Many times, some employees get us so angry with their disposition and attitude to customers; we are tempted to report them to their supervisors. At some other times, you cannot help but marvel at the amount of impunity displayed by employees but what we often forget, is that as employees, we often do just about the same. An employee (especially a customer/consumer facing one) may not live up to expectations in relating to customers due to several factors.

Stress and Work Pressure

Take an instance of a frustrated customer calling the customer care line of one of the major telecommunication firms. He has been having issues with his blackberry subscription. Unknown to him, the customer care representative that took the call had already attended to over eighty clients, many of whom had tacked, verbally abused, insulted and appreciated her; not to mention her supervisor who had been on her neck telling her how that her Average Handling Time per customer is high and how she must meet her daily target. By the time this guy calls and begins raining abuses, she may be forced to call him to order or drop the call on him – an act that surely will get her fired if caught.

Many times, employee impunity could be a direct response to intense pressure. At other times, it could be as a result of an overgrown sense of establishment and or entitlement. Direct contact staffers and front desk staffers are more prone to this kind of lackadaisical approach to work. When they would have handled so many customers and are getting worn out from work, one customer would come in from nowhere and would begin raining abuses on them, once he feels he is not being attended to, the way he should, even when the attendants are not at fault.

Many times as the worker being put under intense pressure you’d be tempted to just damn the consequences and give the guy fire for fire and make him understand how it feels to be thoroughly insulted in public but hey, if you still need the job, then you don’t have to go through that route.

The Familiarity Issue

Have you noticed the eagerness with which new employees attend to their responsibilities? They tend to be the first to show up for work and have this consuming desire to do as much work as possible. But a few years down the line, when familiarity with the boss and everyone takes over and people begin showing up late for work with all kinds of excuses, calling in sick for the dumbest reasons and lose the very zeal that they started with in the first place. It has been discovered that most professionals don’t get to continue growing on the job after a few years. They just doze off on the job and activate cruise control. This is a very critical condition for an employee to find himself or herself, because when the firing axe falls, you can be sure that it will surely meet the head of that employee.

Whether you see it from the pressure perspective or from the i-have-arrived perspective, one thing is sure your job is on the line and if you are not yet ready to lose it, then you may have to fall back in line.

source: Nigeria's Top Jobs and Career Site