A customer made one of us cry.

I don’t think she meant to.  She is probably a nice person.  But, she probably just figured that she had to act tough in order for us to remedy a problem she had with one of our products.

The story is pretty straight-forward.  We ship a lot of food and sometimes the product gets damaged in transit.  If you think about it … you’d expect that, right?  If you ship a box of fruit via FedEx, there’s the chance (however slim) that the fruit will get bruised.

So, the customer bought some feijoa which got bruised in transit.  They called and bawled out someone on my team top to bottom.  She teared up.   Cried her eyes out, in fact.  That sucks.

The customer could’ve just called us and told us about the problem.  And, we either reship, refund or figure out another remedy that both the customer and we think is fair.

Two thoughts on this:

First, I lament the fact that the customer service paradigm on the web is such that people don’t expect to be able to talk to a human and when they do get someone on the phone, they expect to have to scream their way up the chain of command in order to get a fair remedy.  They don’t expect to be taken care of respectfully and fairly.  They expect a hassle.  And, a fight.  That’s shitty.

Second, even though it sucked for my employee, it actually was a great learning experience.  It is sometimes hard to see the benefit in things like this, but speaking well on the phone is a skill that, once developed, you take to every aspect of your life.  It takes a lot of practice to get good at it and there’s nothing like an awkward customer service conversation to take your phone skills to the next level.

2 Replies to “A customer made one of us cry.”

  1. It’s good to remind your people that it’s not usually them, but the customer’s own internal issue. Unhappy people make their own problems, or at least keep them going. They find the issue, even when there is no real issue.

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