Is there any actual benefit of being rude, abusive towards any staff?

Sometimes I am "difficult" like when advocating for my kids in school or healthcare. I'm probably not confident enough to do it for myself. But I pull it out of the bag for my kids. Sometimes you need to be a pain in the neck to get results. I would never swear or shout though, no excuse for that. I'm always polite to regular service staff. I did a long enough stint in customer service myself to be empathetic.

I used to work in a call centre (car insurance). I was bloody good at it but didn’t hesitate to put the phone down on the rude ones.

I did once have a call passed to me by a colleague who wasn’t able to sort a problem, and the person was asking for a supervisor. All the supervisors refused to take the call. So I told her to pass it to me.

It turned out it was someone from one for the companies we offered car insurance for, trying to resolve a customer complaint. She asked if I was a supervisor and I told her ‘no, they won’t take the call, but I’m the person you actually want if you want to problem to be solved’. Then I fixed everything. No one ever pulled me up on it because I truly had no fucks to give.

The corporates don’t design their services to actually work. You have to find the person willing to go around process and actually sort things out.

On an everyday level I find I get an awful lot further by being pleasant and friendly than I would be being narky. A while ago we had an experience at a posh place that we could have gone a bit nuclear over at the staff, even though it wasn’t at all their fault. They certainly expected us to. But we didn’t at all, and made it really clear that we didn’t think of it that way. As a result we’ve just been offered privileged access to something by them. When small things go wrong, I’ve usually ended up with good things happening by being nice.

Having said that, knowing your rights and being prepared to be assertive over them when the bigger things happen makes a big difference, and big companies will treat you poorly if they think they can get away with it. Being too nice is a curse. Even then, getting aggressive is rarely helpful. Things like knowing that they won’t want to go to the ombudsman (knowing that there IS an ombudsman!) and using that appropriately are really good. Trying never to get cross with the person in a call centre as it’s very rarely their fault - I have failed at this obviously as sometimes it is so frustrating and some people can be pretty aggravating! But I always try not to at least.

I dealt with a complaint some time ago when a customer was abusive to a person in my team and he wanted a manager in the end.
I rang him and dealt with the complaint and I could hear the customer near shitting himself when I said 'and now I would like to discuss your behaviour on the call with x yesterday'.
Be assertive. Be annoyed when things go wrong. But do not be abusive to the person on the end of the phone or the person standing opposite you. It is not OK.

I don't know how it's at all rude for customers to bring up a problem they're having with a service they're paying for with the people who are the point of contact. A valid concern doesn't need to be taken as personal criticism as if they worker is so hard done by for having to deal with the customer at all.

I took my kids to McDonald's last weekend, queued in the drive through and for about 10 minutes nobody moved up. Then again. And again. When I finally got to the front hot food was thrust into my window before I had chance to put the hand brake on and then I sat for ages letting it go cold waiting for the rest of the order.

In the meantime, my window was down and my kids and I could hear staff joking and swearing loudly. When I got a perfunctory 'sorry for the wait' I explained what I'd experienced and it was flat out denied - 'I've not been swearing and we're just really busy. Noone's been swearing.' When I said I was reporting what I'd experienced and not blaming her personally, she said she couldn't help the slow service. And when I said she hadn't listened to my actual concern, but denied it, she said 'whatever, I don't have to put up with this' and walked away. I bet she went home and complained about mean nasty customers, when the rudeness was all on her part.

@CheeseWisely

Yep. As PPs have mentioned the vast majority of unreasonable behaviour like this is people taking out frustrations from other parts of their lives out on these people.

When you think you’re talking to a bot you can easily feel that being abusive is a “victimless crime”. Having a response from a living and breathing person who is being somewhat reasonable brings people up short.

It is no wonder that people get so infuriated and made to feel helpless when they are the customer and you have a job because of them; without them your job would not exist.

Except they would have a job without you because most customer-facing roles are essential services.

Sure, you can order your shopping online and avoid the pesky, ungrateful checkout staff but someone still has to receive the order, pack the order, and deliver the order.

If everyone started doing their weekly shop online there would be less checkout staff and more packers and delivery drivers. There would not be less staff overall.

I worked in an industry with an ombudsman, £500 fee for us if any complaint went to them - whether it was found to have any merit or not. Also went into our published stats. Irate customers got offered the world on a plate not to go to ombudsman.

@Thepeopleversuswork And yet despite having a functioning team and easy human based route to complain, people still come at us screaming and shouting from the off 🤷🏻‍♀️

I put them in the same bracket as the people who make needless nasty comments on our social media feeds, but I find that those ones often back down (and sometimes even apologise!) when they receive a polite reply from a human. It's like it shakes them into realising there are actually humans behind the internet!

I worked in the water industry for many years, in particular the emergency department. I stopped giving my name at the start of the call and just used "Watery Water Co, how may I help you?" because irate callers would latch onto my name and personally berate me.
If asked for my name during the call I would use my first name if it was a nice caller and Mrs surname if it was an awful caller. Then if they called again and asked for me I was kind of prepared for what it might be.
My favourite thing was when they said "That's it, I'm going to another water company!". ...because you can't!

