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Effectively Handling Customer Complaints
As someone who works in a customer service job, I get to see my fair share of customer complaints. Nearly on a daily basis, some or the other customer enters our store to complain about the product or the service or both. While it would not be right to say that all customer complaints are irritating, there are those customers, who especially aggravate me with their right to customer complaints. Allow me to explain.
There was this one guy who ‘mistakenly’ bought a pair of shoes with two left feet. I kid you not. In fact, the shoes department is the one with a fairly high number of customer complaints. Well, this gentleman bought the shoes alright, but if he were like you or me, he would have realized that there was something wrong the first time he tried them on. But that never happened in his case. He managed to wear these shoes for an almost continuous period of three months before a colleague pointed out that there was something wrong. Which is when he came back to the store to lodge a customer complaint about the service he was offered.
Normally, if he had brought the shoes back in a near new condition, we would have handed him a refund and considered the case closed. But in this particular case, the shoes were not just worn out. They were almost 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 in any case, she he had almost destroyed the shoes, we ourselves had no use for them. While his loss was just one pair, we had in effect lost two pairs of good shoes. Unless of course there was another customer who could ‘mistakenly’ purchase two right shoes!
And then there was the customer complaint regarding the lady who bought an artificial mink coat and came back to the store nearly six months later to lodge a customer complaint. Her issue? Was that she had been deceived into buying an artificial mink coat and wanted her money back. Needless to mention, the offending mink coat ha been well used and was actually the worse for wear. But file a customer complaint she would.
These are the customer complaint cases that I find extremely taxing. Helping out someone when we have made a mistake or even helping someone 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 am all for encouraging customer complaints as a ration course of action, I find myself increasingly reluctant to help out such people.
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