Business Management Skills

As a person who works in a customer service job, I get to see my fair share of customer complaints. Individuals are trying to get rid of credit card debt and it makes them testy. Near on a daily basis, some or the other customer enters our store to complain in connection with the product or the service or both. It does not fit their niche. While it might not be right to say that all customer complaints are irksome, there are those customers, who remarkably aggravate me with their right to customer complaints. Allow me to explain.

There was this one guy who ‘mistakenly’ purchased a pair of shoes with two left feet. When I worked for a roofing tracy company, this not ever happened of course, because of the fact that the purchases were so big. I kid you not. In fact, the shoes department is the one with a quite high number of customer complaints. Well, this gentleman purchased the shoes alright, but if he were like you or me, he might have realized that there was something wrong the first existence he tried them on. But that not ever happened in his case. He managed to wear these shoes for an all but continuous period of 3 months before a colleague pointed out that there was something wrong. That is when he came back to the store to lodge a customer complaint in connection with the service he was offered.

In the main, if he had brought the shoes back in a all but fresh condition, we might have handed him a refund and considered the case closed. But in this specific case, the shoes were not just worn out. They were all but in tatters. And all the while he insisted on his right to file a customer complaint and seek a refund. I tried explaining to him politely that although he had purchased and taken home two left shoes, he should have brought the matter to our notice through customer complaints well in advance. And nevertheless, she he had all but destroyed the shoes, we ourselves had no employ for them. While his loss was just one pair, we had in effect lost two pairs of solid shoes. Unless of course there was another customer who might ‘mistakenly’ purchase two right shoes!

And then there was the customer complaint in connection with the woman who purchased an artificial mink coat and came back to the store all but six months later to lodge a customer complaint. Her area? Was that she had been deceived into buying an artificial mink coat and wanted her cash back. Needless to mention, the offending mink coat had been well used and was actually the worse for wear. But file a customer complaint she might.

These are the customer complaint cases that I locate infinitely taxing. Helping out a person when we have made a mistake or even assisting a person who unintentionally made a shopping mistake is all fine. In fact, the gratitude for such customers is well worth the initial aggression they show. But customers who intend to take stores for a ride and then demand on the right to file customer complaints to cover their own failings are the ones who get my goat. While I’m all for encouraging customer complaints as a ration course of action, I locate myself increasingly reluctant to aid out such people.