This restaurant brought receipts—literally, when serving this freshly-baked smackdown of a belligerent local Karen who left them a scathing review on a community group. The post got “around 300 comments,” prompting the restaurant to reply. They gathered timestamped screenshots of the encounter along with the actual receipts of the Karen's transaction in order to refute her claims and turn the tide of public discourse against her. When you seek to publicly humiliate another person or organizatio…

In your first customer service gig, you will be shocked at how readily people manipulate and bend the truth in their favor while recounting events with what seems like complete and absolute sincerity. The first time you encounter one of these sad sob stories, your first instinct will be to do everything in your power to help them out. But the first time one of these stories starts to not quite add up, unraveling before your very eyes, you're going to end up with trust issues and not take anythi…

Demanding customers are the worst, but let's be honest, we've all probably been one at some point. Sometimes, you just need to put a little pressure and weight behind your requests in order to ensure your needs are heard through the muffled din of tedious bureaucratic process. This is true now more than ever with more and more corporations choosing to employ fewer customer service workers, relying on automated systems to weed out requests before anyone ever needs to lift a finger. Of course, by…

This reads heavily like someone chucked a prompt into an AI and just let it rip without any proofreading or comprehension of the output. Still, someone at least must have added something to the prompt along the line of “make this statement as authoritarian as possible" without understanding the direction of Everyone has encountered this customer service rep before who has handled one customer too many and is now on a warpath. Usually this types of attitude is a requirement for doctor's office r…

Customer service workers , you're doing the world a favor every time you politely answer the silliest question you've ever heard. They won't train you for this in most customer-facing roles. You think that customers will more or less know what's going on… but that's not the case. In fact, it seems like many jobs just require the worker to answer the same customer questions over and over and over. Some customers are special, though. They're so confused that their questions make the workers pause…

When you start working in a new industry that you never worked in before, you inevitably begin learning how those industries actually work, and how little you knew about it as a customer. It is surprising how much information companies try to keep from their customers even though that information can often be extremely beneficial for them and sometimes even life-changing. That is why, once one starts working in a new industry and learns some tricks and hacks, they should share that information…

With so much information accessible at the tips of our fingers, it's easy for anyone to think that they're an expert. Without realizing it, they're missing the context, experience, and knowledge of the framework that's used to properly define the information they think they're an authority in—all things that an actual expert would know and possess. Of course, when you're delivering a service to clients, they're going to want to do things their way. But, as the customer, it's important to know w…

Ahh, retail… a fine industry where middle manglement regularly tries to shove a dirt sandwich down your throat while whispering sweetly to you it's actually honey. The story shared in this post is a tale as old as time in retail, where management will happily tell you with a smile that the company's official policy is that the customer comes first… but that the unofficial policy is that making sure staff never claim or report overtime also comes first. So, then, what happens when you're working…

Being an IT (information technology) worker has many challenges. First, many of us will admit we do not know much about the technological devices we use on a daily basis, and if we were to encounter any error with one, we would be lost with what to do. IT workers have to be able to identify every single technological issue that they might encounter and even to possess a way of fixing it. Second, Not only do IT people have to deal with these tech issues, they also have to deal with people, who u…

Navigating your way through a crowded store is one of those experiences you won't soon forget, squeezing through cramped aisles between situationally unaware strangers who have made it their prerogative to move as erratically as possible. To make matters worse, you always seem to be in a hurry when this happens, and you need to get in and out as fast as possible while everyone else is moving like the walking dead. As whenever queueing—or any basic social order and decorum—is expected there's al…

"The customer is always right" is an attitude that is purveyed throughout customer service... People will love to remind you at this point that one full attribution of the original quote is also reported as being “The customer is always right in matters of taste” meaning that or that customer service representatives should seek “to satisfy the customer regardless of whether the customer is right or wrong.” Both lend to the idea that the customer is not necessarily right about all things, just a…

In retail, the number of customers who are convinced they know better than you is endless… Better than you when it comes to the products, better than you in terms of your store's policies, and better than you when it comes to the legalities under which you're trading. Having access to all the information with little understanding has emboldened people into thinking that they're experts after a few Google searches, even on impressively technical subjects. Of course, the rehearsed script often ru…

Dodgy off-book leave policies are something that you just come to expect after a while of working in the restaurant or retail world. From the first time you go to book leave and are met with the strong insinuation that maybe you shouldn't be taking any leave at all, giving you reasons of being too busy or too understaffed to possibly afford to be a “man down," you're going to be feeling that old resigned feeling of knowing that this is going to be that kind of place. The reality is that you're…

Social media sites and communication apps are readily accessible. Oftentimes it feels impossible to keep up with them all. You may feel at times that you are unable to keep up with them all. Therefore, you might occasionally need to compartmentalize and determine what is more important and what can wait till later in order to be informed and not miss any important information. But in addition to the countless texts and emails you receive daily, what would happen if you started receiving dozens…

We should have the expectation as a society that it's ok to deny someone service for being impolite to staff. This might actually teach people to be respectful and treat other people with common decency rather than with abject entitlement. Of course, as with anything else, there are grey areas and blurred lines and you might just end up talking to some egotistical service manager who is having a bad day. Still, professional courtesy should prevail even if they're not giving you the same. This c…

Is it ever acceptable for a customer to exhibit entitled behavior, also known as "Karen" behavior? You can argue different ways on this one, but in this story, the customer's behavior was unwarranted. When you pay for a service, such as electricity, Wi-Fi, dry cleaning, or any other service for that matter, you are obligated to pay in return. If you stop paying the company, you cannot expect them to continue catering to your needs, which is what the entitled customer in this story believes.