It has been sometime since I started managing customer deliveries and it has been an interesting journey/learning experience uptil now. You meet all types of customers- co-operative, difficult, smart well funded and various combinations in levels of smartness and being funded. Below are a few observations with no offense meant to anyone:
1. You do not get to throw temper tantrums unlike employees who work in internal departments. You have to be polite with customers, for obvious reasons, at the same time you have to be polite with internal teams to get the work done smoothly.
2. Customers sometimes neglect all the good things you do for them, they would only look at a few small issues and blow them out of proportion even when they are low priority but then customers are customers no matter what, it is a good learning experience in the art of calming down people.
3. Customers will insult you sometimes in a way that you will wish ground opens up and consumes you, your jaws may start hurting because of continuous apologizing.
4. You may start losing hair pretty soon unless you know how to control your pulses. I learnt it after 2 months.
5. The internal teams may not always understand the urgency of the matter, might push off
home leaving you stranded to deal with the customer alone and you will be like a panicky chicken running around to control the situation.
6. The internal teams will sometimes suggest ways and alternatives with zero business sense or any sense at all and you have to just take a deep breath, smile and suggest better ways.
7. And when we meet good co-operative customers, they are like God to us and we would try harder to make them happier and wish every customer was like that.
I have still thick long hair, thanks to Yoga and John uncle 😀 God bless all the customers and internal teams nevertheless, they are all our friends.
Cheers to the experiences,
Devina