Customer service secrets!

I gave y'all some helpful hints in a previous post about how we, as consumers, can take a stand and demand what's ours. Now I'm going to show all you customer service folks out there how you can take control of most situations, and have fun doing it! I'm an office manager now, but I've held many service level jobs over the course of my career.

I'll start out in the world of call centers. There's few things more awful than having to answer phones in a customer service department. You never know if your next call will be a simple transfer, or twenty minutes of ranting from some raging whore, who is complaining because she's had to call back 15 times to get one simple thing done. And nearly every caller is aggravated because they've been sent through a labyrinth-style phone menu, followed by torturous musical hold.

First of all, you need to figure out what your needs are. In most cases it's call volume, and call times. So it's always in your best interest to keep calls as short as possible. Answer the phone by racing through the greeting, especially the part where you say your name. If they get mad later on in the call and say, "What's your name?!" you can simply reply, "Oh, you didn't catch that, did you bitch?" and hang up right in their face.

If a caller's problem sounds too complicated, offer to transfer them to the "appropriate department". Then just transfer them back to your own department (if the odds are good that you won't get them again), or to any random number that suits your fancy. I used to like to send people to billing, after yelling, "Sir, you need to pay your bill!", even if their account was current. By the time they made their way back to our group I'd have clocked out for lunch!

Now lets turn it over to you sad bastards working in face-to-face customer service. You have definitely got it the worst. You've gotta take it from their ugly faces without showing even a hint of attitude. Smile, kill them with kindness to the point that they feel guilty and end up apologizing. Then, when they're gone, copy down their credit card info and send it in reply to every foreign Email scheme that comes into your spam folder.

I used to work at the bill pay and equipment counter for a cable TV company. Folks would come in there causing a ruckus for one reason or another. The really nasty ones would return their equipment in a huff, yell out their account info, and walk out without a receipt. To reward their rudeness, I'd fail to enter the return in the system, and scratch the serial number off their equipment. I hope they enjoyed the $500 equipment fee on their last bill!

I'd speak to the world of food service, but you folks already know what to do. The important thing is that the customer never find out what disgusting things you did to their food. And when you circle the total for a large party's bill, make sure your pen goes through the included tip amount, so they don't realize that it was included, and end up tipping you on the total amount! Even if you don't have time to exact revenge on a specific client, you always have the satisfaction of knowing that the ice y'all put in every customer's drink is probably teeming with parasites!