Rudeness

matimage

haha, cor, touch of bitterness there.
Not at all, if I phone someone I am more than happy to leave a message and wait for them to get back to me.

custardy

superscaper wrote: »

. But simply being there and working for the company makes you in some customers' eyes the sole person personally responsible for everything.

every day,every day

uktim29

matimage wrote: »

haha, cor, touch of bitterness there.
Not at all, if I phone someone I am more than happy to leave a message and wait for them to get back to me.

What about everyone else? If you have the experience with people that I've had you'd know they're not all the same!

superscaper

Having been on both sides as I'm sure many people here have as well I can safely say there are both rude/a***hole customers and customer service reps alike. Probably in equal measure. But the opposite is true as well. You can get great, understanding customers and customer service reps. Getting OT but I think what is disproportionate is how much time we all spend actively complaining about bad customer service compared to actively applauding the good customer service. When they do something good we tend to almost overlook it and think "well that's what they're meant to do" but positive praise does go a long way and encourages more, better CS. Getting back to the OP, I'd consider it quite rude and unprofessional and not what I'd call good customer relations.

taxiphil

uktim29 wrote: »

Look at all the companies people moan about on here, how many of them are actually suffering from the above post? More or less none. The ones that do will largly be down to increasing overheads and more competition that sells at a lower price/better ad campaigns etc, not one person who's decided not to shop there anymore because they had a run in with one of the staff.

For once I agree with you!

The British public are obsessed with low prices and they can always be tempted back if a cheap enough (or what is perceived to be cheap) price or special offer is made.

Ryanair is a good case in point - famous for their 'bad' customer service and Michael O'Leary even boasts about it - but every time they do a cheap flight sale, everyone's there like a rat up a drainpipe. Their profits speak for themselves - people generally prefer cheap prices to good customer service.

People have to realise that if they want good customer service they must be prepared to pay a little extra. I now buy all my food at Waitrose for this reason; I think a premium of about 10-15% is well worth paying for consistently excellent product quality and customer service. I would even argue that in 'real terms' Waitrose is better value than the likes of Tesco, as the quality and service is much greater than the fairly small price differential.

helloecho

Rudeness drives me mad. I had about £65 of rail vouchers recently, each £5/£10 voucher representing a delay of at least half an hour I have experienced with this particular train company, and had gone to the effort to claim small portions of the ticket price back over the course of a year.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to use the vouchers against the cost of my £335 monthly season ticket at the ticket office of a large London mainline station. After queueing patiently for about 40 minutes after being turned away from one desk for being at the 'wrong' desk (even though the sign above the desk said 'season tickets') and then re-queuing elsewhere, I was treated incredibly rudely by the staff member serving me because I wanted to pay in vouchers.

While I appreciate it must be more awkward to process a part-voucher/part-card payment, I didn't deserve the hostility and downright rudeness shown by the man at the desk! If he dislikes selling tickets so much, why is he a ticket vendor? It was hardly my fault.

Incidentally, I just retalliated by being sickly sweet and polite in return - I find it quite satisfying to wind them up further by being inappropriately happy!

setmefree2

Hello Hello,

Glad you persisted and didn't gave into the agression and got what you wanted. It's very easy to cave in these situations:money: