The joy of home exchange is living like a local. The hard part of home exchange is also living like a local. It's fun to browse the stalls at the weekly market. It's not so much fun trying to return an item in your home exchange town's local department store.
Here are some techniques that helped me get "customer service" in France. If it works there it has a good chance of working elsewhere.
1) IT'S NO ONE'S FAULT
Put another way: your problem isn't the responsibility of the worker who you want to have help you. You may think that a company or organization has a duty to help you if they caused a problem for you, but the workers there probably have another opinion. If so, they will see no reason to help you.
One solution to this is to approach the worker in a collegial manner, presenting your problem as an issue for co-miseration, rather than something that gives you a right to assistance. Obviously a company fails the most basic tenets of customer service or customer retention if its employees have the attitude that they need not help you. Your opinion on the matter is neither here nor there. Do what you need to do to get assistance, even if it's entering a bizarre reality where "the customer is always wrong".
2) WHAT'S IN IT FOR THEM?
When I reserved a bassinet for my baby in the bulkhead of the awful French airline L'Avion I was told to show up at the airport early to get a seat with her. When I did so the staff treated me with contempt and accused me to lying about the seat allocation advice I received. This despite the fact that I bought my seat six months earlier, when all the seats were available. That made me really mad, but being angry wasn't going to get me anywhere.
The customer "service" agents simply did not care about the needs of my infant, or my elderly father who had broken his ribs and could not walk more than a few steps at a time. I was told they could not "inconvenience" the passengers who, though completely able-bodied and without children, were pre-assigned to the bulkhead. (I should note that this was an all-business class airline where every seat had the same amount of leg room. There was no comfort-based need for anyone to be in the bulkhead.) This was my response:
"I would certainly HATE to inconvenience those bulkhead passengers. Unfortunately, if my baby cannot sleep in the bassinet, she will cry and scream and that will be more inconvenient for everyone on the airplace than having two people move to another seat. And if my father falls down and breaks something else while trying to walk to the bathroom from the back of the airplane, the resulting medical evacuation will be very inconvenient for your staff."
Suddenly the agent was very interested in helping me get two bulkhead seats. I had made it more inconvenient to ignore my problem than to solve it.
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