The Customer Is Always A Right Arsehole
Ok as you may or may not know I work in retail and after reading this article, (and also experiencing this a few times lately) I decided to write my opinion on the stupidity of the “customer is always right” policy.
My first reaction was sadness that it isn’t just Britain that suffered from unreasonable customers. Its correct that this is the mentality that has caused a generation of impoliteness and bad attitudes.
For example in my company we accepted back many networking products because our customers don’t seem to have the patience or sensibility to set them up, but the big issue I have with working in retail is that far too many managers has accepted the mentality of “If the customer shouts too much, we’ll bow to their demands” and i’ve seen it far too often. So lets recap, many times my fellow employees and I are told that we don’t offer refunds for non-faulty products to the point that I have spent 20 minutes telling the customer that there’s nothing we can do for the customer to simply say “I want to see the manager”, we go to get a manager and they responed with either “I’m not gonna see them, just do it to keep them happy” or they come down, talk to the customer and say “yeah no problem we’ll do it”.
This results in many of the employees having no respect for the managers for telling them to do one thing but when things get a little more harsh they flip 180 on you, making the employee lose respect from the customer and even worse…. self respect. I don’t know if anyone has experienced this, but on top of this at a later date management will give you hassle because your amount of returns are higher than normal.
It just annoys me on a personal level when someone like myself who is part time working to pay for higher education (in turn leading to a career later in life) and has no real responsibilities towards to company will try to protect the company’s interests, but the administration of the company doesn’t even bother to “back up its soldiers”.
I’ve experienced the same thing, it sucks loads. Makes you feel like a bit of an idiot - especially when you’ve been insisting on a particular stance and holding your ground for good reason.
On the subject of networking returns, I think that although a lot of them are due to problems setting up the routers, a relatively large chunk is because ADSL customers see the cheaper cable router prices and immediately go for that.
I agree in terms of networking products but because we dont have the facilities to test the products we have to take the word of the customer and thats probably whats costing the company the most n terms of networking
I agree 100% I do front desk tech support for my cable company, and I have to say fuck all the customers, I usually toy with them and luckily for me my own boss likes to fuck with the rude obnoxious piece of shits. overall fuck all of them, my company doesn’t pay me enough to give a shit.