The Buck Stops Where?

I’m going to let you in on perhaps the biggest tidbit of insider information you can ever know. Realizing this one fact, believe it or not, can save you countless otherwise fruitless hours of frustration and anger. However, I’m telling you now, you’re not going to like it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ready?

The customer is almost always wrong.

Since you’ve been hearing the exact opposite all of your consuming life, let me give you some credentials, if you will.

When I was 18 I worked for ConsumerInfo.com, otherwise known as FreeCreditReport.com. For all of you who just scoffed and said, “Free credit report my ass!” you would be one of the legion of the wrong. For those who haven’t had the pleasure let me explain. You can get a truly, 100% free credit report from FreeCreditReport.com. The vast majority of the calls I received in the 2 years I worked as a customer support e-mail and phone representative focused on one thing.

“You bastards said it was free, and you charged me!” Bait and switch was thrown around a lot. So was the word scam.

For the moment, I digress. Let me tell you where I wandered after I left ConsumerInfo.com. I spent the next year doing customer support for an alarm company that I won’t name, and I’m fairly certain you haven’t heard of them anyway. They were relatively small time players, and I believe they’ve since thrown in the towel.

From there I spent 6 months each doing customer support for AT&T/Cingular/AT&T, and a fancy bath fixtures company. I’ve been at my current company for about two and a half years now and while I’m FINALLY done with customer support (sorry, can’t say that I miss it), I did answer phones and e-mails for Realtors whose websites my company hosts.

I’m like McDonalds over here, 15 billion customers served. One wicked case of headset hair later, the universal truth is that the customer is almost always wrong! The problem lies in the fact that they’ve been told over and over again that just by the virtue of being customers, they must be right.

In the ever wise words of Jedi Master Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” The reasoning here is simple. You can’t be open to a solution or explanation your hapless customer support rep is going to give you if you go in with the preconceived notion about whatever you think the problem is.

Remember the supposedly free credit report and the extremely peeved customers who were scammed? They were all wrong. There was no scam. Essentially, every single one of them had read the words “Free credit report!” and then had conveniently forgotten how to read. The rest of the website, save the one sentence, was entirely about the service ConsumerInfo.com provides: the credit monitoring system. You got a free credit report and 30 days, cancel anytime. It was all there in plain English on the homepage as well as on the sign up form, ABOVE WHERE THEY REQUEST YOUR CREDIT CARD INFO. I don’t mean to yell, but honestly, even if you missed the whole homepage, one would think that as you’re happily typing in your credit card number, you might be concerned as to why.

I tried to explain countless times, after I’d processed a full refund (no questions asked), but time after time my customers worked themselves into a tizzy of curses and ranting. That can’t be healthy. I guarantee you they hung up the phone with a foul taste in their mouths, convinced and traumatized that they’d been taken when in actuality they’d made a mistake in not reading what they were signing up for and I’d issued a refund within the first 5 minutes of what turned into a 20 minute call.

How about the 4-5 Cingular customers I’d get every day who called to dispute the random charges on their teenager’s cell phone. “My teen would never run up text messages like this!”

Um, yea. They would.

“No, I already asked her, and she swore that she didn’t do it.”

She lied.

When I spy a random charge on my bank account or my credit card, my first thought is not “What’d they do!?” it’s, “What’d I do?” All being a constant victim is going to get you is frustration, anger and more time, which my customers always screamed was so valuable, out of your life. These companies aren’t out to scam you, or make your life miserable. Not to be cliche, but help them help you. I can’t help a person who’s telling me what the problem is and what the solution should be when reality dictates something completely different.

Swallow your pride, and at the very least admit that it’s entirely within the realm of believability that you made a mistake. The buck stops with you.