Wednesday, October 26, 2005

I give up.

I don't think I will ever understand customers. Last week I had to assist a very irate customer who had a debit on her Oystercard. As the fault of the debit laid with both the customer for not getting an extension on her Oystercard and still touching in & out with it, and Wimbledon station for not doing so either; I wasn't able to speak to Wimbledon station staff as it is run by national rail.
I was then asked to come to the ticket office as the customer was refusing to leave the window thereby causing a long queue and inconveniencing other customers. I had to keep her waiting about 10 minutes as I was already dealing with another customer.
Rather than asking her to pay back the debit owed and apply for a refund, I instructed the ticket office staff to cancel the last pre-pay which would then bring her pre-pay balance back to zero and then her travelcard would work again. The ticket office could have just done from the beginning and saved everybody the hassle, but her attitude wasn't condusive. Eventually she went off and we even shared a joke about it as she left. This morning I get called to see the DSM.
I was extremely annoyed and angry to get called to the managers office because this person wrote a letter of complaint about me, said I was very unhelpful, rude and I needed retraining.

In my nine years since joining LUL I have never had a complaint, rather I have had numerous letters of thanks from customers. (well a few)

I think next time I'll just give then the generic card with the customer services details on it and leave them to it.

1 comment:

DistrictDriver said...

Sorry to hear about that. It doesn't matter how nice you are to the customers or how hard you try to answer their questions etc, you're always wrong.
I know it's quite hard for someone who likes to try and help people (I'm the same) and there's only so much you can do, but don't let it affect your otherwise good customer service. This one particular customer was obviously just wound up after a bad day and decided that YOU were personally responsible for it. Don't take it to heart.

Hopefully your manager will realise your normal high standard of customer service over the years and will treat the complaint with the contempt it deserves.