Customer Service 3 - Doing Your Job

In my series of customer service observation/complaints, this is the third post. The other two can be found here and here. This post revolves around customer service staff not doing their job, not even the required parts, let alone anything outside of their job.

Recently I had been to many travel agents looking for tickets for my end of year trip. Most places were very good and helpful and gave me a lot of options. However, at Extra Green in Box Hill, one staff member was extremely arrogant and thought he knew best about everything. When my friend and I asked him to look up particular tickets, he would say "I know there will be no tickets so there's no point me looking it up." When we insisted that he look them up anyway, he would still dismiss us and say "I'll just give you the price for the standard ticket and if you really want to buy, then I'll look up the actual prices". What kind of attitude is that. How I can make up my mind if I don't even know whether that ticket will be available should I choose it. Anyway, after a while of us asking him to look things up and him not really bothering, we got quite frustrated and left.

Days later, I went to World Vision Travel in Springvale and asked for the same tickets. Lo and behold, the lady did a lot of searching for me and came up with tickets for flights that the other guy had said were all sold out, and at $200 cheaper as well. That bloody guy, if he had bothered to get off his fat ass and do something, he could have easily found those tickets as well. I guess my business wasn't too important to him as Extra Green is extremely popular. However, at World Vision which is a small company, every deal counts so they were very helpful. The travel agent even helped me look up other cheaper options without being asked.

So my point of this post is that the customer sometimes does know best, or at least know what they want. As a customer service staff, you should try to do to the best of your ability what the customer has requested. You may dislike your job, but it is your job after all and you should do it to a satisfactory level at least. Arrogance as a customer service staff is definitely a bad trait that won't give you many happy customers.