[Eclecticist]

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?

[LiteraryLark]

McDonald's. 'Nuff said.

[childofchaos831]

I worked at a retail pharmacy, front end, for a year and a half, several years ago. The store I was at was either #1 or #2 on the list of busiest in our area, at all times.

There was this one customer... first, she opened an orange soda before getting to the register, drank half of it, decided she didn't like it, and then didn't want to pay for it. I had never had that happen at this job, so I just told her I needed to ask a manager. She huffed, and waited, and to just make her be quiet he said to not charge her.

So then she asked for a carton of cigarettes. I didn't have a carton, but did have 10 packs, so I asked if she could wait while I had my manager look up the SKU, so I could get her the price of the carton. She completely went off on me. "Just ring up that carton!" "I can't, ma'am. The manager is looking for the number now." Inventory reason, but try to explain that to a customer.

So she stands there, for a full 10 minutes (the manager was having difficulty finding the SKU), and proceeded to call me stupid, ignorant, good for nothing, never amount to anything, etc. in front of other customers... management didn't do anything... got the SKU, rang her up. She left, and my manager took one look at me, and told me to take a 15, but if I needed longer take longer. I went outside, to the far end of the parking lot and cried and chain smoked for 20 or 25 minutes...

The part that upset me is that the management knew I am am on SSDI for mental illness, and accommodated as best they could most of the time... but he just let her stand there and berate me for something I didn't do and was out of my control in the first place, and then the names and put downs... she made me feel like a child being yelled at by my narcissistic mother and I couldn't even just walk away, because I was at work...

After that job, I didn't try to work again for 4 years.

[LookingforCalm]

I've worked in customer service for most of my adult life. I have a plethora of stories.

Nothing is worse than bad management, though. I'm in management myself and your manager should have spoken up.

Admittedly, I've made mistakes too in this capacity and have apologized to my employees for sometimes not speaking up when I should have.

I think the root of the problem is boundaries. And customers try to push that button to get what they want.

I had one customer try to talk to one of my younger female employees and compliment her on her tattoos she had on her arms. She's a bit introverted, and didn't know how to react so she didn't say anything.

He then started to complain about females, and how attention-seeking we were. "You get tattoos but you don't want anyone to talk about it. It's like women wearing low-cut shirts. I'm not supposed to look?"

My jaw dropped. When he was saying this I shrugged, and when I turned to her she was regressing with fear. Being an older women (I guess), he felt comfortable saying this to me, knowing she heard every word.

I still look back on that with regret. I should have stood up for her, but I went into shock and didn't respond. I apologized to her saying just that.
"I should have been your advocate," I said. "I'm so sorry for that".

From my perspective as a manager, I failed her and I owned it.

I hope things get better for you. People don't realize how hard it is to work for the general public.

[TishaBuv]

I had a couple of awful confrontations with customers trying to return non-returnable merchandise. It was always kind of funny though. It was a family-owned store, so we could throw people out, when we needed to. We had the police come a few times.

[BlueMerleGirl]

My only customer service experience is working at as a waitress at a full service restaurant my parents used to own. I once had a lady go nuts because I gave her a "cup" of soup which is what she ordered, but she thought it was a bowl. Our "cups" were just smaller bowls. I told her that it was a cup and she still went to talk to the manager, my dad.

Also I hated serving bus loads of people that would come in, no one seemed to understand that someone was going to be the last one to get their food. Rocket science I know.

[justxholdon]

Ha!

Yes, yes, yes.

I'd worked in retail for over ten years. I got up to assistant manager before I stepped back to pharmacy and became a Certified Senior Pharmacy Tech.

There are so many horrible stories that come with that job. People have absolutely no idea how their medicine comes to be ready, how many hoops we have to jump through with their doctors office, the law, the stores policies, insurance policies, and then to have people just scoff and tell you to "just slap a label on it". Like...

