When Bad Customer Service Makes You Want to Scream

It's not often that I find a company that doesn't have a FAQ page on its website that helps me through any technical question I have. It's even less often that I find a company that has bad customer service/support, or whatever they call it.

I'm just going to throw this out there: Twitter's customer support is bad. I don't care if I can tweet about the question. If I can't chat with someone online, call someone, or find a forum or support page that answers my question, it's bad customer service.

What can we do when we have a bad customer service experience? Well, obviously we can blog about it, but what else? Scream about it. Cry about it. I suppose we could curse them out too. But does it really help? Well, blogging helps me because it's therapeutic somehow to put my frustrations down on the page. But does it really help?

It certainly won't solve my problem.

What can we do when that happens? When we're more frustrated at the end of our customer service experience than we were at the beginning?

Personally, when the call is over and my question is still not answered, when my frustration is through the roof, I like to have a bit of a cry until I feel better, and then go back over my question, determine if I can make it more clear, and try again (often hoping the same person won't answer the phone).

When a company doesn't have an email address or a phone number to contact, however, it doesn't feel like I've done all I can to resolve the issue, and it can even feel like resolving the issue is impossible.

I guess today I wanted to talk about things we can do instead of reacting in our frustration. I think it's too much to ask that we never become frustrated when customer service goes bad. So, when we're about to blow our tops, and react badly to bad customer service, we can:

• Pray
• Send up a quick prayer for patience in dealing with a frustrating person or situation.
• Breathe.
• Take a deep breath before saying something we'll have to ask God's forgiveness for later.
• Remain calm
• Often it isn't the support person's fault that we don't understand something
• Hang up and call again.
• If we need to end the call to collect ourselves, we should. Be as polite as possible.
• Bear in mind that if there was a long wait, it could be worse the next time.
• Put them on mute, and then scream.
• Don't scare them by forgetting to press the mute button.

These are just a few that I came up with. Do you have any?

I guess we shouldn't complain about customer service too much though, since "Frustration is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart" (Ecclesiastes 7:3). After all, if we're never frustrated, if we're never challenged, we won't be able to learn or grow.

So, the next time we face a challenge with a company's customer support department, let's remember that frustration is actually good for us.