First, thank you for your response, I appreciate your willingness to talk about this calmly.
Originally posted by KONG1
In my business I have interns who work for free, they are greatly appreciated. I also have customers who come in every shape, size and disposition. My interns are instructed NEVER to engage a customer. That’s my job. If there is a complaint I ignore the form it comes in and try to determine if there is some substance to it. If there is abusiveness I deal with it calmly and decisively and never bicker. I find defensiveness abhorrent. If you are not wrong why be defensive, if you are wrong do something about it. Now to answer your questions:
An apropriate example. HTC would be in your place in this case and the CT staff are in the place of your interns. The CT staff can and does handle most problems quite well, but some that are directed at them now, should really be addressed to HTC, and Skuzzy has said as much several times. Some of the complaints that we get now are like yelling at a volunteer at a soup kitchen because your bread is stale and the soup is cold. We should all be grateful HTC even allows us to have a player run arena at all. No, I dont think the CT staff is perfect, and yes, there are some serious issues sometimes, but I do believe they do a good job for the most part. More to the point of this discussion, I think their intentions are true, they do not have the hidden agenda that some see.
First, you need to be more specific, which couple, what attitudes. Attitude is such a big word it is almost worthless. There are initial attitudes, attitudes resulting from specific treatment, attitudes resulting from other attitudes. I often receive negative reactions from people because my attitude is: if you say your gonna do it, do it. I don’t suffer fools easily and believe in personal responsibility. Some find these attitudes to be very negative others find them quite reasonable. Attitude is a very subjective thing. Discussing attitude is always fruitless better to discuss behaviors, which brings me to your next question.
Another very non-specific question and “appropriate” is a highly subjective term. I can tell you I have behaved inappropriately on occasion but believe I’m way above the curve. I believe everybody’s behavior in the game exists in a gray scale somewhere between Oldman and the guy who just got permanently booted. If I had to average all the behaviors of all my squadies according to my version of appropriate. I believe they would be significantly above average. I joined this thread discussing specific behaviors by specific people as they pertain to the game environment. If you have specific examples of bad behavior please enumerate them. If you have examples of abusive behavior or personal attacks that brings me to your next question.[/b]
I did not use specific examples, and that was intentional. You know very well who I am refering too, and you know the behavior I was refering too. I chose not to cut and paste examples because the instances I am refering to were baseless, irresponsible, and borderline delusional tirades and I will not re-air them since they should not have been posted at all originally. If you want me to, I can cut and paste responses from this BBS posted by the folks in question to represent examples of almost every one of your "unacceptable responses" list from several posts above this, but that really isnt neccessary is it? I would rather not do that if I dont have to.
This one’s easy. How do you react to personal attacks?
DON’T
Personal attacks make the attacker look bad. Besides HTC does not cotton to personal attacks or abusiveness. They can, will, and do deal with such behavior in a professional manner. In my business I’m the one who draws the lines not my interns. Take over the top behavior to them.[/b]
I agree with you 100%, and that is how I would handle it, but I have extremely thick skin, and have been dealing with customers in retail business for most of my adult life. Every day I have to give customers bad news of one sort or another that I have no control over and have to try to resolve it to their satisfaction. I can easily see someone not having that background would be more likely to respond to a personal attack in kind. That is not my style, but there should not be personal attacks for anyone to respond to in the first place, yet we see it over and over again.
I understand that some customers that come to me upset, can not be made happy no matter what I do for them. They have already made up their mind and there is no amount of good will that I can extend to them that will win them back as customers, I am sure you have seen the same thing. We have a few here that are at that point, there is nothing that the CT staff can do to make them happy, they are beyond winning back in my opinion.
