When Customer Service Goes Horribly Wrong

By now, most of you already know that I’ve spent a fair amount of time in customer service roles over the years, and I continue to think of these jobs as the worst-conceived parts of corporate life. In most cases, the only contact a customer will have with a company is with that front-line customer service representative (CSR), and will quite reasonably judge the entire company by their interactions with the CSR, since they have nothing else to go on. Unfortunately, that CSR is probably making minimum wage, or possibly a little more with bonuses for processing as many calls as possible each day, and is almost certainly being housed in a cube farm, denied anything resembling benefits or perks, and worked to the point of nervous exhaustion. In other words, most companies are placing the most critical relationships they have on the weakest link of their company, and still they can’t understand why they’re losing customers to the one firm in their field that’s actually paying for a better class of CSR. Although the story this week about someone actually trashing a customer’s front yard is still something special…

You can click on the link here for the local news account, but basically the woman who runs a dog-waste removal service lost her temper with a customer who had failed to pay her bill for a few months running. So she went over to her customer’s house and gave back four months worth of dog waste – all over the front lawn. The police were called when neighbors realized what was happening, and the irate service provider was taken away, clearly embarrassed at losing her cool in this fashion. Although the dog-waste removal person was quoted at the scene as saying that it felt really good to be tossing the stuff all over the place…

Now, I don’t want to be too critical of anyone associated with the story. The non-paying customer claims to have been preoccupied with medical issues for the last few months, which I can verify WILL make you forget basic things like whether the dog-poop-removed bill has been paid regularly. And it’s hard to blame someone who does a service as inherently unpleasant as cleaning dog waste out of people’s yards for getting a little irate with someone who does not pay their bill, ducks telephone calls, ignores reminder and overdue notices, and so on. The fact is, most people who have ever worked front-line customer service can tell you about at least one customer who they would really have liked to go and bury in dog waste, even if they didn’t actually work for a dog waste removal company at the time. But that really doesn’t change the fact that this is still about the worst example of customer service I’ve ever seen…

Why does he tell us this? I hear some of you asking. It’s not like any of you are in this business, or that you’d ever wig out and do something like this if you were. All of which is true, but recall what I said about how every CSR has wanted to do this at least once in their career. That means that your CSRs, if you have any working for you, have wanted to do this at least once in their careers. One of them might be considering doing so right now…

I’m not saying that we should all take better care of our customer service personnel; I’m not saying that better pay, job enrichment, or rotation through different departments and stations are actually critical, or that you should drop what you’re doing and look into such things. I’m just saying you should consider doing so at some future point, before one of your customers winds up with a yard full of dog waste, and your company is the one on the evening news…