I broke down and took the customer service line work a bit ago. It is soul crushingly terrible.
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Some days, I just come home and I can't stop crying and a lot of it is from the things people say about me.
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I'm supposed to have thick skin and not let any amount of abuse bother me. I have been told it can only hurt me if I let it. I can't help when most of what I'm told day in and day out is how shitty I am. I can't take it.
I used to work in a supermarket chain a little while ago (last day was yesterday) here in New Zealand that has a terrible reputation.
It sounds like working in this supermarket chain has the same sort of environment that you experienced. I was continuously getting in shit with my bosses because customers would come and ask me for stock which took me time to go out back and find, then give to the customer, then get back to the job at hand. The bosses didn't like that I was being helpful, searching high and low to find the stock they wanted.
I finally gave in. My boss (department head) was saying "I was the reason they kept getting in f***en trouble from the high ups".This is not something someone just turned 18 who had only worked for this store,put in a ridiculously large amount of hours for them (approximately 1700) over 20 months, almost didn't get the grades for uni because of the little focus i had on school because i spent almost every weekend there, working only to be told i was doing an inferior job (by the store manager) and "I should quit so I can hire someone who could do the f***en job better".
To make it worse, the management of this chain(based in Australia) kept changing the "Best Practice" every could of weeks,which meant that by the time you figured out what we were meant to do, it was different all over again. If we didn't abide by it, we could have disciplinary action taken for wasting store hours and money.To make it all worse in my eyes, it didn't matter if the stock was damaged on the way to the shelf as long as it got there.
Customer service sucks. Either you do the job too well and get screamed at or you do it like you are told to and get abused the hell out of by customers who wanted something that you can't spare the time to find. The few good customers and good fellow employees I had were alright, but not enough to outweigh the bad management and numerous terrible customers.
P.S. I worked for a store chain called Countdown Ashburton.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9438534 times)