Yes this is my experience as well. Very few managers actually want to deal with ‘customers/the public if they can help it.
I’ve always found that being polite to staff when I have a complaint generally means that I get fobbed off without resolution. Unfortunately to my shame I have found out that being rude and making a fuss is more likely to work.

I think the "benefit" is that the emotionally immature person "feels better" by releasing pent-up emotions.

When a building company caused me two months worth of stress by refusing to resolve an issue caused by their own shoddy work, damn right I was rude. I'd tried to do things the right way, I was civil to start with but when the manager stopped answering my calls or messages, I did go to his office and miraculously, the issue was resolved the very next day.

Grandad said the same. I try to remember it.

Of course there is zero benefit to it, it makes people less likely to help you and making everything more difficult all around plus you risk refusal to serve you.

However I will say that there are some people who lack resilience and who are so used to people letting them down that they struggle massively with ANY perceived judgement or rejection. That can make them more likely to struggle in interactions and lash out. The problem is its hard to differentiate between these people and those who are just having a bad day or who just are entitled and have zero respect or empathy for others.

My Grandma always said you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

No there is no reason for customers or staff to be rude. There are plenty of rude customers and plenty of rude staff. I was rude to the woman who called me about a fictitious car accident that i seemingly had. I explained that there had been no such accident but she insisted there had been, i asked her for the date but of course she came back with "i am not allowed to give out such information due to data protection" I told her she was wasting my time and to remove my number from her list, at that i put the phone down and went back to baking, seconds later the phone went again and lo and behold it was the same woman on the phone demanding to know why i had put the phone down her ! Yes i was rude in my answer and frankly i think i was justified in telling her to do one.

Friends husband manages an Aviva team. Callers are passed on to him when their screaming has reached unpleasant levels. The calls are recorded so he plays them a bit of their behaviour. It tends to change the tone of the rest of the call. His main bug bear is people who buy their insurance through John Lewis. They buy the cheapest car insurance possible because they hope they will never need it. When they do need it they expect a free courtesy car, onward journey transport ,5* recovery of their vehicle. Trouble is they went for the economy package so now they have to pay a lot more to add those things on. The phrase " But I'm a John Lewis customer" has been deployed many times . Sadly you are a very mean JL customer and screaming won't get you what you want.

No, and on occasion when I have become frustrated, I always apologise if i am rude to staff. I would not want to be in a customer facing role.

Banks and BT however are a whole other thing. 🤐

I have a benefit of looking at it from the management position and no, loud and abusive customers absolutely won't get what they want and I always backed my staff up. I have a very thick skin and "kill them with kindness" attitude. And yeah, sometimes I had to "fire" a customer for being abusive.
We were a local business and eventually our customers learned that we would go above and beyond to fix your issue if you were nice, non emotive and reasonable. But untill that happened, people thought that they have to "beef up" their complaints preemptively because they are not uses to getting resolution elsewhere.

The ex clearly benefited from it. He frequently got his own way and it certainly made him feel good about himself.

Personally, I wouldn't have been quite so happy to tuck into the complimentary dessert after he'd kicked off about some innocent waiter (or particularly waitress), but I'd worked in restaurants before and it served him right.

Obviously he wasn't like it when we first got together.

@CheeseWisely

I work for a small company. There's no chatbot or FAQ loop. It's an email to the general enquiries address that is picked up by one of our 6 customer service agents and if it's a complaint it comes directly to one of two managers to deal with, depending what it's about.

So it sounds like your company has a properly functioning customer service operation which works the way it should.

The issue people often have with customer service at large companies is the fact that it’s very difficult to have a proper dialogue without being redirected into a digital black hole which in theory is supposed to make your life easier but in practice takes you shout into the void.

I am not justifying rude or aggressive behaviour at all. It’s inexcusable. But I think companies sometimes fail to understand that the fact people have been disintermediated from the customer service process is partly what is making them so angry and aggressive.

The harder it is to have a rational conversation with an actual person, the more likely you are to shout when you do finally get through to one.

Not retail but I book surgery in a hospital. Those who ring constantly, complain, are rude etc tend to get their ops sooner just so we can get rid of them. I hate that it works this way.

Agree, but I do have a relative who is so abusive and intimidating towards people that he genuinely does get what he wants a lot of the time.

It's horrible and absolutely wrong but it does work out for some people and therefore they will keep doing it. And usually there is no way to tie these kinds of incidents together and say look, this person has a pattern of bullying, abusive behaviour. So while they may get banned from certain establishments or lose contracts or relationships, that doesn't really matter to them, they just move on to the next victim.

And then for some people they aren't actually thinking about their actions as such or enacting a conscious campaign of intimidation. They just have poor emotional regulation skills, or they're having a bad day or whatever and it all comes out at the poor person on the customer service bench.

@Thepeopleversuswork Not in my case. I work for a small company. There's no chatbot or FAQ loop. It's an email to the general enquiries address that is picked up by one of our 6 customer service agents and if it's a complaint it comes directly to one of two managers to deal with, depending what it's about.

We're in an industry that has industry wide routes of recompense depending on the situation, and then we have the option to exceed these minimum legal entitlements as a gesture of goodwill. I will not exceed them for shitty shouty customers.