What city and state please?

I find, that for me at least, it is the little things that build up over time that prove to be the most frustrating aspects of my job. Were I to enumerate the behavior of customers that really gets to me (relax beyond this one particular example, I'm not going to do such a silly thing) I'd have a list of a thousand different little insignificant peculiarities of human nature. I cannot think of a single thing that would make this hypothetical list that the majority of people who have never worked in a customer service related job (especially one conducted primarily over the phone) would not dismiss as laughably trivial.

Truthfully they wouldn't be wrong, taken out of context, in isolation, not one of these behaviors would rise above the level of minor annoyance. But when you start talking about hundreds of calls a day, five days a week, it doesn't take long for even a small percentage of calls to build up from hundreds of little irritants into one frequently encountered major annoyance. Informal chats with my coworkers lead me to believe I'm not alone in these feelings. Everyone of us has a slightly different list of things that annoys (or in a few select, and extreme cases angers) us, but the impetus for this post is a pretty universal source of aggravation (at least I believe it is among my coworkers).

Broadly defined the most common customer behavior that is guaranteed to cause me irritation is not listening. The specific example as seen in the title of this post is the directory assistance customer responding with anything but a logical answer to the question, "What city and state please?" The most common "incorrect" response to this question is the customer's desired search; I ask for city and state, and my customer responds with John Doe, or Random Business, Inc. I've lost count of the number of my coworkers who at one point in their career have mused, "just once I'd like to ask a customer what state the town of John Doe is in." There are variations to this namely answering half the question and giving either just the city or just the state as an answer. If the customer's desired listing is uncommon enough, a state will often be sufficient, on the other hand a customer looking for something like "Robert Smith" is probably going to need to provide a bit more information before a successful search can be performed.

I suspect with the other side of the coin, giving only the city, often has more to do with customers assuming the operator is located in the same state (if not the same city) as themselves and/or in the case of larger cities the customers frequently just assume the operator will know the correct state. In a case like Seattle that works out fine, the only Seattle in the United States is the one in Washington (or another example the only place in the US you'll find a San Francisco is in California). Consider however that nine different states can lay claim to a Boston, Phoenix can be found in five, there are eleven different states with a city named Dallas, seven different states have a Manhattan, and three different states have a Milwaukee (and if you count Milwaukie, OR you can bump that up to four). I could easily continue but I trust my point is clear. A note for the curious I'm basing these numbers solely off what gets recognized as a city in the directory assistance database used by my employer. A cursory search of Wikipedia gives slightly different results.

The only real cost of this behavior is the inefficiency being forced to repeat a question to a customer causes. And while those few seconds add up after a month or even a day into a not insignificant amount of time I could have spent helping an additional customer, for the offending customer the direct effect is minimal (although enough prior customers engaging in such behavior can contribute to the amount of time my current customer spent waiting for me to answer). Well that and possibly my sanity, but I question the sanity of basically anybody working for even a moderately large corporation. Alright enough complaining about unchangeable realities of my job. I now return this blog to its normal state of me ignoring the ever increasing amount of anime I've been meaning to talk about.