Well, I don't think you were wrong exactly, but I am a store manager for one of my jobs that is paying for school, and I wouldn't be thrilled if one of my customer service reps handled her that way. The things I would ask my CSRs to avoid:

1) She was speaking to her daughter, asking her daughter (not you) how you knew she didn't want a ferret. I would for sure not be happy if my CSR stopped helping another customer (the mice person) to jump into the mother and daughter's conversation to be defensive. If you hadn't done that, I doubt she would have made a scene. She probably would have just been a little ticked that you weren't using the ferret to babysit her daughter while she shopped, and gone about her shopping.

2) I would have been unhappy with my CSR for further escalating the problem by giving the customer a laundry list of how they should be behaving and what they were doing wrong. You should simply have explained to her that her daughter was not old enough to hold a ferret on her own, and her daughter had said she was not planning on buying a ferret. Giving her a little lesson in how customers should behave just made her more defensive and upset. The rules should be calmly and politely explained, and then you can offer to go ask a manager if it is ok to allow the ferret to be handled.


That said, I HATE customers like that, and I fully realize that sometimes there is just not a gosh darned thing you can possibly do to make them happy, but it sounds like you handled it ok. I'll stop playing manager now .