Irritated
customers are a fact of life when you work in retail, or any customer service
environment. While we don’t have customers per se, (in the Library we call them
patrons, as to reflect their status as supporting the library by using it) I
still have to deal with many disgruntled people in my work. One of the many
reasons for this is that people tend to get upset when they feel like they're
getting the run around, or when they feel a policy is unfair.
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| It sort of goes like this sometimes. |
In
this case it was a professor who was expecting a book in from another library.
Now these books are processed by other library staff and placed on a hold
shelf, so as front desk staff we hope that they are there when patrons are
notified that they are. Another issue is that sometimes patrons have first and
last names that could pass as either, and it isn't always clear on the
paperwork which is which, causing them to be misfiled on the shelf.
In
this unfortunate situation, a student assistant had helped the professor during
the initial encounter, at which point the book could not be found in the normal
spot. Equally unfortunately that student was trying to get to our ID facility
to open it for the evening, so they didn't look as hard as they could. When the
professor came back waiving a printout of the email saying the book was in
fact, ready for pickup, I was the one who handled the rest.
I
discovered that the book had been mis-shelved under the first name instead of
the last and retrieved it for the professor. Outraged over the inconvenience,
he demanded to see the student who had helped him originally to reprimand him
for his failure of service. I assured him that as the Evening Manager I would
certainly explain the shortfall in our standards to the student assistant and
make sure it never happened again. This did not placate the professor, who
demanded to see the student assistant at all cost, which I was never going to
let happen.
At
this stage I would like to point out how ridiculous this situation was. With
the possible exception of fast food, there is no service industry in which you
would be the one pointing out to the service provider that they did something
wrong. You might rage at a customer-service representative at the bank for something
the bank did, but I would hope you would never expect to discipline a
representative yourself if you discovered a mistake. If someone makes a mistake
you speak to the supervisor or manager and let them deal with it, it is in my
opinion completely unprofessional to expect to be able to provide your input on
disciplining a service provider. You can always tell them off, but you should
never expect to tell them how to do their job properly. Again I would hope.
The
situation wasn’t made any easier by the fact that the professor had a yesman
(yes-student?) who was helpfully adding comments like: ‘don’t make this any
harder than it is man’ and ‘just go get the guy.’ Eventually the
professor was placated by being offered to escalate the complaint ever further
to the Manager of the Circulation Department, (i.e. my boss) and went on his
way.
Situations
like this are very infrequent. It basically represents
the mother of all complaints, someone who feels that today is the day to get
martyred on the platform of ‘unfair library policies’ and bluster against my
ability to say “I’m sorry we can’t do that for you sir This isn’t to say that
we don’t deal with irritated patrons every day, it’s just most of the time it’s
just minor things like fine payments.
At
the library, the most common incident is with fines. Despite the fact that we are loaning
material out free of charge, we have to use some sort of stick to enforce
library policy regarding returns. As a coworker once said regarding reserve books and our ability to
prevent people from hoarding material close to exam time:
“We
do not have curved helmets and batons; we cannot break down people’s doors, go
into their houses and get the books back.”
Instead
as a library we rely on fines, the age old stick of institutions. The fines at
the library are pretty reasonable, on books there is a grace period of one
week. So if you’re less than one week late, you don’t get fined, the catch is
that if you’re eight days late you
get all the fines slapped on at once. So rather than getting fined 25 cents a
day for 7 days, on the eighth day you get fined two dollars and it increases by
25 cents a day afterwards.
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| In this case, we'd just shrug and tell you not to worry about it. |
A
subset of fines for laptops, reserve materials and recalls don’t have this
luxury and start fining right away. Particularly with laptops, people tend to
get upset about incurred fines. This is primarily because every time someone
signs out a laptop, they also have to sign off on a septillion point contract.
In a perfect world, the first time they sign out a laptop, they have the contract read in full to them. Every
subsequent time we give them a Coles notes version of what their signing.
Unfortunately, patrons get wise to the fact that if they say no to ‘Have you
ever signed out a laptop before’ they have to stand and listen to me yammer
about their responsibilities in signing out a laptop for five minutes and have
learned to just say they have. Subsequently when they get fined they claim
ignorance, which shouldn’t be an excuse in this day and age of data compression
but apparently still totally is in real life.
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| Especially in politics! |
What
is so difficult about dealing with complaints is that you never really know
what coming
in. In his dissertation,
Bard Tronvoll determines that only about half of complaints are generated from
a bad customer service experience. Other complaints are generated by a series
of ‘inconsequential’ experiences that have combined into a critical mass, or
they evaluate their experience to be below their standard. So you never know if
this one complaint about fines is going to be the straw that broke the camel’s
back, or if the patron is going to come back because your
explanation was below the expectation they were willing to tolerate (in terms
of the Cranky Professor). (Tronvoll, 2008, p. 66)
So
essentially service providers are not just battling instances of bad customer
service, but are also challenged by perceived levels of customer service.
However this perception goes both ways. If you want to set yourself up as a bad
customer by complaining all the time, it’s possible that you will reduce the
options the service providers want to use to assist you to the bare minimum
required by their obligations. This
boils down to be respectful to their service provider, especially when they are
students with lots on their plates.
It’s
not just teens and students that need respect when working, everyone who
represents an organization in a front end role deserves to be treated with
dignity and respect. Most of the time they can’t do very much to rectify any
customer service complaint and generally they won’t get flustered. If anything
it will just summon the supervisor or manager who is even better versed in the
art of sticking to whatever the organizations policy is. If you feel you have
grounds to complain, by all means do so, this isn’t a call to eliminate service
satisfaction, just go through the proper channels rather than raging your face
off at the nearest representative.
Paper
Referenced: Tronvoll B. (2008). Consumer Complaint Behaviour in Service. Karlstad University Studies. Retrieved
from www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:5576/FULLTEXT01
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