to wonder why some customers have to resort to personal insults?

[mummytowillow]

I work in customer services for a well known retailer.

Today I spent an hour listening to a man verbally insult me. No swearing but just completely unnecessary personal insults about my intelligence, my personality, my experience, the fact I have a cough, the fact all I said was 'mmm' (he didn't let me speak).

All because he didn't like a policy that I didn't make and can't change.

He really was the most unpleasant person ever and ruined my afternoon!

I'm good at my job, fair, polite and firm, experienced but he really got to me today

The large glass of wine I'm drinking is helping!

Why do some people resort to such unpleasantness?

trappedinsuburbia I hope you feel suitably chastened and realise that you're an uncaring corporate lacky, who roundly deserves to be abused for selling your soul to an evil corporation.

Or, you know, just doing your job

I kinda see what elephant is saying.

I was in insurance. Most of the shouting screaming and personal insulted, weren't that personal. With I a lot of patience firmness and honesty (this is what I can do for you this is what I can't do and this is how long), most calmed down and apologised.

I hate the call centre agents who say if you talk to me in that tone of voice I'll hang up. All that happens is the customer call straight back up angry that they have been hung up on. They are the fuckers who are just passing the (now much more angry) buck onto some other poor sod to resolve.

My MIL is one of those customers who love to complain and kick off. She often brags "I love being a bitch" and I find it so embarrassing. I often apologize when she flounces out of the shop.
Some people are having a bad day....she never gets this.

You say that Toffee but I have told customers to 'stop swearing at me or I will hang up' and 90% of the time they do stop. I'm not paid anywhere near enough to get sworn at by customers, no matter how annoyed they are.

Not that I have ever actually hung up on a customer, I'm not allowed and you are right, it would just pass the buck.

something - I don't know what you do, what industry, type of call centre, but have you ever been in a situation where you think, this isn't right. My company is doing the wrong thing here. We're not doing what is right by this customer?

elephantspoo I don't know why you are talking about dead babies - I work on a Adult ward.

And I'm not a 'nursie' - I'm an HCA and nurses are 'nurses' not 'nursies'.

We treat our patients very well on our ward and have actually won awards for it.

Like I said I could understand if an offensive patient had a complaint or was upset but when they are just sat there and decide to insult you for no reason at all, it's very hard to take.
Especially when it's racial abuse.

I bet you wouldn't like it either.

elephantspoo You avoided my questions about how you respond to complaining customers now you run your own company. Do you give them everything they ask for, regardless of whether they are being reasonable? Do you tolerate verbal abuse from customers, to you or anybody you employ?

Do you really think the one awful company you worked for is representative generally of customer service functions/attitudes towards customers?

As for the NHS. I'm sure most people can give examples of bad experiences. Years ago, my dad spent 24 hours + on a trolley in an NHS corridor with undiagnosed septicemia. But I would not dream of judging an organisation (with more than a million employees) by one negative incident, when I can think of numerous examples of positive, caring, amazing service.

Instead of "stop swearing or I'll hang up on you" (Egocentric threatening and in my mind every bit as rude as swearing) try "I need you to calm down a bit because I having trouble working out what the problem" (customer centric and shows them you care and are listening, usually a pretty good place to start)

Or listen through the swearing, its just disembodied words and isn't personal. usually you can start picking up the jist of the problem, once you start repeating the problem back. Usually they calm down at that point.

How is it "egocentric and threatening" to ask someone to stop swearing?

I'm so glad I don't work in customer service any more.

its just disembodied words and isn't personal

It is possible to take a distanced view if you are dealing with irate customers at the end of a telephone. If, however, the person abusing you is with you, possibly in your personal space, and that abuse includes racism, and other personal rudeness as per Latara's examples, that's a very different situation.

I think your suggestion of asking somebody to calm down could well be taken as patronising and inflammatory. I think stating boundaries e.g. I can't continue this conversation if you keep swearing - is preferable.

I don't think that many of us like ringing call centres - I'm always polite, but sometimes my patience is severely tried. BT and their very polite Asian staff, for instance? The attitude definitely seems to be: look, we have so many ways we can communicate with you - isn't that good of us. Even if a simple job takes up to three weeks and you phone them every day. I'm sure that their call staff are trained in deflection techniques and I know that it tries the patience of many people. I now EXPECT to be on the phone for an hour.

Latara - You pointed out that you work for the NHS and waded in with your tale of woe. I merely pointed out, specifically, that not all NHS staff are so deserving, and indeed are both inconsiderate and offensive to their patients. You may well be an award winning care giver to this country, but that is not everyone's experience of NHS staff.

I find it really curious that a tale of one woman's experience with the NHS, you chose to take as a directed attack on you.

