Customers Who Don't Know What Words Mean: Restaurant Horror Stories

[Glassunion]

31. I'm in convenience retail. Wife is in department store retail.

I do not approach customer service from the standpoint that they are wrong, or even that they are "not always" right. Their satisfaction is my goal 100%. However, there are customers that cannot be satisfied, and at times it can be beneficial to your business to fire a customer or two.

Employees run the business. Those employees are the front line to every customer. We train them to exceed the customer's expectations. We give them the freedom to make their own decisions on how to satisfy a customer. They are the one dealing with them, and no two customers are the same, so there is no in stone policy for handling complaints. Those employees are the keystone to our success. End of story.

You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them. If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment. We have to work together every single day. And they need to know that they have our support. So if it comes down to the choice of choosing between a valued employee and some irate jerk who wants free car washes for a year because there was no tri-foam wax in his Ultimate wash. I'm going to chose the employee.

There are customers out there that you cannot reel back in. No matter how nice or accommodating you are. They are unreasonable, and abusive and our employees do not deserve dealing with that abuse. Yes there are incredible cases of poor customer service, however trying to resolve this by declaring that the customer is always right can be counter-productive.

When you make the decree that the customer is always right you are basically setting the ground rule that the abusive customer has an advantage over your employees. This makes it harder for your employees to deal with the abuse. You end up rewarding your customer's abusive behavior, and this will only encourage it more.

So what ends up happening is now that you are encouraging bad behavior from your customers, your employees have to deal with it more and more. And if they feel that their manager is always going to side with the customer, the employee becomes frustrated. When you have unhappy employees, you end up with poor customer service all around. It becomes fake and forced (plastic smile), and they are not having fun.

I'll give you an example. Way back when I was in Ops and was transferred to a new location, we had a customer who came in about twice a week. No matter what, this customer was not happy. He would nit and pick every little thing until he got something for free. What I noticed in my employees, was that when they guy came in, my folks would scatter, trying anything not to have to wait on him. It was the same MO. He would come in, pick up a few items, go out to his car, then come back in a few minutes later fuming at something. He would fly off at the first person he saw. He'd find anything to get something for free.

This guy would really stress out the employees. The last day he came into the store he simply bought a Hersey's candy bar and a soda. I personally rung him up. Two minutes after he left, he came back in and started yelling at me. Apparently the candy bar was broken and there was a huge corporate conspiracy to save money and ripoff the customer by cranking up the temperature of the cooler as his soda was warm. Never mind the glistening perspiration on the 1/2 consumed bottle of soda. He then demanded a free sandwich and a replacement soda and candy bar. You see he'd been down this road before, and knew immediately what to start demanding.

I apologized with a smile, I then personally fetched him another soda, and candy bar. He immediately inquired as to the location of his "God-Damned" sandwich. I apologized further and explained that there was not going to be a sandwich and that I was sorry that I could not help him further. I handed him his new soda, and unmolested candy bar, along with a return of his money. He became quite enraged and threatened to contact corporate. On the return slip for his purchase I circled the phone number for corporate. I again apologized as I was pointing out the number on the receipt, and then informed him that we would miss him as a customer, and wished him the best of luck shopping at our competitor. Corporate backed me up.

This was the best thing that I could do for my employees. They were quite pleased knowing that working second shift on Thursdays and Fridays was no longer going to be a nightmare. Yes, it is a bit expensive to replace a customer. But it is more expensive to replace a good employee. Sometimes you just have to fire that shitty customer.