365 Days of Gratitude: Day 22 - Good Customer Service

If there's one job that doesn't get enough love, it has to be the people that can handle being any flavour of customer service agent and finding a way to do the job well. Before my career took a 180 turn and I became a blogger/podcast/social media, I had done all kinds of different customer services jobs that were both on the phone, online, or in person, and I can promise you that it's not easy. While some folks are very nice and just need help dealing with a problem, others are complete fuckwits that think it's perfectly acceptable to be an asshole to strangers. In my experience, some days were fine, meaning uneventful and generally routine, while others were completely fucked up and stressful because someone literally screamed in your face/ear because of whatever problem was going on in that particular case — In those days, I hated going to work.

My point here is to paint the picture that doing the job can be tough, and that's important to remember when you get really great customer service and this week I got some. I'm not going to go into the whole story about what happened, the short version is that I had a product I was dissatisfied with that needed to be replaced, but the conclusion was that with a little politeness I got the exact outcome I wanted and that the agent was perfectly happy to help. If you're to learn a lesson from this quick rambling mess it's that good customer service can change an entire day around, just as it did mine today. Just be nice out there, people.