"Unskilled" My Ass!

Story by Matt Starr (@BlameTag)

It looks like you’re writing a resume. Would you like some help?

Do you thrive in a fast-paced environment, have excellent problem-solving skills, and work well under pressure? Well, I have some bad news for you: Everybody says that shit. But fret not! Your time in customer service has gifted you many skills to give you a leg up on the competition!Being referred to as “unskilled” is a reality most customer service workers have experienced whether from customers, managers, family, or the mayor of a major metropolitan area. Whether you actually believe yourself to be unskilled (and I promise you, you are not) or have trouble finding the words to describe what skills you have acquired, we’re here to help!Here are five skills you have that you don’t even know about:

Crisis Negotiation

It’s a tense situation. There’s a volatile entity and it’s up to you to defuse it and avoid disaster. One wrong word or gesture and the whole thing explodes. What do you do?

To be successful you’d most likely follow these steps:

• Actively listen to the hostile party, letting them know you hear them

• Show empathy, making sure they know you understand their point of view

• Build a rapport so that empathy goes both ways and trust is built

• Exercise your newfound influence over them to act toward resolution.

• Behavioral change can now take place and, hopefully, the hostile party will walk away without further incident

Now, did I just describe the steps to dealing with an irate customer or the Behavioral Change Stairway Model of hostage negotiation? The answer is yes, I did.

If you’ve ever had to deal with Karen screaming in your face and through either experience or formal training were able to end the situation amicably then congratulations, you’re a crisis negotiator!

The above steps are just one of many crisis negotiation techniques and there are many nuances to the craft in which we are all well versed, such as:

• Knowing when we must give something to build trust and rapport

• Recognizing a no-win situation and cutting our losses

• Deciding when it’s best to let the sniper take the shot (not literally in this case)

Hostility is something people tend to avoid because, really, who needs that crap? But it’s not something we’re able to shy away from. To us it’s just a day on the job. We’re all well-practiced in these techniques and not only is it an asset to us but makes us assets to future employers as well. 

Adding this skill to your resume is sure to help you negotiate your way to a better job!

Human Behaviorism

While working at a movie theater I could watch a movie trailer and tell you exactly which movies would have an increased incidence of disruptive phone use, which were most likely to attract parents who would argue about the R-rating policy, and what concession items would have higher-than-average sales for the weekend.

It almost seems to border on precognition sometimes. We’ll say things like “Customers are going to be opening these all the time” or “There’s going to be a lot of price checks on this”, usually with a staggering level of accuracy.

Go smaller and think of it on a customer-to-customer basis. Think of how you know almost instantly which customers could be placated with a “I know, it sucks, but they’re making us enforce it” and which are about to ruin your day because the pack of 500 plastic straws has less yellow ones than it used to.

No, it’s not because you’re psychic. You’re a human behaviorist!

Behaviorism is the science of studying human actions as the result of certain stimuli in order to recognize patterns and thus predict people’s behavior. And you’re quite adept at it.

Like with crisis negotiation, some of us have had formal training in this. Go ahead and ask the team in charge of your store’s layout, or planogrophers as I’m sure they’re not called, why things are set up the way they are and you’ll hear some really specific behavioral reasoning that most people would never notice, even as they perform it.

That being said, don’t sell yourself short for lack of specific training. The vast majority of customer service workers haven’t had it and can probably still predict a customer’s behavior with near perfect certainty.

Along with this skill people in our field may also develop:

• A top-notch bullshit detector

• An uncanny ability to lie

• A sixth sense for knowing what people want to hear

• Confrontation avoidance techniques

You’ve been observing, studying, and applying your knowledge of human behavior this whole time and didn’t even realize what an amazing, unique skill that is to have at your disposal.

Keep this in mind while job hunting and you’ll start behaving like you deserve that better job!

Competition-Level Tetris

If you’ve had to arrange sales spaces you know what I’m talking about. Or if you’ve had to stock a supply room. Or load a delivery truck. Basically if you’ve ever worked with stock at all.

So Reese’s keeps introducing more and more versions of the same product. One day you have the candy aisle perfectly spaced and stocked, no room between products to slip a dollar bill between the white and milk chocolate potato chip peanut butter cups. It’s beautiful. Then one day they introduce a Mountain Dew flavored peanut butter cup and your whole world implodes. Adding one product to this aisle will have a domino effect resulting in you having to rearrange half the store. But you don’t meltdown, give up, or stick ’em over with the olives. You make it fit.

