As mentioned on the “About” page, I work at Ritz Camera.  Before that, I worked at Blockbuster Video and briefly at Cold Stone Creamery.  The point is that I’ve had quite a bit of experience with retail, and in turn, with customer service.  I’ve dealt with a lot of customers over time, and find that at least a portion of them manage to be irritating in some form or another.  What better place to vent about those irritations than my blog, right?  Obviously there’s numerous things that customers can do, or act like, that can be unpleasant.  I’m not going to try and list all of them here, at least not at once.  But I figure it could be fun to mention them one at a time.  I’m going to start with the one that I often tell my coworkers is my biggest “customer pet peeve”.

While I see this trait more often in non-native English speakers, it is not relegated to them.  The problem also occurs more often over the phone, but once again, this is not the only time I see it.  The thing that some customers do that bothers me the most, is when they repeat questions over and over.  One repitition is fine, two is acceptable, but once they go past that in repeating a question over and over I really lose patience.  And here’s the thing: I understand repeating a question when you don’t understand the answer or you didn’t hear.  These people are almost never under these circumstances, or at least the one’s that really bother me are not.  The reason it frustrates me so much is that they do understand what I’m saying, they just want the answer to be different the second or third time around.

A conversation might go something like this.  The customer asks, “Do you have the Neekon [misspelled to match their mispronunciation] S60?”

I’ll respond.  “No, we don’t have the Nikon S60 in stock at the moment, but I can order it for you if you like.”

They pause for a long time and then mumble, “Oh…… So……. You don’t have it then?”

“No,” I’d say, slightly annoyed.  “We don’t have it in the store.”

Now in most logical conversations this would be the end of things, but many of these customers have found a way to keep it going, by coming up with some other question, like, “On your website it says it costs, $299.”

I’ll respond, “That’s right it does.  But I don’t have it”

“You don’t have it.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“So you don’t have the Nikon S60?”

“We do not have the Nikon S60 in the store.”

And the conversation goes on like this.  My coworkers can usually tell when I’m stuck in one of these conversations even if they don’t listen to the words, because my tone of voice will change with the frustration.  They’ll smile and laugh, only to have it come around to them when they get the next call like this.

What’s worse is that some of these customers have made an art of looping the conversation around several times.  Coming up with two questions and just alternating them, hoping I guess that I will forget my answer to one or the other and change it to the one they want to hear.  I’ll exhaust myself of whatever information I have on the subject their interested, and they’ll still manage to keep me on the phone, despite the fact that we really only want to deal with customers that in depth in store.  Bottom line is our object when we’re on the phone is to meet the needs of the caller as quickly as possible, so that we can help the people who actually took the time to come to our store.  These people make accomplishing that not only difficult, but about as boring as it possibly could be.