Getting pissed at rock Auto

Phreakish said
My company only communicates through web/email. We used to take phonecalls, but you get people who have nothing better to do than tie up a customer service rep ALL DAY and then the next day THEY CALL AGAIN.

The vast majority of people can't be concise and are so ignorant of their own lack of knowledge that it can take several days of conversations to even determine what their actual question is. We get between 200 and 500 inquiries a day. If we did it by phone we'd need 25+ operators. As it is, we have two guys who can keep up by email. Having fewer people doing customer service also cuts down on inconsistencies and errors - its hard to find good help these days, let alone 25+ qualified subject matter experts.

I've been retired for 5 years as of next week, so I imagine it's only gotten worse. My experiences with phone calls from customers were fine as long as it was direct to the person having the problem. Usually it was just something very simple, a misunderstanding, someone crossed an I or dotted a T type thing and it could be worked out.

There were a times when it backfired... When it went up and down the chain of command at the customers (we dealt with industrial type customers) and then up and down the chain at our place. The end user would ***** to his boss... who would ***** to his assistant to call us. A girl at the front desk would take the call, tell the boss, who would tell the tech. It often sounded like the sky was falling and we did it. The boss (often me) was smart enough to get our tech to call back and get to the root of the problem and it often was, again, something simple.

The other time it would backfire was when the customer was irate. We had one customer that we just couldn't make happy. We hit every goal and more etc. Did everything right.... But they would find something, usually imaginary or their own fault and they would call up and just lay into whoever answered the phone. They did pay their bills, but they were a PITA to deal with. I answered the phone once and that time their claim happened to be legit and it was a small mistake that I had made. Really small.... I owned up to it immediately and said we would take care of it ASAP, but that wasn't good enough. I really thought they wanted someone to slide a gun across the table so I could "do the right thing".

We had been doing OK by then... Paying the bills, making payroll etc. All was good. We talked and decided that they needed to go. They became our first customer that we "fired". Told them to take their business elsewhere. It was a good day... Meant we were doing well enough not to take that kind of crap from someone we should not have been doing business with in the first place. They were floored. Didn't know what to say and as it turns out, that wasn't the first time they had been told that.