But I’ve never lasted longer than 18 months.

Today’s story is one example of why I simply can’t tolerate that shit… 😬

👉 Want the truth? Don’t ask for it. Create a scenario that reveals it.

👉 If you’ve never been your own customer, you have no clue how bad it might be.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

…And it was my job to sniff out who it was.

👉 On one side—

The Operations Managers on my team reported they were fielding nonstop complaints about the customer service department. Customers were showing up in person with all kinds of problems, and griping that they hadn’t been able to reach customer service over phone or email.

👉 On the other side—

The Senior Director in charge of customer service, let’s call her Sherry  –a 20-year veteran of the company– claimed her team was the best goddamn collection of customer service rockstars on the stinkin’ planet. 

She gave them 5-star performance reviews, and assured us that every call & email was promptly answered during operating hours — messages that were received overnight were returned first thing the following morning.

Sherry defiantly asserted that if customers were complaining about not being able to reach her team, there was only one conclusion — they were lying.

An idea for how to get to the bottom of this came to me during a meeting with one of the Operations Managers who was (yet again) bitching about the –ahem– deficiencies of customer service. 

To demonstrate his point, he whipped out his cell phone and called our customer service number.

It rang.

It went to voicemail.

It was the middle of a business day.

Now, there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Every so often, call volume exceeded staffing, and if that happened, their protocol was to return any missed calls as quickly as possible — hopefully within the hour.

He didn’t leave a voicemail (obviously), so we couldn’t determine if that was happening.

But other people could… 🤔

I started stealthily shooting off this text message to some trusted friends:

In total, I asked 28 people to call our customer service line over the course of a week, including my brother Jake, hoping they would all receive prompt and friendly service.

Welp. It’s been five years, and Jake is still waiting on call back. Poor Jake. 🤦

Of the 28 calls placed, only half were answered. The people whose calls weren’t answered left voicemails… and only THREE of them ever received a call back.

So it turned out our customers weren’t lying.

Sherry was.

F*ck.

Sherry was not a nice person.

She was hostile, vindictive, and had a moon-sized ego. She outranked me, and many other managers — a weapon she wielded to shut down any valid criticisms we brought to the table.

The pure absurdity of how she remained employed at the company was a running joke among everyone who worked with her. 

When I started, my boss even gave me a lesson on how to keep my team away from her, because she crushed the spirits of anyone who wasn’t in her fiefdom, and he knew I didn’t want to lose good people because of her bullshit.

So how on earth does someone like that remain employed at the same corporation… for 20 years?!

Because she threatened to take revenue with her. 💸

Part of Sherry’s job had been to develop third-party sales partnerships. And over time, those partnerships began accounting for a decent chunk of revenue — revenue that this company was not willing to risk. 

But I now had proof that not only was she miserable to work with, she was also (at best) bad at her job, or possibly outright lying about the performance of her team.

I compiled the data, and sent it to my boss. 👇

Look—

The petty side of me would have loved for this to have been the nail in her coffin. 

By this point, Sherry was going out of her way to try to get me fired. (Apparently asking invasive questions like “What’s your process for tracking unresolved inquiries?” plants one on Sherry’s shit list.)

I knew when she was confronted with this evidence she would somehow spin the situation to take the heat off herself — and remind us all that she wouldn’t leave without doing her damndest to destroy the sales partnerships she had helped build.

But honestly, I just wanted the problem fixed.

Our customers needed their f*cking calls returned. 

And it was up to the corporate executives to hold Sherry accountable for making that happen — or finally fire her and find someone who could. 🤷

A few days went by. Then a few weeks. Then a few months.

I finally received a call from my boss’s boss’s boss (yes, you read that right) to gather more information. Apparently he drew the short straw to confront Sherry, and he wanted to have his facts straight.

More weeks passed. More months passed. Sherry’s behavior was just getting worse — and that unlucky executive never did confront her with the call data I had collected.

In one meeting, Sherry looked squarely at me and said “I think you’re horrible at your job”.

Gee. Thanks for the feedback. 🙄

I quit soon after. But it wasn’t just because of Sherry—

A culture that allows someone like Sherry to stick around and torment people, just because firing her might lose us some sales (which I’m fairly certain we could have won back pretty quickly) has far more problems than a single bully.

And those problems had piled up well over my head.

If today’s issue just sounds like a bitch-fest about a bad co-worker — you’re kinda right. Thanks for letting me vent. ♥️

But the lesson here goes beyond that.

Sherry wasn’t just putting me through hell — she was putting our customers through hell. And for a while, the rest of us didn’t even know about it. We all thought “Well, she’s a walking migraine, but she gets the job done, so I guess we’ll put up with her shit.”

Sure, the Operations Managers were experiencing her incompetence on the ground, and running it up the chain, but Sherry had an excuse — those whiny customers were just lying to get free stuff.

And that’s where any potential discussion for improvement died. Because there was no data to refute what she was saying. The person in charge of customer service was telling us that all the customers were being served. What else was there to discuss?

It wasn’t until I went all Undercover Boss on her ass that we realized how dire the situation was. All of a sudden, I was seeing our company through the customer’s eyes, and it was wildly confronting.

Now, you probably don’t have someone as titanically toxic as Sherry in your business (I hope), but you might have the kind of problem Sherry created for our customers.

So how do you combat it?

Of course you should run NPS surveys. Of course you should talk to your customers. Of course you should take complaints seriously. 

👉 But be prepared for the people in charge of whatever area you’re investigating to cover their asses, and spin that shit.

But you know what’s harder to spin?

You –the boss– experiencing the deficiencies for yourself. 

Stop relying on dashboards and dipshit reports, and go full incognito mode. If you’ve got people whose literal job is to talk to customers… go talk to them as a customer.

Call your service line. Submit a support ticket. Buy the product. Return the product. Book the tour. Schedule the visit. Enroll in the program. Stay the night. Eat the food. Sit in the waiting room with no special treatment and no one knowing who you are. Ask dumb questions. Get annoyed.

And see how your team handles it.

⭐ Bonus points if you use a Bart Simpson name like “Anita Mann” or “Mo Lester”. 😜

And if you truly can’t do that stuff without getting busted, ask a trusted friend to step in for you.

If your team drops the ball, don’t panic. Just fix what’s broken. But if your leaders lie about what’s happening on the ground — that’s a whole other conversation.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin

P.S. — I was inspired to write this story after dealing with hellish customer service this week from a company I’ve spent over $25k with over the years. It’s a regional family-owned furniture store. I wonder if the owners realize how bad it is?