Fascicle - To be honest I've never had to deal with offensive customers. Demanding ones, yes, and we always do our best to go above and beyond what is expected. Ones that complain and won't settle their accounts in a timely manner, yes, but I suspect all businesses have those. But customers who are just offensive without cause, no. And unless you give them cause, unless you refuse to acknowledge when your work is unsatisfactory and refuse to put it right, you don't ever tend to give them cause. I guess that's the difference between a small business and a faceless corporate automaton.

Re the NHS, I was not saying the NHS is bad, nor their staff. I was illustrating a situation where a patient being verbally abusive to a member of staff is understandable. It is simply wrong for all customer service staff to think they are entitled to be treated with honour and respect regardless of how they or their organisation chooses to treat people.

Bottom line is, if you and the organisation you are fronting are going to be abusive to a client, with intent, you deserve the same back. They may use less flowery language than you have been taught to use in your abuse, but abuse is abuse regardless of the language you dress it up in.

Toffee - What is 'egotistical and threatening' is telling a customer, 'fuck you, sue me' no matter how nice and flowery you pretend to dress up your words. Those types of customer service reps' who then explain it away as, 'well it's company policy, I don't make the rules, I just get paid to tell them to fuck off' are the ones who tend to get the most abuse I'd imagine.

skolastica - Call centre staff have become the most hated of jobs in society, viewed with as much venom and vitriol as was once reserved for estate agents in the 80's. No matter how nice a person is, that says a lot about the career they have chosen to follow.

Some years ago, I rang a customer help line. I was frustrated after having got nowhere on line and let down as the product which was promised to have arrived, did not. I am most ashamed to say I was harsh and aggressive and the person at the other end of the phone told me I was being so and that I was being unreasonable. That pulled me up, right and proper! I rang off, thought about my behaviour then rang back (unfortunately did not get the same person but had logged her name...I apologised and asked that it be passed on to the appropriate person. I have never forgotton my behaviour and will always remember the person on the end of the phone who politely stood up for herself and asked me not to treat her as I had. I am not an innately rude person and i will always remember that. Maybe you could be assertive and 'stand up' to these people, who, for one reason or another are rude to you. They have no right. I was so wrong.

Mmmm. This is a load of supercilious bolleaux.

No company in the world, no matter how ethically marvellous, or with super whiz bang fabulous customer service has not, at one time, dealt with a customer being an arsehole just because they can

elephantspoo So to summarise, you believe that the customer is always right; customers don't get angry without just cause; most (?all) large corporations rip people off; staff in such organisations deserve the abuse that comes their way because they have chosen to be paid by unethical paymasters and as such, they are complicit in their employer's attempts to dupe customers. Is that right?

And in your own business you've only come across demanding customers, not abusive ones. You think that customers are only demanding because a company's performance has been unsatisfactory/substandard.

So if one of your customers isn't happy with your products/services, do you give them everything they ask for to put matters right? What if their idea of satisfaction involves you making no profit on a job or order? Would you do that, to keep them happy?

Yanbu op. I work in customer services for a utility company- so I'm definitely on elephants list of morally incompetent idiot stooges who deserve abuse and should be publicly judged and scorned for my 'career' choice- but some customers are just cunts. The best are the ones where you've done what they want within a minute of speaking to them- in my case issued a refund/ amended the bill/ changed the spelling of their name etc, but they continue to scream and rant and refuse to allow you to speak to tell them it's done. Drives me mad.
I also hate customers who have the idea that managers have special powers that we don't. 100% of the manager escalations I get are where the customer has refused to tell me what is wrong, - they don't want to speak to the stooge you see- when in fact, I could and would have done exactly the same thing my manager did for them- In fact I am still the person that does it, as my manager isn't as good at working accounts as me, or any of the team, as her job is to manage the team, my job is to manage customer accounts - she doesn't know the systems as well as we do. Those customers who call and ask for a manager who can be convinced to tell me what's wrong first will relent when I tell them I can fix/ resolve that without needing to wait for my manager- and then I do it.

fascicle - No, what I have always said is that some do, and do so with intent. It is a management tactic of attrition, and those who front such organisations know they are doing it, and do so deliberately. I have never used the term 'all organisations'.

I said that those staff who do work for such organisations, choose to do so, are trained to do so, and do so deliberately. They are abusing the power of the company over the customer, with intent. As such, they are the abusers in the interaction, and ANY verbal response by customer to the abuser (short of physical or racial threat which is against the law) is justified.

The OP has not been candid. Everyone has assumed she works for a fine upstanding company doing very reasonable work with honourable intentions facing an unreasonable customer. I have no reason to defer to that prognosis. I merely point out that it is wrong for people to maintain that ALL customer service interactions are right and honourable on the part of the person doing the job, and that the person in the wrong is the customer. This is not the case. If it were the case, companies would not train their staff to obfuscate, and complaints would not need to be defending with legislation and ombudsmen.