I'm now in hospital pharmacy and the grass is not greener. You've just replaced 'customers' with 'nurses' and go through the same dang thing day after day. At my hospital at least, most nurses consider you to be very far beneath them but most of your conversations go quite like "I never got my medicine." "It's in your fridge." "No. It's not." "I promise you, I put it there. On the bottom shelf." "Oh. You put it in the fridge?" "Yes." "Oh. I didn't look there." And you just get irate but you're not allowed to express it. It's no wonder people have such poor mental health when we're all told that the workplace is a place that we must be polite, be professional, and absolutely cannot defend ourselves, and that if a customer becomes verbally/emotionally/mentally abusive - you cannot do anything to stop that other than call a manager. And hope they come.

I had a repeat customer who was always a BIG problem and certain people in our store would bend to his demands. So he would demand more and when we didn't know his previous leniences, he'd get angry. I was still fairly new and we had a new pharmacist that was helping out and this customer had created quite a scene already. I was shaking, choking back tears, he's still screaming, my pharmacist was on the phone with a doctor we'd been trying to get ahold of for hours, my other coworker's dealing with drive and the growing line behind him - which several of those very same customers had tried to shame/yell back/get him to stop, management isn't responding to our pages for help so when he started slamming things around and throwing them at me, my pharmacist (who is one of the most laid back soft spoken people I've worked with) went 'gotta call you back' slams the phone down and gets between me and him, sends me to the back and yells back. He refuses to fill any of the customer's meds, ring him up for anything, and tells him he'd be quite happy to transfer any of his meds to any other pharmacy of his choosing, but he will not let his team be attacked like that.

Naturally, he got chastised because you can't yell at customers (or refuse service since service = money) but nobody chastised themselves for not showing up when we called. -_- It's a wonderful system.

On a completely different note, it's amazing how much common sense people don't have regardless of their jobs/ages/lifestyles. I worked in very rich areas and very poor areas and it was exactly the same across the spectrum.

I hear you. And I admire what you do. It's a shame you can only take so much before you have to leave regardless of how much you've put into it.

You (and your job are very important). It's a thing I wish I heard more.

[sito]

I worked in call centre as customer service representative a long time ago. I left it after 2yr. I couldn't handle it anymore

[ladytiger]

I work at tech job doing billing/sales now with doing tech support. omg, i get more bad attitude from customers than i do nice people. most things they ask goes to corp/app developers/engineers they don't answer to customer inquiries. i get asked dumb questions daily i work in a call center don't know what the corp office does in cali so i don't know.

every day, it's a very draining job both physically and mentally too much stress been there 8 months now. i had a customer who argued with me about something we do thats within our policy and hated the answer refused to speak to me wanted to speak with the manager and finally a sup came over told him the same thing i said. i smirked plus the guy was so disrespectful he hung up.

had another customer who felt he was entitled to a replacement before troubleshooting thats not how it works. after troubleshooting, i needed him to monitor his device for 48 hours he just argued with me to a T very bad and horrible call. i told him straight up do you want a workable device or not? by choosing not to do what i am asking you to do, you are also choosing to not want your device to work. i put him in his place, it was very a extensive troubleshooting.

i hate phone work i would love to do work behind the scenes not deal with customers or the phones.

[Dan208]

I work in a small family owned grocery store, and while I enjoy it, I do get sick of the entitled people. The owner is so scared to lose customers that over the years people have gotten used to getting their way. It gets old really quick.

I've worked several retail jobs and some office customer service positions. My clients were all pretty wonderful but coworkers were a nightmare and not very good at providing customer service to be frank. It was often appalling to listen to them talk to and about our customers. It wasn't just a "having a bad day" thing either, it was constant....and they treated their coworkers crappy too. I had an occasional difficult client but it wasn't common and aside from one time where I needed my managers assistance to calm down a very unreasonable women who was basically trying to scam us, I could handle all problems quickly, efficiently and in a way which made us all happy and feel like winners.