast out customers because they ‘don’t feel like it’.

I can recall one time whilst working in LloydsTSB that a customer demanded to be put through to their branch, I duly did so, and just before the handoff where I took the time to explain the customers issue so they didn’t have to explain it all over again, the staff member blasted off, screaming about how she had just gotten back from their holiday and that it was their first day back and how I should have pawned the customer off. Sorry, I did what the customer had asked, that isn’t so wrong (since I couldn’t solve the issue myself, but I made sure the person I put them through to had enough information so that they could). 

People like that should not be in customer service. The fact remains that most customer facing roles like customer service call centres and branch staff, are paid the lowest, treated as expendable and generally not treated well. This needs to change.

At the end of the day an arrogant prick at the front line (whom is usually paid the lowest) treats one customer badly. That person decides to leave, and usually tells everyone else. The arrogant prick keeps treating people like crap and so more leave, as a result the low paid individual who frankly doesn’t care about his or her job ends up costing the company a small fortune, yet if companies were prepared to treat staff right, treat them better and pay them better the staff might just change their minds and attitudes toward customers.

And maybe for once, we might get a decent level of customer service. For now, I wish the Virgin Media call centre staff, the very worst, and I really hope that the many I have spoken too, either get re-educated the hard way about what they are doing wrong, or find a job where they are simply not allowed to talk to other humans.