Spread a Little Joy
Good customer service can lift a business up or sink it, and it can turn someone's whole day around either way. I've admitted before that I lean toward grumpy. One of the lines I repeat to myself is that my patience gets tried.
The trouble is I don't always catch it happening until I've already gone off and embarrassed myself. There was the time I shook my fist on the third trip through the pharmacy drive-through, trying to get a prescription filled after surgery (I wrote about that one last week). And the time a four-letter word slipped out of me right in front of the grandchildren. When you've hit your limit, reining yourself in is no small thing.
So today I gave myself an assignment: call the customer service lines of three different businesses. Going in, I felt a lot like the traveling salesman in my favorite joke, the one knocking on a grouchy farmer's door hoping to borrow a jack, who has run the whole conversation in his head so many times that when the farmer finally opens up, the salesman snaps, 'You can keep your God damn jack!' I was primed to blow up. I'd rehearsed several versions of each call before dialing.
Getting through took a couple of frustrating tries. But once I reached a real person at each place, every conversation was pleasant and every problem got sorted out to my satisfaction. I felt good enough afterward that I sat down to write this. My gut said these calls would go badly, yet I kept that assumption out of how I opened each one. The friendlier I was, the friendlier they got in return. So spread a little joy this season, or whenever. A 'please' and a 'thank you' cost nothing, and there's no reason to be rude if you can avoid it.
A week back at that pharmacy drive-through I was in an ugly mood. When I later tried to work the same issue out by phone with a few different pharmacies, I softened my voice and set the anger down. Some things just aren't fair. That doesn't mean you have to let them wreck your day and someone else's too, especially when the whole mess may not have been their doing to begin with. A few of these customer service departments are so pleasant that I half think I could call them just to cheer myself up on a bad day.
Which brings me to the last thing. When I recommend a business, local, online, or national, it usually comes down to how they treated me when I got in touch. My hope is that those same businesses would turn around and recommend me as a customer, based on how I treated them.