Gone are the days when people actually believed in the motto, ‘The customer is always right’. This is the age of grumpy flight attendants, pesky bankers and snooty beauticians. In essence, customer service is extinct. It’s very rare to come across a polite individual who is happy to attend to you and cater to your whims and fancies.

A major airline had cancelled a very busy flight and a lone check-in agent was busy trying to sort out all the displaced passengers. A very angry and aggressive man barged his way to the front of the queue to confront her. He mentioned that he was flying first class and demanded to get on the first possible flight. The agent just ignored his request and asked him to take his place in the queue. The man bellowed at her, “Do you know who I am?” The agent calmly picked up the microphone for the PA system and made an announcement, “This is (airline name) desk 64; we have a gentleman here who does not know who he is. If anyone can come and identify him, please do so”. The man, purple with rage, started yelling at the agent, “I’m definitely lodging a complaint against you!” She calmly replied, “And you’ll have to stand in line for that as well, Sir”.

When Anita’s father passed away she called the bank to cancel his credit card. She said, “My name is Anita and my father, Sohail, passed away. I want to cancel his account.” The customer service representative (CSR), who was too preoccupied following his script, didn’t absorb the information and responded, “Well, I need to talk to Sohail”. Anita retorted, “He’s dead — now if you want to talk to him, you’ll have to figure out how to. Give me your supervisor!” When the supervisor got on the phone, Anita inquired, “Do you have a connection with God?” Instead of being apologetic, the supervisor couldn’t control her laughter as she had heard the whole conversation.

Fareha will always remember her first visit to a highly reputed salon, but definitely not because her experience there was extraordinary. Instead, she would have walked out of the salon if she hadn’t paid for her pedicure in advance. The owner of the salon seemed to have a dicey relationship with customers who were somehow slacking in the grooming department. The seasoned beautician went so far as to comment, “Until now, I hadn’t thought it possible that anyone could have so much gunk between her toes. Sweetheart, coming for a pedicure doesn’t mean you stop washing your feet a month before your appointment!” Unless a customer thinks that personal hygiene is an oxymoron, there’s no need to badger clients who have taken a day off to pamper themselves.

In this era, one feels pretty much handicapped without the internet. If you are shifting houses, getting a new connection can be tantamount to a Herculean task. It starts off with you handling the line men visiting your house and goes on to you bickering with the technical support staff on the phone until you’ve lost all remnants of sanity.

Mona has been the victim of a number of customer service representatives who invariably exhibit both incompetence and belligerence, either of which is fully capable of driving even the strongest to the height of frustration or the brink of frenzied hysteria. “Once I could not log in to the net after I’d fed in the required password, ‘DEAF 123’. Yes, I know it’s a very appropriately coined password, since I realised my requests were falling on deaf ears! When I called up the service provider, I was bombarded with questions such as, ‘Do you have the CAPS lock key on?’ and ‘Are you typing in the wrong password by mistake?’ Instead of just refreshing the password or exploring the problem at his end, the technical service representative kept implying that perhaps I was too dense to type in the correct password! When I realised I was not getting through to him, I decided to try another approach, “All right, since there is this little fairy that lives in my keyboard and moves my fingers to opposing keys when I type in a password, can you do something to solve my problem? If not, pass the phone to your supervisor!”

It is mind boggling that in today’s society people fail to understand what customer service entails. It’s not about telling people how great you are. It’s about producing amazing moments in time, and letting those moments become the focal point of how remarkable you are, told not by you, but by the customer who was thrilled by your service. Think about it: Who would you trust more: An advertisement or a friend telling you how incredible something is?