There's No Escape ...

Listen: no business is immune anymore from having dirty customer service laundry aired in public in the most frightful way. A call between a Dell rep and an angry customer illustrates this.

In essence, the customer was upset because he spent an hour on an automated system trying to find out how to turn off a laptop stuck in shut down mode. At the end of the call, he is told by the human Dell customer service representative to hold down the power button for 1o seconds. But the caller, by that time, was agitated almost to the breaking point (warning: the strongest language is involved).

While the Dell rep does not stoop to yelling back and appears calm, the smirk in his voice clearly comes through, and makes Dell look bad, bad, bad – really worse than if the rep had yelled back. The answer is to be authentic. No one would have blamed the rep if he’d complained about the behavior of the customer: that would have been an authentic, truly human response. There’s only one way to get respect here that I see, and that’s to just honestly care about how much time the customer’s wasted.