As regards my business, if a customer is not satisfied with the services my company provides, I will write a loss. It has only happened once. We discussed the client's concerns, explained our position, reviewed the instructions they had given in writing, negotiated and settled the account. We wrote a small loss of about £12K on paper, about £2K in actual costs to the company excluding time, and agreed not to work with each other again. Most contracts result in some form of negotiated settlement at the end to cover things that never formed part of the original contract, but so long as we all walk away making money at the end of the day, and no one feels like they got too much of a raw deal, we're all happy to enter into the next contract when it comes along.

What I will say is, when our work has been carried out to a less than satisfactory standard, it is removed and refitted. When we take longer than we should have done, we admit it. We are not in the business of lying to our clients or making up excuses for poor performance. The honesty tends to attract repeat business.

pregnantpause - You say you are empowered to issue refunds. You also say you are allowed to pass a customer to your manager. You offer no deterrent, like, 'if you have been overcharged you need to put your complaint in writing to this address.... and our refund team will review your case and issue anything owed in 4-6 weeks', or 'I'm sorry, but we're not allowed to pass calls to our managers.'

You see, those sorts of obstructions are present in many call canters all the time. The intent is to cause as much obstruction and work for the customer as possible, because it has been shown that some 9 out of 10 customers will not pursue a refund if they believe the time and effort needed exceeds the value of the refund. At unnamed popular TV service provider, we were taught how to tell customers to go fuck themselves in a dozen of the most polite and obstructive ways the customer service experts could come up with, and we were rewarded on how little time we spend dealing with customers and how effective we were at preventing them from calling again.

What are your company's measures of success?

Our contact centre agents are allowed to terminate calls after a warning if a caller is being abusive. They will then put notes on describing what has happened

If that happens and the customer calls back and continues to be abusive then they will be hung up on again, and again until they learn some manners.

No-one should have to be spoken to like shit at work. The more attention and reward people get from appalling behaviour the more satisfaction they get from it.

This scenario doesn't happen very often as we are a multi award winning CC but it does happen because some people are rude, aggressive arseholes who get a kick out of belittling people on the phone.

We are rewarded for being efficient in preventing customers calling again- that's a measure of good service- if a customer has to call repeatedly they are not happy. If you have done your job, satisfied the customer then that is reflected when they don't call back- no one likes calling call centres after all, it's a chore and one not preferably repeated. Surely that's a good way to measure service?

Our performance related pay is measured on customer feedback surveys- of which the only question that counts is 'how likely are you to recommend the company to a friend' - a customer can say you were great, 10 out if 10 for helpful, polite, understanding, efficient but they say 5/6 in terms of the recommendation question because really, who recommends their gas company? How is that reflective of my service? It's just not British to go around raving about your gas supplier! Anyway personal rant over.

"The more attention and reward people get from appalling behaviour the more satisfaction they get from it."

How very true that is Methe. Happens on MN all the time!

Right I'm back, the customer wanted a refund for a non-refundable product that they had changed their mind about.

T&C clearly state this type of product can't be refunded but they chose to go down the abusive route to get what they want.

Elephant I was following a policy and we're not legally obliged to refund unless faulty or as not as described. Does that make it clear enough for you!

Oh and I can and do escalate to my manager, I also do amazing things for my customers and have received numerous praise letters.

In the spirit of being positive, I had some great customer service today myself. It was from a rail company that refunded the full cost of my train ticket due to a cancellation. There'd been a mix up somewhere down the line but it all got sorted.

I spoke to them on the phone, explained the issue and it ws all sorted out then and there by a very helpful man on the customer service line - they were absolutely great. Couldn't have been happier with the outcome.

I expect if you're the type of person who goes into transactions expecting to be swindled and lied to and speaks to customer service people accordingly then that will be mirrored back to you.

In the UK generally we have a pretty poor idea of good service.

Most people don't complain when they're ripped off or treated like crap.

I'm a lawyer. I've been on the receiving end of irate calls, been called a fucking whore, stupid bitch, etc. I used to find saying to the caller (in a calm measured tone) their language was unacceptable and I'd have to terminate the call if it continued generally served to calm them because actually they were upset because they were in pain/ they were broke due to accident/ claim not worth as much as they expected etc.

That said I've also had to pull colleagues up numerous times for blatant lies (noone senior is available...bollocks. Not just in my field but most, there is always someone else you can speak to, claiming they've sent something they haven't), speaking rudely to callers, etc.

I accept some callers are rude. Equally I think it's not uncommon for call centre staff to do exactly what they accuse callers of - be rude, patronising, raise their voices unnecessarily, lie either outright or by omission. And that's without starting on awful non uk based call centres, who cannot answer any question outside 'the script' and for someone like me whose hearing isn't perfect, can be v difficult to understand/hear.