Let me take you back a few years. Well, like 15 years to be exact. I was working at a large Wireless phone service provider in a major metropolitan area. My job was to take calls from people whose phones had been compromised and, essentially, be screamed at.
We were required to take 35 calls a day at a minimum. So I was required to be abused by customers at least 35 times a day.
Over the 2 years that I held this job, I quickly learned how to “defuse the angry customer” and, more importantly, keep my sanity while keeping an even keel. It was far too easy to let them get to you and lose your patience and/or temper – which helped no one, but least of all me. I needed beer money and couldn’t afford to lose a job.
I am going to share couple of stories from that time… Today’s lesson is about irrational behavior.
On this one fine day, I received a call from Mr. Cust. His phone had obviously been compromised and our standard procedure at the time was to change the customer’s phone number. The only way to do this was to manually reprogram the phone or have the customer take the phone to a store. Manually programming the phone required the phone to be shutdown and thus could not be done while talking on the phone.
Imagine yourself in his shoes – Wireless service was expensive. Few people had phones and those that did paid a lot and expected a lot. You try to place a call – most likely important – and you are routed to a customer service rep that tells you that you need to immediately change your number. The number most of your business colleagues have and the number you have probably had for quite a while at this point.
Yeah, he wasn’t happy either.
But as a professional (those that know me are allowed to laugh here) – I do my best to make things as easy as possible for Mr. Cust. I explain the situation. I assure him he will not be charged for any use that is not is – in fact I am willing to give him a whole month free (mainly because we are not able to give credit for calls at this point). He’s still not happy about changing his number.
I explain his options:
1) take the phone to a store and they will have you in and out in a matter of minutes.
2) call me directly from a landline phone and I will walk him through reprogramming.
he wants option 3) Reprogram the phone while he is talking to me on it.
He is very busy after all.
I very calmly explain why that is not possible and offer to call him at a number of his choosing at any time he would like. No good, he wants the phone reprogrammed now.
Again, I explain that it is not possible and his response is “I want my phone number changed now – walk me through it right now!”
I said , “ok sir – please press end” and he dutifully complied allowing me to be screamed at by 34 other irrational assholes that day.
As hard as I tried to make things easy for him and as much as I empathized with his situation he wanted extra – asking for something not technologically possible and refusing to accept that the person he was talking to might really be doing everything they could.
The moral here is that the customer is NOT always right – sometimes the customer is just too pissed off to think rationally.