My Promo-Mentors Writing Challenge: The time I singlehandedly created a customer uproar

I spent three years working as a customer service "associate" at Sam's Club during my college years, so you can imagine I've got some stories. (Don't we all, if we've worked with the public?)

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The current "Promo-Mentors Writing Challenge" sponsored by @futurethinker is to tell about a huge mistake you've made. This one is tricky for me because some of my "biggest mess ups of all times" have great lessons to teach, but aren't ones you can laugh at as the contest details mention, so I'll go with a bad mistake I made at work that I really can laugh about now.

To set the background, Sam's Club's business membership profile pages have a "tax exempt" checkbox. Florida's tax exempt certificates were reissued annually, so in order to keep their tax exempt status current, businesses and nonprofits were supposed to bring us their updated certificates each year so we customer service associates could scan them. Key words here are supposed to. Probably anybody who has worked that kind of job knows it takes an act of Congress to get many people to actually do it. Especially because the cash registers were programmed to allow the cashiers to just override the "TAX EXEMPT EXPIRED" warning, so customers got used to blowing us off about it.

One time, I noticed one of my coworkers with some kind of report, pulling up business memberships and unchecking the Tax Exempt box. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was working the Tax Exempt Expired Report. I was fairly new to the service desk at the time and thought no more of it.

But fast forward a year or so, and it was one of those gorgeous early summer days when customer traffic was really light because people (except us) were at the beach instead of shopping. I was poking around on the store computer on the back counter, figuring out what tricks and tips I could add to my repetoire of knowledge to be The Best Customer Service Associate Ever, when I came across...you guessed it, the Tax Exempt Expired Report among the various items under REPORTS. I opened it, and was astounded. I honestly can't tell you how many businesses were on it, but it was well up in the mid hundreds at least.

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Right then and there I remembered the coworker working on the report before, and I had the most brilliant idea ever. I would do it too! Yes, I would work on that report myself, and take all those slackers off their undeserved tax free status. Some of them were riding on certificates from two years ago! I printed the report--pages upon pages upon pages--and set to work. Before long, the other girls became curious and asked what I was doing, and then because they were bored, we divided up the pages and we all industriously got to work, feeling quite pleased with ourselves for so helpfully correcting this oversight.

There was just one small detail I was completely unaware of: before removing somebody's tax exempt status, you were supposed to call and inform them first.........

There was another detail that, with a few years of combined cashier and customer service experience under my belt, I was fully aware of: you don't mess with people's money........

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Yeah. I knew something was wrong when I walked in the door to start my shift the next day, and immediately my manager made a beeline for me. The first words out of her mouth were, sternly, "Did you print the Tax Exempt Expired report?"

Gulp. My heart sank at the expression on her face, but I immediately answered that I had.

"Who told you to take everyone out of tax exempt?"

Another gulp. "Nobody. I just thought we were supposed to take care of it."

Her face softened a tiny bit, though it was still grim. (Writing this article, I suddenly realized that she's the reason it's been nagging me for years that Hillary Clinton reminded me of someone.) The fact that this manager was a rather pragmatic and completely unemotional sort probably saved me from a major butt chewing.

"Well," she said, matter of factly, but still quite stern, "this has created a bad situation for everyone. You're right, the report is supposed to be done, but you're also supposed to call the members first. If you had asked before just working on the report, we wouldn't be dealing with so many angry people right now. But we'll get through it and they all needed to update their paperwork anyway. From now on, if you get ideas like that, run it by (Supervisor) or me first, okay?"

I very meekly assented and slunk off toward the time clock, my proverbial tail between my legs and my cheeks flaming, wondering what was in store for that shift.

Oh lordy, to say it was an uproar that affected all the cashiers, check out supervisors, managers, and customer service associates, is putting it mildly. I can't really describe the wearying effect of constantly hearing people's voices ominously rise as they asked "what do you mean, I can't get this tax exempt?" and bracing yourself for the indignation to follow. Customer reactions ran the gamut from unconcerned (sadly, too few), to irritated, to full blown yelling outrage. The Hillary Clinton-esque manager adopted the strategy of half-truthfully telling people that after awhile, "the system" just purged expired certificates (I'm sitting here giggling at the recollection of her perfectly straight face when she'd say it in front of me).

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Also, to say that I, as a sensitive person, was mortified beyond belief, is a massive understatement. For several days, I felt like every conversation I overheard on the store's front end had to do with lost tax exempt status, and I also felt like a huge spotlight accusingly pointed out my permanently blushing face to my coworkers as the culprit who'd given everyone this ongoing headache. We were flooded with updated forms at the customer service desk, where our perpetually malfunctioning scanner botched half of them, causing "The Home Office" to reject them on their end, starting the angry customer cycle up again. Oh! and I got the cold shoulder from the Marketing ladies for awhile, because it turns out that report was their job and I'd unwittingly dimed them out as having not done it months ago like they should have. Whoops.

In the grand scheme of things, it was a customer relations nightmare requiring damage control (remember that people talk about bad experiences at stores exponentially more than good ones), BUT ultimately it blew over fairly harmlessly, and work life returned to normal. A handful of coworkers were annoyed at the hassle, but the majority of more seasoned employees shrugged or laughed it off. At my age now, I too can laugh it off, and if it happened now I wouldn't be as affected as I was then. But, I learned a few things from it that I will never forget!

• Initiative is good, but
• Initiative needs to be run past a supervisor before proceeding!
• Self-assurance on the job is good, but
• Getting so self assured that you make decisions on your own, when you aren't in charge, isn't so good.
• I carried my manager's example in my mental leadership file, so that later on, when I was the one in charge of people, I weighed whether someone's intentions had been good when they screwed up, and tempered my reaction accordingly.
• Finally, people really hate paying taxes. LOL

Ending with a smile :) Me on the job on a typically happy day! (Coworker's face is blurred for privacy. This photo is my own.)