Coping With Difficult People

I’m struggling to remain polite after trying to decypher your teeny mobile text type question. Show us a little respect.
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i was on the phone to a lady who needed paying by the company i worked for (it was quite a small amount too)…
i didnt make the decision of who got paid…i just printed the cheques!
she was screaming and shouting at me…
i was polite and kept cool but in the end i had to hand her to my manager…
i think people should understand that yes they may be stressed…but dont make the person on the end of the phones life difficult too! especially if they cant do anything about it & if they are trying to help!
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I worked for Currys many many moons ago and had (thankfully very few) angry customers come in every now and then.

After some trial and the odd error (with explosive consequences) I found the easiest way was to allow the customer to vent off at me full blast until they had finished.

Then I asked them how I could make it right.

Quite often they just wanted their money back or a replacement product, and usually they were within the money back guarantee period so this was no problem.

I once had a manager that refused a refund but wouldn’t come out and speak to the customer leaving me in an awkward situation because I was left carrying the can - I agreed with the guy that the product was no good but had to quote the managers decision - the guy made such a fuss the boss had to come out anyway - guess what - he changed his mind and the customer got his money back!

Angry customers usually get their way - life is too short and you can never be paid enough for taking abuse off anybody!
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ten years in retailing

I’ve had that today!
I was out of the office and working on shopfloor for once and I was busily cleaning shelves and re-setting them with my back to the checkouts.
Suddenly an extremely abusive and obnoxious woman was shouting at me infront of everybody demanding to be served there and then - I calmly called for the cashier (who I hadn’t realised had left her till) and then I proceeded to explain to Miss Shouty that because I’m partially deaf and had my back to the checkout and I was making noise with the metal shelving, I had no idea she was there as I simply couldn’t hear her so there was no need to be so rude to me.
It was quite satisfying watching the smugness (she was loving the attention she was getting from the other customers and obviously felt very big about putting me down and shouting at me in such a way, anyone would have believed I was a total imbecile) suddenly disappear from her face, despite me not getting an apology and it was also interesting to see the sudden switch of support from all of the other customers go from supporting her to supporting me as soon as my deafness became a factor.
Although I fully understand how frustrated she must have felt (and the other customers) there was absolutely no need to scream at me - she just ended up looking stupid because of my "disability" - people should think more before they blast off at staff - just because an impairement isn’t always visible doesn’t mean it’s not as much of a hurdle as a visible disability.
The stupidest thing is, if she’d have confronted me in a polite (or even semi-polite) way, I would have put down my cloth and served her and all of the other customers and apologised for the wait immediately.
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