Let’s face it – customers are annoying. They’re constantly asking for things, and they touch everything – and there’s no telling if they washed their hands the last time they went to the bathroom. Customers are gross. They should be illegal.
But unfortunately they’re not illegal. There’s an election coming up, and I’m hoping to hear something in the presidential debates about finally banning customers once and for all. But until that magic day comes, here are a few simple tricks you can use to make sure that you have to deal with these people as little as possible.
Keep Weird Hours! Banks are great at this. “Oh, sorry, we’re closed. Yeah, it’s Arbor Day. I know, most people don’t realize how important a holiday that is, but we take it really seriously around here.” But the best examples of this are college professors. Ever notice how they’re only in their offices for three hours a week, and how none of those hours are next to each other? They’re masters at avoiding their students. In case you were curious, that’s why they call it a master’s degree.
Don’t Offer Shuttle Service to the Airport for Your Customers! Who Have Early Flights In case you’re wondering, no, this is totally unrelated to an actual experience I had a few weeks ago with a rental car company that I’d never used before and will never use again. This completely fictitious example was made even more amazing by the fact that this particular hypothetical rental car company was located off-site, which means that I ended up walking about a mile and a half to the airport at 4:45am, rolling my stupid rollerbag suitcase behind me and inventing words so vile that merely reading them would cause your eyeballs to explode. I’m sure their defense (if this were a real story, of course) would be that I should have known that their shuttle service didn’t start until 6am. And that’s cool. I’m totally fine with that. It was a fun surprise to find out at 4:45am, and it won’t be a problem ever again.
Make Absolutely No Attempt to Engage Potential Customers! Common in tradeshow booths and stores where the owners really don’t want to be there, this is the ninja-sly antithesis of the overzealous salesperson. If you ignore your potential customers for long enough, eventually most of them will go away. And good riddance. As we’ve already stated, customers are ooky.
Enjoy, folks! Customer service lessons of the week, signed and delivered. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go practice my rock-throwing. Halloween is coming up, and I just know some kids are going to be crazy enough to ask me for candy. Well I’ve got another thing in store for them!
