dragonlady7

customer service is like!, i'm not even that introverted, i did enjoy and get energized by some of my customer service jobs, but it can be so draining, and nobody expects that, and that's why-- you're not human to some people so they don't put any energy into it for you, it's not a mutual relationship at all, they just want to extract

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just had the strangest encounter at the cvs photo counter…. i was like “hi i had some photos printed through your website” and the employee just said “so?”

“Hi I had some photos printed through your website”

CVS employee:

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i mean. i work in a photo lab and we have those little envelopes where we tear a strip off and hand it to the customer like a claim check, so they remember to come back? and customers love to come in and hand that to me, like i’m going to know what the fuck it is, when we have such a wide range of services and the thing their lil reminder slip matches could be literally anything.

When I worked the sales floor I started writing on the slip what the thing was and what the customer’s name was, so that when people handed it to me I could look at the slip and actually get some information.

but like.

“hi I have some photos.”

“ok, here are some photos.” This seems to be what customers expect, but like. How do I know who you are? We asked your name so we could fill out the bag, do you think we’ll just remember what your name was?? Or do you just want me to randomly pick some photos to sell you? You probably want your photos, don’t you? So maybe, just maybe, you need to tell me who the fuck you are.

You manage to wrench the person’s name out of them, so you get that and you go to the alphabetical file of the photos, and after a while you’re like “I don’t see anything, what was it?” and they’re like “oh I had a poster printed” see THAT would also have been good info to have, before I pawed through all the drawers for regular photos, because here’s a shocker, posters don’t fit in the little file thingies so we file them in a whole other place!

Listen especially this time of year I am not here to carry this conversation, I am here to do actually kind of a technical job, help me the fuck out here and don’t expect me to read your mind and know just what you’re here for. Please tell me your name and what you ordered, I am so tired and so busy.

Also it turns out the Post Office really does not like mailing things to people without a name. Or an address.

Honestly the notes on this…guys, every single business has a different reference system (trust me, I know, I’ve worked international wholesale).

Don’t answer your clients with ‘okay’ and try to make them guess how the conversation should proceed. Take charge! Ask them for the specific information you know you require. ‘I need your (name/reference number/the date you placed your order/the receipt) to find (thing you want)’ will get you where you need to go so much easier than ‘so?’

Oh, I did not have the customer guess how it should proceed. I would ask straight out “would you like to place an order?” And then I’d ask for their name.

A surprising number of people would not want to give their name after saying yes they wanted to order. You made a phone call! You spent 20 minutes asking the various merits of product X and product Y. You say you have decided you want to order product Y. It is a mail order business, so we sent products through the mail. Which means the Post Office will require your name.

Did I get their name eventually? Eh. Sometimes.

And people wonder why I don’t like telephones…

Yes, that was my complaint as well– customers come up, wordlessly hand over the slip or occasionally say “I ordered some photos”, and then get, like, hostile when I’m like “okay I need some information though”. That’s what always got me– of course most customers came up and said “hi I’m so and so and I ordered some X?” and I’d say “ok!” and go and get them their things, and in some cases I would, in fact, recognize them, and I’d say “oh your thing came out so great let me get it!” and really the vast majority of my interactions were neutral-to-positive in these ways, but what got me was the astonishingly large subsection of people who reacted as though I were being unutterably rude when I took their slip or looked at them and said “may I have some information about this” because they expected I’d just… magically know. More, who seemed to think it intrusive when I wanted their name, because how was it my business who… ordered… this order… so I know which order… to give them.

It’s pretty straightforwardly that a lot of people don’t remember to pay attention to the difference between their own interior life and the consensus reality in which we all live, and so since they know who they are and what they want, I should also know it, but it was always more people than you expect who consistently forget that an interaction with another person is, you know, an interaction with another person, and that other person does not have the video game script.

So I super empathize with the CVS employee snapping this once, because man sometimes you get fucking tired and customer service is endlessly having to manage a surprising proportion of needlessly-hostile interactions because customers don’t think customer service employees are fucking human.