XOJane:
Believe it or not, the customer service representative that you are speaking to wants to help you. Or at the very least, they want to fix your problem and get you off the line. So please. Allow the rep to do their job and actually listen to what they have to say!
It’s sad we live in a world where we need to have these kinds of things explained to people.
I’m not sure I agree. In many situations where you’ve been driven to calling customer service the rep is there as a firewall so you can’t bother the people who are actually responsible for your issue. They’re cannon fodder. Many times reps CAN’T fix your issue, they aren’t the ones that caused it and you can’t speak or punish those responsible. They’re paid to be a buffer, if they don’t like taking the heat for someone else’s screw-ups then they should take a different job.
Some reps may not be as knowledgeable or as personable as others. That said, the attitude that they are useless is one of the main reasons the call quickly goes wrong before it starts.
The rep is a person trying to make a living by helping people who are mostly dissatisfied for starters. It can’t be an easy job. Plus people feel soooooo entitled!
In my mind, some companies hires cheaper reps and some don’t train them well. Some reps are just not patient with people. None of those is in my control. What I can control is a behavior on my part that produces the best possible outcome out of the service call.
If you think reps are useless, why pick up the support line? Get a lawyer and sue the company! Else, pipe down and show some respect.
Patience with first-tier reps occasionally yields rewards.
I can’t imagine there are many people on the planet who actually enjoy the job. These are people who probably have few options here, in a country that’s killing its own middle class. So I try to be as courteous as possible.
Anyone who thinks customer reps are there as a firewall is a self-centered person. Having said that, anyone who claims to have never abused a customer rep is being … forgetful.
Not true. I’ve never “abused” a rep.
Nor have I. I try to be as respectful as I can. It can be trying at times when the customer rep was rude, but even in those cases I tried to be understanding. I do the same thing online. I treat everyone I have discourse with with respect.
Nope. Speak for yourself.
It only took one insane ex-girlfriend to train me how to keep my cool while on the phone—in front of coworkers at a day job—no matter what I was trying to accomplish, no matter how frustrated I may have been.
And it only took two or three other day jobs to train me how to explain technical problems to people who could determine that I knew what I was talking about.
Customer reps are gatekeepers who need to be convinced that my current problem is neither delusional nor outside their ability to correct.
If I actually had the authority to make them get things done with verbal abuse, I’d be calling someone else much higher up. And I’ve never had that authority.
Yes, reps typically are the first “firewall”, out of necessity. Any large company is simply bound to get a ton of “customer contact”, simply due to their size. And simply by human nature, a lot of that incoming contact is bound to be “bogus”, trivial, based on wrong assumptions etc. There are only a small number of people inside any organisation who “can do something” or who are deeply knowledgable or who are “responsible” for whatever ill has befallen you. If every single incoming query would go straight to those people, they’d be swamped and couldn’t do anything anymore.
Hence, a first “firewall” which will eliminate 90%+ of incoming contact which really doesn’t need to go any further. It depends on the specific company what that firewall looks like exactly. A company where the majority of calls need no “expert” to solve at all, you’ll get a lot of low-paid script readers which really know very little. In other situations, they’ll have pretty knowledgeable people on the front lines already and even better experts somewhere in the back.
This is only a problem if the reps aren’t able or trained or willing to ever escalate anything to the next appropriate level. That’s a problem of the company not giving them the right training/tools/escalation procedures/power to do anything. Which means the company views its customers as not worth serving well.
Either way, there’s no reason to abuse a rep. If they have the power to do something for you, they will. If they don’t, they can’t and will try to tell you in official corporate speak. Either way there’s nothing wrong with treating the rep like a person and play along with them.
I have never abused any either and I think my memory is good. I was not nice to someone repeatedly calling me with some collection agency scam, but they were a lot more hostile than I was (and they were committing a crime).
If I call someone for help I am nice and do what they ask, if I feel like I am not being helped, I escalate. Sometimes the first level people are the only ones who help. Take a company with truly atrocious customer service like Drobo. Their tier 1 people are extremely helpful, nice, responsive and genuinely want to help you. Once you escalate beyond that you can expect to be ignored by tier 2+ and thief managers. Being nice to the tier 1 folks who are willing to harass these other people is the only way to make progress.
Many Customer Service call centers are set up to Prevent you from getting service. Service cuts into profits.
I’m never rude to CSRs, but I do wish companies would create a win/win approach that would enable people who know a little something about what they’re calling about to skip the inane troubleshooting steps. Give me a simple two-question test to ascertain whether I know what I’m talking about, and we can skip the “let’s reboot the device” stuff that I’ve already tried, saving your time and mine and solving the problem more quickly.
Whether one has done it in the past or not is irrelevant to the key persuasion of the article: calling everyone to aspire to treat people better going forward.
Then, why go to the expense of setting it up? In any case, why tell yourself that unverifiable claim to justify taking it out on a poor employee?