well I can say I'm of the privileged kind. I'm fairly well paid (almost twice the minimum wage in my country); and have to deal mostly with professionals (I'm in an hotel chain and our main customers are travel agencies) Despite that, it can get really stressful some days and some times I must go to the toilet to cry or just kick the wall. I'm not of the service kind..
I have some "rules" to make things easier for me though..
- Get the customer to say the full date of booking. Like, june the 17th. I know some bitches claim they stated they wanted to book for july when they find out they received a no-show, so I always make sure they'll say the full dates. This applies to any other thing concerning the booking: kind and number of rooms, kind of service, please would you kindly repeat which city, and so on.
- If there's no room, there's no room. I'm not going to take a trowel out of my ass and build a new hotel for you. And I'm not going to call the hundreds of hotels we work with in a city to ask for extra room. I don't mind whether the customer's already in the city, hey if you're going to a fair you should guess there's going to be trouble in finding a hotel.
- If some characteristics aren't clearly stated in my program, don't take for granted there's going to be communicated rooms/big bed/late check out/whatever. I'll ask the hotel the moment you want to make the reservation, but not before (OK this doesn't work always but I try).
- I don't mind whether you want to talk to XXX. I know 80% the times I'm equally, if not better, qualified to help you, esp. when all you want is to send a confirmation fax/change the customer's name/spell the hotel's direction/tell you the total amount. I won't bug my coworkers for shit like that (I hate it when they do it to me...)
- If you're rude, I'll be rude. I'm not worried about your complaints. As far as I know, there's only been one serious complaint because of my behaviour and even that wasn't so serious compared to what that bitch deserved. Although I may be a bit harsh, good nice customers know that I'm efficient and fast and that i barely screw things up; they know I'm honest and that if I tell them this hotel is fine and the customers will like it I'm telling them the truth. And plus, my boss knows I do twice the work a normal person and still get some time to study, read a book or surf the net. But, if anyone is rude to me, they'll learn I can be even more rude. Even bitchier. They can't imagine how bad I can get to be.
wow long.