Sometimes I can’t believe the non-customer service we are told to provide the customers of the company I work for. I know I complain a lot about my work, what can I say? It’s a popular topic considering it is about 1/3 of my life, and 1/3 of my life I am not conscious, it’s a major part of my every day.
Anyways, this situation is partly the customer and partly us.
Buddy calls, irritated as shit, and wanting to talk to my supervisor. And she obviously knows why he’s calling and wants me to avoid passing the call to her. So his question/rant is where is the truck with his order. So I told him I’d find out and call him back. I find out his delivery should be dropped around 3:30pm that particular day. That’s apperently not good enough. He starts getting really agitated in general (but towards me since I’m the one on the phone) about how he was told his order would be packed up at 12:30 and arrive an hour after, which he thought meant 1:30 pm. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that they start packing at 12:30 doesn’t mean they finish immediately.
But from his standpoint I see his reasons for anger. He’s had his people sitting there waiting to unload this truck for the past two hours. They’re getting paid, probably a lot for what they do, and they’re not doing it. And he starts going on about how the other companies all come in the morning like they promise, where we don’t.
Well, we have the monopoly on the product we sell, problem being, we can be jerks and no one can do anything about it. We’re the only game in town.
But yea. Some companies have “cut-off times” when they can continually add to their orders until said time and then they can’t for the day. Most people the cut-off time is 12 noon, for their orders to be delivered before 11am the next morning. At noon, the orders are processed and the back starts picking them.
This company’s cut-off time is 3pm. Why I don’t know. But that means he can continually change his order until 3pm. Meaning it won’t get packed up until the morning. Meaning there’s no real way it can get to his location in the morning if the trucks are on their second run at that point. But this guy just didn’t see it that way.
But his totally valid complaint, came from when he needs something picked up. It shouldn’t take 3 or 4 hours for every single order. Some I can see, if it’s lots of weird random stuff in small quantities, but to tell someone it takes 4 hours to pick one box, is just stupidity. And sometimes we have these drivers here waiting for over an hour while we deal with their paperwork. And that’s just … wasting their time and money.
And… I couldn’t help but feel for this guy. He was obviously irritated. He ended up getting to talk to my supervisor, who is normally a calm person and got her shouting back at him, probably because he was making her go deaf (I was holding the phone pretty far from my ear and could hear quite clearly)
I dislike companies that have monopolies over a product/service. They always take advantage.
