Anyone work in customer service?

People can't expect to pay the lowest possible amount for their goods or services and then expect the company to be able to answer all calls quickly regardless of how many people are calling. Expectations are unrealistic. People like Martin Lewis don't help matters.

I work for McDonald's - the amount of abuse I & my young co-workers receive on an alarmingly increasing basis is just appalling.
Many of them are young teens earing money to put themselves through driving lessons, college or uni etc. They really do not deserve the way they are spoken to for simply trying their hardest (& the ones in my store are generally lovely, hardworking young people)

I work in customer care (complaints).

It's ridiculous, people expect to pay the lowest possible cost and receive the highest level of service. The level of entitlement is unbelievable.

Not validating their behaviour at all but many places the customer service has gone to shit, you can spend 45 mins on hold to get cut off and join the queue again or get told it's not the right department, or you have to go into store to do that and store tell ou you have to call.

It's infuriating and businesses are not providing enough customer resource experience.

I did it at uni and it was better then. My sister does it now and can't even go for a week without permission. It's shite.

I've been in my current customer service role for 16 years. My colleagues and i have noticed that people have become much worse since covid happened, it seems to have sent people loopy. I used to get verbally abused by customers a few times a year, but now it's at least once or twice a week. Last week I answered a call, only to have a man scream down the phone "answer my call, you mother fucker! Don't you ever make me wait on hold, you mother fucking whore!" He'd only been in the call queue for 2 minutes. It doesn't help that the industry I work in isn't popular with the general public either.

Honestly I think the most rage inducing thing is sitting on hold for an hour with the same tinny music over and over again. Pause "oh someone's answering" [random automated message saying to hold] music starts again

We're living in times where when I call somewhere and I'm put on hold, I should have my own playlist playing.

I think people are just cunts to be honest, and getting cuntier by the day. The company I worked for didn't use chatbots, had a 48 hour turnover for email queries and the average hold time was three minutes. Still got death threats and abuse every single day 🤷‍♀️

Do you think the man who hoped I was gang raped was understandably pissed off because he'd had to wait -gasp- three whole minutes?

Do you think the increase of angry customers correlates with the decline of good customer service, especially in the UK? ie:

-The fact the first port of call for a lot of people now is an AI 'chat bot'?
-And I say 'first' but this probably isn't the first time a customer has tried getting this particular query dealt with.
-Your call/email is finally directed to an 'agent'... who you eventually get through to after being on hold for nearly an hour (Sky, I'm looking at you!).
-When you do eventually manage to talk to a human, there's still, very often, a 'computer says no' approach.
-On top of all that, these queries usually have to be dealt with mid-week when people are at work, adding to any stress that might have been there to begin with.

There's never an excuse for abuse, death threats. BUT I can totally see why people might be thoroughly pissed off by the time they actually get to talk to someone.

Yep. Worked in customer service for 20 years before I left. Truth is people who don't work in this sector always look down on people who do. I had been called a number of things from being told they wanted to speak to a man not a woman, to 'it's not my fault you didn't educate yourself' to threatening with their 'lawyer' thinking I would be absolutely fearful and in awe of their worldly contacts. I get people want a quick and efficient service and I have seen bad service which makes me mad because I know what good service should look like. In my case it was never about bad service but entitled people thinking because of who they are and are somehow professionally 'superior' in their view, could get what they want beyond what they are actually entitled to.

Many, many, many, many horrible customers over years in various CS positions. No longer in CS but still have to deal with people unfortunately, CS probably made me tough enough to do it.

I don't remember any particular nasty ones. I will probably always remember a handful of lovely ones though. Two in particular from working in insurance. Think we need those experiences to survive though.

I think that everyone should have to do 6 months in a customer service role, like national service. You honestly have no idea how dreadful some people can be until you do. And they walk amongst us. Some of them must be MNers.

I offer to fill out leave forms or send them links by email to do so etc.

Oh yes we had the bomb threat too.

We should play bingo 🤣

I left for this very reason, I got sick of the abuse. Once upon a time in 100 calls you'd get one arsehole, 95 completely normal interactions and four really lovely people who you remembered. Then slowly that became five arseholes. Then ten. Then eventually every other call is someone screaming abuse at you, and the lovely people are as rare as the arseholes once were. I've been called every name under the sun, threatened, HISSED at. Often for the most mundane reasons just because they've riled themselves up into a complete state before I even answered the call. Someone even said he hoped I was gang raped on my way home 👍

I was very good at de-escalation too, so much so that my recorded calls were used as training material. But it's so, so draining. I just wasn't willing to do it anymore.

Used to. We had people threaten to find us and burn our house down. Wishes if rape and death etc. That was working in car insurance.