Was the assistant rude?

foreverskint

I had an awful experience two weeks ago in the ELC. I'm agrophobic and had plucked up the nerve to out with my OH to buy my daughters birthday presents. I was being served by a lovely assistant, who explained that as one of the items I had bought was in the sale the voucher i wanted to use was not valid, but if I spent another fiver, it would. So i popped off to get another item, whilst she put my transaction on suspend on her till. Amother assistant stepped in to take over on the other till to serve the customers behind me.
I returned seconds later and walked up to the assistant who was serving me, only to be shouted at by another customer in the queue, saying that I was queue jumping. It would not have been so bad, had the customer allowed the assistant to explain what was happening. The customer then started really having a go at this poor assistant and me, I completley lost it and had a major panic attack in the middle of the shop. The woman continued to have a go at me and the assistant, saying that she was pulling faces at her and being rude, etc and actually put in a formal complaint about her.

When I returned to the store a couple of hours later the assistant was still really upset, and I spoke to the area manager who happended to be in the store at the time, and she explained that no action would be taken against the assistant as she had done nothing wrong. It turned out that the assistant serving me was blind, although you would never had known from the way she coped, she was desperately worried that she was going to loose her job, and had spent all afternoon worrying,

The thing is that this one womans rudeness has caused so much upset allround, just by looking for trouble.

In my experience I have rarely come across rude assistants, it's usually the other way around.

Poppy9

I have to admit I get annoyed when standing in a long queue with only one person serving and others on the shop floor either chatting, trying to look busy tidying the shelves or flogging store cards. One of the worse places for this in my town is M&S. On one visit I overheard an assistant flogging herself to death trying to get through a huge queue tell another customer that management had introduced a new policy of the staff managing themselves. If there was a queue at checkout they should start serving, if it was quiet they should tidy etc. She had a resigned look when the customer said it wasn't working. I felt so sorry for her as she was young and obviously being taken advantage of. I could see two members of staff chatting behind a rail so I rang the store on my mobile and asked if it was possible to have more staff on the tills in Ladies/children wear. Shortly after a boy in a suit (you know the Man trainees, just shaving etc ) appeared with the two chatting assistants and himself to open up 3 other tills. He did apologise to us all for the wait and everyone offered praise for the original checkout girl and how annoying it was to see assistants standing around, not with customers, while they were waiting to pay. No wonder M&S's are selling less:rolleyes:

Also does anyone have the problem in Tesco's that if they have to refund or exchange goods for you on customer services that they often have to ring the bank for authorisation. No its not just me but everyone - but just on customer services. Really annoying as the assistant, of which there is just one, is at least 15 minutes trying to get through to the bank.

I have been both sides of the counter but I do think that many shop assistants in major stores like Debs, M&S, HOF are a bit surely and aloof. The supermarkets are a bit of a mixed bags. Most till operators ok its when they move to customer service that the power goes to their heads. I especially hate the snooty women on Planet etc in HOF. I always feel like telling them that I probably earn more in a day than they do in a week when they are looking down their nose at me in my scruffy jeans and unmade up face:eek: . Staff in Boots are my favourite as they always make eye contact, smile, helpful and quick. A checkout girl was wearing a T shirt saying ask me about Mark ???. So I did. She laughed and said I was the first person all day to ask, everyone else just looked. I told now that I had asked a man of that name would appear and say "why should I ask you about me".

Zippy123

Bought a light from B&Q this AM.

The transformer in it was faulty so I took it back. The clerk at the returns desk scanned it and exclaimed that it could not have been bought from them as it is not a valid item. They had my receipt from this AM with the item on it and still asked me when I bought it!

Anyway, I had to go to the lighting department in their store to show them that the product was there. I then noticed that I had been originally overcharged by about 10% too!

Not even an appology and I also wonder how many others have been overcharged!

Willsnarf1983

me personally i have worked for Blockbusters and the amount of grief on a daily basis is unbeleivable. One occasion this guy came in and was trying to get a refund on a dvd where he had no reciept, didn't buy it on his account and no record that he bought it at the store.....he then tried to claim that scanning the back of the dvd (the barcode) would show he bought it from the store.....................................what a fool. anyway i was shift runner and kept trying to explain this to the guy calmly and carefully but he wud not believe me and it was lucky that the manager was still there at the end of his shift and he came and explained it to the guy and then basically told him to get stuffed lol. It annoys me when customers refuse to take what the normal customer service person tells them and feels they ahve to go higher up, it was a simple and obvious thing and easily dealt with. grrrrrr

anyway i now work in the trade for sparkys and its much better because its not the general public its tradesmen who understand what they are asking for takes time, and may not be easy and also their timeconstraints arn't as severe.....


phew rant over

Will

Jem8472

now if I am in a que any someone is being rude to an assistant I will make a comment to them maybe have a go at them about being rude if I am in a bad mood

ruiner99

I personally work on a customer service line taking comments and complaints for a very reputable British company and to say I get the most rude, arrogant, insensitive people calling through would be an understatement. Now I try to be courteous to anyone in customer service and in shops cause I know they can have a hard time of it and I do know even some of them can be rude and useless too but I do know where they are coming from.

