It was in a moment of inspiration, and a rather large hint from a friend, that I needed to start a blog of my daily dealings with stupid. But first, a little about myself...
Hi... I'm Victoria Toscano. I'm just your average, everyday person that has WAY to much time on my hands as of late. I grew up in middle income Los Angeles and moved to Dallas, Texas when I was 13. It's hard to believe that was 25 years ago, this past January, but the DFW area is where I've been ever since. I have a 16 year old daughter that is an aspiring chef. She NEEDS to aspire to get over the "ick" factor when it comes to food, specifically seafood, or she'll never get anywhere. I could go into massive detail, but I will sum it up this way:
Circumstances in my life have led me to a very easy job as a "Courtesy Officer" at a hotel in suburban Dallas, Texas. For this position, I am compensated with a room to live in and enough money to put food on the table. It is not the most glamorous job in the world, but it's better than being homeless. And that's what I would be, because of said circumstances, I would be homeless. I don't have a car. There are two luxuries I afford because I am still looking for that other job that will afford things like a car and an apartment.
Before all the circumstances that have led me to my current situation, I have been "Customer Service" in a range of industries for 15 years. I've worked in retail, legal, food service, interior design, interior decorating, craft, construction, and tech support. All of these industries require some kind of "Customer Service". I wouldn't consider myself an authority, but I know how to get it done and keep a customer happy.
I have seen in the news, on other blogs, and the all important social media, stories of the BAD customer service. These seem to get the larger part of media attention. It was just recently, a man released his conversation with a customer service rep about canceling his cable services. I was absolutely appalled by that call. How could a supervisor allow that call to last that long? I remember when I was on customer retention, and the rule was if you offered the customer the incentive to stay twice, and the customer said "no" twice, you canceled the service... PERIOD. You didn't argue. You didn't badger. You just canceled the service.
Then you get the "Hero" Customer Service stories. Who remembers the Netflix CSR that killed it with the Star Trek references, and gave the customer what he needed/wanted and had fun with it? I love those stories just as much. And it's even better when you have a company like Netflix that encourages their CSRs to do things like engage the customer and have fun.
The thing about Customer Service that always seems to tick me off is the age old phrase, "The customer is always right,". I've seen this phrase in EVERY customer service training manual. Once I got into my tech support training, the phrase changed a little. It became, "The customer is always right, except when they're not,". If you've ever been in any customer service/tech support role, there is always that customer that comes in or calls in with a product that has NOTHING wrong with it. It's all end user error. But no matter what you do, or how you try to explain it, the customer insists there is something wrong with the product.
This is what I am going to be blogging about. These are my stories of dealing with that customer that can't seem to understand, they may be the customer... But they aren't exactly right either. These are the stories of Dealing With Stupid. And now that I'm in the hotel business, I deal with stupid on several levels and in new inventive ways.
