Part of the Problem
Have you ever had to tell a customer something that made you mad at yourself?
If you work at a dysfunctional company, there’s a good chance that your customers are even less satisfied than you are. Dealing with incompetence is terrible when you’re being paid to deal with it. It’s much worse when you are paying to deal with it.
As a representative of your organization, you are often bound to behave as the company behaves. You’re just one part of the process, and even when you mean well, you can’t always solve the customer’s problem. When you’ve lost faith in the process you’re a part of, you can quickly end up as the bearer of bad business. To a customer, that means you’ve become part of the problem.
Shoot the messenger. It’s his fault too.
Bearing Bad Business
A friend of mine was a recruiter for a sleazy IT recruiting firm. He is one of the most honest people I know, but he was required to deceive candidates during negotiations or he would be fired. Needless to say, he quit as soon as possible.
One of my readers shared with me the experience of selling a service he no longer believed in. He had to continue to push the company line to prospective clients until he found a way out. In sales, you can’t exactly recommend a competitor.
Another friend who works in customer service had a customer go 2 months more than promised before receiving the product they purchased. This was a time-sensitive product, and yet management refused to allow for a discount or refund.
Rebellion and Exodus
Being a part of shoddy business practices is one of the more demeaning aspects of a truly awful job. When your company handcuffs you to mediocrity, sometimes the only way to reclaim your integrity is to quietly rebel as you begin to find something else. Of course, this is assuming that they company is rotten to the core. If top level management is good people, go tell them. Otherwise, I would begin to guide customers to better options.
When have you been in a situation like this? What did you do about it?
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6 responses so far ↓
1 Ryan Paugh // Aug 29, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I have a buddy who uses the honesty to approach to his benefit. Even though he knows that the wireless company he works for doesn’t really care about the customer.
“It’s not always the service that’s broken,” is his motto. Sometimes it’s just the way they’re getting it delivered.
He thinks “outside the box” (sorry for the jargon) and find ways to make things better for the client. Even though he knows they could probably do better at a competitor.
So maybe if you’re in a position where you can’t afford to lose your job, even if you don’t believe in them, you can be the salesman that gets the best out of the company for his clients.
It’ll take you a long ways, especially when you can afford to leave that job to go elsewhere. You’ll already have a following of clients ready to leave with you.
2 Bush Mackel // Aug 29, 2007 at 8:38 pm
I feel like I’ve been handcuffed a lot lately, and frankly it sucks. Basically other groups in the company want to use my talents, but my lead doesn’t want my attentions diverted from his menial tasks.
My solution is to work on what he wants enough to keep him off my back, and to devote the rest of my time to my other co-workers.
Boy office life is fun.
3 icedragon // Aug 30, 2007 at 2:32 am
It’s soul consuming when you stop believing in you own company, but what happens when its not the company?, what happen when is your particular job position
In one company that I work for, the value of my job decrease from an asset to nothing, but I still have to do something, it was the worse three months of my work life
4 Melissa // Aug 30, 2007 at 10:44 pm
In college I answered the phones at an AWFUL car dealership. I used to watch people walk in, get scammed, and leave, often thinking they got a good deal. The salesmen would all then have a good laugh about how stupid the customers were. The post-sale customer service was, needless to say, horrendous.
I used to try to ameliorate angry customers whose keys were suddenly “missing” after they left them with the manager to go on a test drive. (If you invest your whole day at a place, you’re more likely to give in and buy.) Every time someone walked in, I wanted to write them secret notes directing them to the guys across the street…
Yuck. It makes me feel queasy just to remember what it was like working there.
5 Pam // Sep 26, 2007 at 5:54 am
I was going to reply in your comments, but my thoughts ended up turning into a whole post over at my site. This made me realize that in my case, it was my supervisory and management practices that were “bearing bad business” to me.
6 Chuck Westbrook // Sep 27, 2007 at 10:32 am
@Pam– Thank you for letting me know. I really enjoyed reading your post.
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