Thank you! No, we definitely don’t mind you writing about our blog – we appreciate it! I’ve added your blog to our Blogroll list. We’re pretty new at blogging, so it’s nice to see that people are reading us. Good luck with yours – I’m enjoying it already.

And given that, I’d say it’s in the company/employee’s best interest to, politely, inform said person that they are no longer your customer.

There’s a really gray line between, “making the customer happy” and “we can’t afford to make our customers angry.” For example, I’m planning a Walt Disney World vacation and it’s common knowledge that there are discounts available for the Disney Resorts that aren’t made available unless you ask for them. That’s ‘paying the problem away’. That’s the same as Starbucks offering a Small size if you ask for it but not writing it on the board. It makes the customer happy if they ask, but it doesn’t really benefit the customer who doesn’t ask for it. It doesn’t necessarily hurt the non-asking customer either.

I’ve never worked in retail sales, but my roommate does and my mother is a retail pharmacist. Both of them face an endless stream of irate customers, people who aren’t just mad but who seem to be using their anger as a tool to get what they want out of a transaction. [Here at Ilium, very luckily, we seem to get a low number of angry people who stay angry.]

I’ve read ‘tips for dealing with customer service’ on the internet, that boil down to, “threaten the rep with your lack of purchase.” “Oh, you won’t do what I want? I’m going somewhere else.” “Company X does Y, why don’t you do Y too?” The worst is probably, “if you don’t do what I say, I’ll make my credit card company charge back my purchase.” Chargebacks cost the seller money, and often the problem can be fixed with a simple refund. The chargeback is used as leverage.

This creates a really bad precedent. My roommate has endless stories of people who come in to OfficeMAX and end up talking to the supervisor, or submitting a ‘report’ to corporate HQ about something that happened. The customer is usually not right 99.99999999% of the time when it comes to company policies like refunds, rain checks, sales combinations (discount + employee discount + multiple coupons) but no sales or service rep is allowed to say, “Sir, you are a big walking piece of BS, and it would be beneficial to both of us if you simply changed your standards or left.” The precedent is, “you can say whatever you want to me, and at the least I won’t yell back or tell you off, and at the most I’ll do what you want.”

Customers are where your money comes from as a company, but should sales reps allow customers to walk all over them just to avoid the publicity of, “I was at [store] and the sales person told me to come back after calming down! They’re terrible! Never go there!”

I wonder if paying a customer’s problem away will really stifle a bad report. Some people are intentionally angry and are never satisfied.