This makes you the very definition of a competition Tetris world champion!

I guess you can say “superior spacial reasoning”, “ability to make the most of limited sales space”, or “expert visual merchandiser”, but “world-class Tetris player” sounds way cooler.

I mean, what better way is there to let them know you once filled a two gallon jug with five gallons of liquid or placed four 6ft² pallets in a space of 9ft²? There isn’t one, that’s what I’m saying!

Let this line fall perfectly into place on your already impressive resume and they’ll know you’re no blockhead!

Forensic Cleaning

I’ll say this up front since I’ll be saying it a lot in this section: People are gross.

You know how generous customers are with their biological waste. Every flat surface is a changing table. Anything bucket-shaped is a trash can. Every toilet is a vague suggestion of a target. Every fitting room is a [deleted by editor in the interest of decency]. Like I said: People are gross.

And we can’t always throw sawdust on our problems and walk away. Someone’s gotta clean that mess up. Like all privileges that come with being “essential”, those someones are we.

Yeah, it’s a shitty job (sorry for that), but it makes you a forensic cleaner!

To us, blood borne pathogen training isn’t just a PowerPoint slide. We can’t just shut down part of our workplace because someone left a used [deleted by editor] on the floor or smeared [deleted by editor] all over the family restroom. And if someone decides to [deleted by editor] in a bedding display we don’t get to leave the [deleted by editor] there for some kid to find. Even the average restaurant table probably contains more biohazardous material than the average person will ever encounter in one place.

Some workers have it worse than others. I have stories of stuff I’ve seen cleaning movie theaters that will haunt me forever. But I’d wager none of us has been spared the barrage of everything flying out of our beloved customers. So we throw on some gloves, break out the heavy-duty sanitizer, and clean up every single cubic centimeter of stuff that came out of someone else like it’s just another day on the job because, well, it is. People. Are. GROSS!

Include this skill and you’ll be cleaning up on those job offers! Maybe just don’t get too detailed about it.

Zombocalypse Survivalism

Okay, so imagine this:

A horde of unthinking, inhuman creatures are advancing on you. They show no sign of compassion, reasoning, or sentience. They are an unstoppable wall of horror that exists only to consume, destroy, and spread.

Now imagine the same thing except with zombies.

If you and your coworkers haven’t had a serious discussion about what you would do in the event the dead rise and overtake the earth, then what do you even do at work all day? Funny thing is, you’re already prepared for it.

It’s really not that much of a stretch to see that customer service workers who’ve worked Black Friday are better prepared to handle a zombie onslaught than the average citizen. While Black Friday might be the pinnacle of rabid customerness, there are so many other examples of the horde in our workplaces:

• Opening weekend of a popular movie franchise

• Clearance sales

• Any business with a bargain day

• Anything to do with kids on a rainy day

• Sunday fuckin’ brunch

• Sunday afternoon in general!

You might not realize it, but handling the swarm only to keep coming back for more has made you the perfect candidate to survive a zombie apocalypse, or “zombocalypse” [editor’s note: kickass movie title!].

While some will go out with guns blazing, drawing the horde, we understand the best thing to do is make ourselves as unseen and unheard as possible. We know the best way to deal with an oncoming mob is to cause it to bottleneck and face them one-by-one instead of all at once. We recognize the need to always have an escape path from wherever it is we’re stuck. And we know exactly how to do all of that.

If you worked during the height of covid, which I’m told is totally over so you don’t have to worry about it anymore, then you’re even more prepared for the zombocalypse. We’ve already seen what it takes characters in those movies half their runtime to realize: The real threat is always other people.

That person who gets bitten and tries to hide it from the group only to turn and infect someone else? Seen it.

The guy who loses his shit and attracts the horde to the party? Yep, we’ve seen that, too.

The group disintegrating and fighting amongst itself while the real threat is banging at the door ready to come in and ravage the place? You get the point.

If a prospective employer doesn’t see the value of having someone pre-prepared for the inevitable flood of undead killmonsters then I don’t know what to tell you, probably a terrible place to work anyway.

Have this skill listed on your resume so headhunters know they can call you in and pick your brain!

So there you have it: Five skills you definitely already have to polish the turd that is your resume and land the job of your dreams! Well, maybe not your dreams, but something better than the nightmare job I just described as living through a zombie apocalypse without much hyperbole.

Good luck out there, job hunters!!