Some people phone us up and shout at us about things that have absoultly nothing to do with our company and i have been abused over the phone about the most petty of things, and trust me when i say petty i mean petty. I think some people should think twice before picking up a phone to shout and b***h about something stupid, i know some people at a the time feel strongly about the point they are trying to make but in the grander scheme of things if your point is about as interesting and useful as something i scraped off my shoe then count to ten, have a drink and go about your day instead of shouting at someone who is paid minimum wage to answer your call.

I am actually in work now (just finishing) and I have had one hell of a night listening to people make total holes out of themselves about stuff that you could have went to bed and forgot about by the morning and it would have no more effect than if you called in. Personally i think the UK can be a big fat country of convienience and generally people only complain cause they think they will get something for nothing. Some people do have good reason to complain and if all the people who had no reason to, stopped, then more things would get done and better results would come from it. I do think i am a total cynic because of my job but i think that is good enough reason.

now as for people that cold call you to sell you stuff you don't want on over the phone, feel free to shout at them lol.

Poppy9

ruiner99 wrote:

Personally i think the UK can be a big fat country of convienience and generally people only complain cause they think they will get something for nothing. Some people do have good reason to complain and if all the people who had no reason to, stopped, then more things would get done and better results would come from it. I do think i am a total cynic because of my job but i think that is good enough reason..

Gosh I think I have spoken to you . This is why customers get irate when dealing with customer services, either by face or via the telephone. You get a bored p'd off assistant who think you have no right to complain being obstructive. Is the customer services worker mad at you you mad at their job? Put together a p'd off assistant and a p'd of customer and things blow up. The blame has to lie with management who have devised a system where they have staff in the front line who are impotent when it comes to rectifying matters. All they can usually do is make a note of the matter and pass it on. Customers don't want notes made of the complaint they want action sadly, as can be seen from other postings on this board, we rarely get this unless we go to the top.

I am fed up of being treated as if I have no right to complain when things go awry. If my new cooker stops working and they fail to turn up for an appointment, that I have taken a morning off work for - too right I am blooming mad when the customer service person, who is the only person you can talk to says "sorry we should have rung you to cancel, I can make you a new appointment for 7 days time when we are next in your area". How does that help me? Why should I be further inconvenienced because I have spent money buying a product from a company that isn't fit for the purpose it was sold. Why shouldn't I expect the repair agent to turn up when they say they will? Will can't I talk to the repair agent personally and bollock him LOL? The fact of the matter is we are expected to speak to people who can't help us. The staff know they can't help us so we are in a lose, lose situation. This matter has been made worse by the introduction of indian call centres where its hard getting the staff to even understand what you are saying and they just repeat a script back to you.:mad:

Did you guess the repair man didn't turn up to repair my cooker? Not once but 3 times and when he finally did he had the wrong part because they had made a mistake with the model number :mad:

stripeyfox

As I have said before on here, much confusion arises over what customers expect to happen when they return an item and what they are legally entitled to.
I worked for Halfords (mainly in one of the old high street shops) and regularly had to deal with people returning items that were stolen from us, stolen from another shop or damaged by the customer. We used to get dozens of car stereos (purchased legitamately) returned as "faulty" and most of the time when we tested them in store they were in full working order but customers still demanded exhanges or refunds!
I have been shouted at, sworn at, threatened with varying degrees of violence (I'll wait for you after work, I'll smash your face in, I know where you live etc etc), which was intimidating at the time. I have never been assaulted myself but saw a colleague headbutted in a row over car tyres by a customer who had his kids with him! There's no way I'd go back an work in retail; rubbish money, rubbish hours (no time off at bank holidays, christmas etc) and verbal and physical abuse.

PS Just remembered the "non pc" way we used to deal with shoplifters (usually schoolkids); because the police took so long to arrive, we had to lock them in the cellar and use our "well built" shop lad to intimidate them until the police arrived. One time, during the two hour wait for the police, he struck up a friendship with one remorseful thief who ended up working for us!

trace-j

ruiner99 wrote:

I personally work on a customer service line .......

Having worked on an advice line, it's really important to try not and take things personally. I lost count of the number of evenings I felt miserable after a day of listening to other peoples problems and other verbal assaults directed at me because I've told them something they don't want to hear. At the end of the day it's just a job and finding a way to destress is excellent way to be fresh for the next.

Funny thing is you speak to the same person a couple of days after an inital moan, a lot of the time they're more together and sometimes even apologise for causing a fuss. So even if someone does kick off, a number do regret it later- though most of the time you'll never know.

PS I love queue jumpers, if they start to get vocal so do I then the jumper realises their out numbered by me and everyone else! I have physically shoved many a drunkard out of festival toilet queues, so be warned:rotfl:

Pennywise

I just wish that shop assistants and telephone customer services assistants would actually listen. It is an art that seems to have been lost. I wonder if it is because they're taught using scripts and have to actually ask a specific question before they can "accept" the answer. Giving them too much information in one go seems to "overload" them. It's not just cs staff though, I had the same with a doctor when my baby wasn't well - I gave a full run-down of the symptoms etc., and then the doctor started asking questions that I'd already answered - it was clear he hadn't actually been listening!