Do you work in customer service?

Have you worked with customers that just don’t seem to understand the nature of your job? Or simply don’t care?

Would you like to vent about it with me?

Tell me about your terrible/funny/scary experiences working in retail.

I work in a retail pharmacy as a pharmacy tech trainee. I’m basically a glorified cashier selling a specific product. I feel like it’s about 90% trying to please demanding customers and maybe 10% all of my other duties. It’s mentally and emotionally taxing for me. At the end of the day, the last thing I want to do after several hours on my feet catering to unhappy patients is to interact with another human being.

To make matters worse, our pharmacy is cursed with a PDX system which is about 15 years old. We’re long due for an update, and we were promised one back in January. But it hasn’t happened yet. There’s nothing any one of us can do about it but wait and make do with what we have.

I think that the duties that this particular job entails are a little obscure to many who are not familiar with doing the job themselves. This makes it difficult for patients to understand that everything we do takes time. They don’t realize that billing their insurance takes some time. And if you have several insurances and want the tech to find the best deal, it takes a lot of time: they have to enter all of their insurance info from all of their prescription insurance cards, bill the first insurance to see what their price is, credit return it, bill the second insurance to find what their price is, credit return it, and so on. The same goes for coupons. Our computer systems are not like registers where a cashier simply must scan an item or coupon and void it if the price isn’t right.

If their insurance arbitrarily decides not to pay for their medication and requests a prior authorization from their doctor, then it can take several days.

If the prescription is written particularly poorly or if there is some vital information missing, it takes time to contact their doctor and request that information.

If there is another third-party payer they use in addition to their primary, it’s not always obvious to the tech that this is the case unless 1) they’ve taken the time to look at their transaction history and look and the transmit claims in the past (which takes time!!) or 2) the tech or pharmacist happens to be on a personal basis with this particular patient and knows what to do already (which is rare).

If you want your prescription in 5 minutes or less, guess what. So do the 100 patients before you. Get in line.

Speaking of lines, don’t think for one second that drive-through pharmacies are a way to avoid them. Drive-through pharmacies were created as a convenience for people with certain disabilities. They were not created for people who want their prescriptions 5 minutes after dropping them off.

The entitlement that drive-through places give people is absurd. I once had a young woman who drove up to the drive-through window requesting to apply a coupon she had to a medication we had filled for her (ideally she should’ve given this coupon along with the prescription when she dropped it off, but whatever, mistakes happen). She passed the coupon to me through the window, and I told her it will take a few minutes to reprocess her prescription to include the coupon. So would she please come back around in a few minutes so we can serve the other people behind her, while we do that?

She refused to move. She said she had been waiting in line for “far too long” already and she wanted her prescriptions now. The coupon she had wouldn’t work because it was one of those one-time deals that she had already used on a prior prescription. It took twenty minutes to explain that to her. She finally said “I’ll just go to another pharmacy” and we all breathed a sigh of relief. She won’t be our problem anymore. But then we had to deal with the patients who were behind her who were unbelievably pissed off. And it was just angry customer after angry customer for the rest of the evening.

So what are your experiences working in customer service?