I cried on the phone to a customer

[TheChild]

I have had the shittest of shit days today, need to let it out because I can't stop crying.

I work in a Call Centre, worked at the same place for nearly 6 years now. 5 minutes before the end of my shift and 5 minutes before we actually close I get a call from a customer who I could tell striaght away was not happy.

It was nothing I had personally done, he had problems with our (admittedly outdated) systems and the way we have to do things. Nothing I said or did was good enough, the options I gave going forward weren't options, I had to repeat myself multiple times when he kept asking the same question, saying that I did not have the answer because it involved a 3rd party who's systems we don't have access to. I never ever lose it on the phone, show any annoyance or emotion but this man just pushed me to the edge. I asked if he's like to speak to a manager, ignored and told again how useless I was. Asked what I could do to put the situation right, was told I could tell him the answer to the question that I already said I could not answer, offered to raise a complaint so we could fully investigate. Nope.

What made it worse was that I was working from home, no colleague next to me to listen in and take over the call and my voice broke and I started crying, whilst at the same time apologising for being unprofessional. Ended up staying on an hour and 30 minutes extra doing everything I needed to do. A colleague will need to listen to the call as I logged a complaint, so they will have to hear my pathetic snivelling.

I'm so cross with myself that I let someone get to me that badly, and that I had a panic attack afterwards whilst trying to sort it all out. I'm back in tomorrow and I just feel sick, I'm so fed up. I don't want to go to work tomorrow and deal with more people being arseholes over something that is not my fault.

I will add a disclaimer to say that the majority of the people I speak to are lovely, but it's the rare arseholes that can just ruin my day. My confidence is completely knocked

Please someone tell me SOMETHING happy?!

@tankcrossing

Sorry OP, he was an absolute arse hole.

I work in retail so my shitty customers are face to face with me.

Today I had a woman ask for curtain material off the roll. She showed me the measurements of her windows and I worked out for her how much fabric she needed. Then she asked me to cut the fabric into 28 pieces so each piece would fit individual windows.

I told her sorry that we don’t do that. She argued that it was my job to cut out her curtains. I explained that we have ready made curtains if she wasn’t comfortable cutting her own. Nope, she wanted me to cut up 37 metres of fabric for her. She argued the fact that she didn’t own a tape measure, or scissors and my queue grew longer. Then she threatened to report me on Face Book.

I still didn’t do it

So……
There
We
Are
Then

Wtf ? Was she going to blu tack the pieces to her windows. Crazy moo.

My boss tells me that most people just want to vent. Just listen in silence till they run out of steam. Then give them the options and go back to playing candy crush while they have a conniption and wait for them to run our of steam again. Repeat options. I'm so sorry sir, the options I can give you are xyz. Rinse and repeat. Eventually they will listen and accept what you are saying or they'll have an aneurysm; either way they're off your hands.