Credit: Alyssa Ao

WSPNs Chloe Zilembo shares her experience working in customer service.

Working in customer service can be exhausting. Our sole job is to please others and make sure that they get what they want. It costs nothing to be nice to people whose job is to help others and make sure that they have the best experience possible.

I have worked in customer service for a year now, and over that time I have experienced some pretty insane things that I never thought I would experience. I have endured people yelling at me, outrageous requests and unreasonable anger. One minute I’m doing my job and the next someone is yelling at me and being extremely condescending.

Around 43% of customer service workers have experienced some form of verbal abuse from a customer. The Harvard Business Review said that working as a service worker was considered the “frontlines of labor,” meaning that service workers bear the brunt of customers’ abuses.

Customers have brought me to the verge of tears due to their behavior. No one should go home from their job crying because someone they were helping was cruel to them. It makes me wonder what would happen if people knew how they were making workers feel? Would they care and feel bad, or would they brush it off as the worker being weak? I think that the latter is more probable based on my personal experiences.

I have come in contact with people that are overly self-entitled and seem to make it their mission to make employees feel incompetent or lesser of themselves. They are willing to risk demeaning others if it means that it will help them get what they want.

There are always people who will treat you with very little respect and always resort to calling the manager because you “weren’t doing your job right.” Let me tell you that the manager also doesn’t want to deal with being berated over the customer service’s supposed incompetence. Trust me, they don’t want their employees to be yelled at either.

It’s genuinely an awful feeling when someone is yelling at you over the phone or in person. I have found that people are willing to be meaner over the phone when other people in the store can’t hear them. The worst is when people yell at me for things that I can’t control, such as an issue with a product or an order. I had no involvement with their problem, so why am I the one that has to deal with the verbal abuse?

Sometimes it isn’t the yelling that gets to me the most. A lot of the time it is people being very passive aggressive and acting like I am stupid or useless that makes me the most upset. I’m a 17-year-old girl working her first job, and people are rolling their eyes at me and talking to me like I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to do anything. Being a teenager definitely does not help in avoiding customer abuses.

Although I encounter some pretty rude people while I am working, all hope is not lost. There are a fair share of customers who truly brighten my day and make me want to help them. Being nice can make a service worker’s day, and I can still remember some of my favorite interactions with customers. The issue is, all it takes is one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch, meaning one bad customer has the capacity to ruin a whole day for a worker.

So, next time you talk to a customer service worker, please be kind and understanding. It can make all the difference and we really appreciate it.