“We Can Hear You”: 30 Things Employees Know That Customers Usually Don’t

I work for an airline. I manage the development of the system our call center agents use. "Please" and "thank you" will unlock magical doors of help when you're on the phone with the agents or are at the airport dealing with airport staff. Simple politeness no longer seems to exist in these interactions. I've shadowed agents to understand how they use what my teams develop and I can count on two hands in the 150-200 calls I've listened into over the last year where the caller was polite and acted decently towards the other human on the other end of the line.

Don’t take a filthy car to a mechanic. Clean cars are always treated better.

You can and should get your kid an evaluation for learning disabilities if there is any potential - (many parents want to avoid potential stigma) - but depending on your school district they might not tell you because they don't want to increase their SPED caseload.

Hotel prices are negotiable. If you go to a hotel and show them a Booking.com or Expedia price for their location that's lower, they can price match. They would also much rather you do it that way because third party websites are a bitch and a half to do anything customer service related.

Booked a king but got two Queens? Good luck on your hour long call with them just to talk to a representative in another country. If the front desk does it, beep bop boop and two seconds later you have a key to a new room.

Academic here — to get a PDF of a paper you can usually email the author and ask for one, the times I’ve tried this they’ve been happy to share. After checking if it’s available on https://oa.mg of course.

Don’t mess around with formatting your references manually — use something like https://citationsy.com to automate the whole process.

Not sure if your homeowner's insurance will cover something? Apply this one simple rule:

> Was the damage caused by a sudden and one-time occurrence?

If the answer is yes, 99% of the time you're covered. If the answer is no, 99% of the time you're not covered. (This advice applies to the US).

Electric guitars made out of fancy expensive wood will sound exactly the same as guitars made out of cheap wood. The electronics system is what makes electric guitars sound different from one another, not the fancy AAAAA flamed maple top. It’s pure aesthetics.

If you use Libby to download ebooks from your library to your Kindle, you can turn it to airplane mode and keep the books as long as you want. The next person in line is not affected. 

Edit: because not everyone wants to illegally download ebooks from sketchy servers in Tuvalu? It's not any easier than what I suggested. .

I worked for Wells Fargo doing customer service on mortgages. If you use the keywords: lawyer, media or government we're trained to escalate you immediately to the highest level of customer service.

background: if you call for a question about your mortgage there are five tiers of representatives.

If you call and say "give me a manager" you'll only get to tier three.

The media/lawyer/government statements get you escalated to essentially tier six, of salaried customer service representatives that will essentially be given a ticket to fully research your complaint and prepare a summary in a complete and total cover your a*s manner. You may not like the result, but they will do enough due diligence on your question so they're comfortable they won't be sued.

Most industries have retention teams because it costs 10X more to get a new customer than it costs to keep one you have. So if you call up and complain/threaten to cancel every other time they raise your rates they'll probably give you the introductory rate. Just be aware you might have to switch.

edit threaten to cancel added.

edit 2: Another thing I'm seeing a lot is people getting shut down with no explanation. People hang up and call back. Just say you got disconnected you might have better luck with another operator. Yes they take notes, but some reps are more empowered than others. Also feel free to escalate. Make sure you know how long you've been a customer, and how long you've been up to date on your bill.