Do you have "Poly" bags?

Do you have “Poly” bags?

That was a question a customer called and asked about.  When I first heard what he said I was not sure what he was talking about. Did he say Pauly Bag like a name, did he mean he was looking for a bag size, or maybe something completely different. I was confused, and so I asked him to repeat himself. 

Then he said, “well if you are in the packing business, you should know what a poly bag is…” and went on to be quite rude.

What made me not get rude back to him was the thought that he was having a bad day or that this was not the first interaction he had that sounded “clueless” to him that day.

I just said thank you and that I would go look up what he was talking about. I even went as far to ask him to spell what he was asking for.  But sadly, by that time he was confident I didn’t know what I was doing and hung up.

I know what a "poly" bag is and if I had understood him when he first asked the situation would have been different.  But how I reacted to what it turned out to be was extremely important.

How do you handle rude phone calls or even worse a customer who walks in and is rude? Try to remember he might be having a horrible, no good, very bad day, or something else.  You might just be the perfect person to help him calm down and have a better day.  He might end up remembering how nice you were to him when he was rude to you and come back to be a great customer.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is It Full?