Being a Jerk Doesn’t Help

Once again, I’d like to point you towards the Consumerist, namely this article about an obnoxious complaint e-mail and an atrocious reply by the company. What floors me is not the complaint or the response, but the attitude of the commenters who are actually applauding the VP who responded.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked in customers services (many years at McD’s, in fact) and I’ve had my fair share of verbal abuse by insane customers. But if I had been a total ass to the customers like the VP, I wouldn’t be proud of myself, I would be totally and completely embarrassed that I had stooped to that level. And, frankly, this woman’s complaint letter really wasn’t that rude and her some of her complaints were legitimate.

For some reason our society is leaning towards accepting being a rude jerk as acceptable behavior. Instead of putting on our big girl panties and dealing with other people like adults, we’re losing the ability to calmly deal with things. Being ‘edgy’ is not cool, it’s obnoxious and there’s a difference between standing up for yourself or having a strong opinion and being a total asshat. You want to rant on your blog, that’s great, but when it’s time to talk to people you need to be able to rational, clear and calm.

Anyway, Sarah’s complaint letter is a good example of how NOT to complain to the management, which is why I brought this up in the first place.

• Proper grammar and spelling. In this case, Sarah’s complaint would be easier to read by the introduction of paragraphs.
• Be concise. Sarah rambles on a bit and most of it is fairly sarcastic and/or just plain obnoxious. If she cut most of that out, her e-mail wouldn’t have been so inflammatory.
• Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it a bad thing. Sarah has a legitimate complaint in the interruption of the movie for theater hoppers and obviously deserves a refund. Having an empty ATM when the theater only takes cash is also poor service. Whining about the policy to only take cash, not so much.
• State what you want and be reasonable. All Sarah does is whine and offer an impossible resolution. Most of the time, e-mails like this will just be ignored if management.
• Don’t say you’re ‘never coming here again’ or any variant. Most of the time customers who say that are lying, so companies ignore that line and if the company thinks you truly aren’t coming back, they won’t bother with a resolution. If you truly aren’t coming back, feel free to say it if it makes you feel better, but understand that it’s not going to help anything.

While it’s true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, any obnoxious squawking will probably just result in you being ignored. Make your complaints polite, concise and reasonable and you’re very likely to get an acceptable resolution.

Does anyone have any truly atrocious management response stories?

Mr. and I do our best not to have hissy fits, so we usually have fairly good resolutions to problems. We may rant and whine when complaining amongst ourselves, but when it comes time to deal with employees we don’t take it out on them. Our one big complaint is about the management of our local Lowes who didn’t seem to care that they screwed up our custom order 4 times. In that case it was more of a non-response issue than a rude response issue.

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