This week I was out traveling, teaching New Accounts seminars, and I got quite an education during lunch one day about a problem I didn't even know existed -- smelly customers with bad hygiene habits! The attendees shared coping secrets. Several swore by electric fans. When they see the stinky ones coming, they flip on the fan behind them, blowing the air the other direction. One banker said they used to burn scented candles, until someone at one of their branches started a fire with one and all candles were banned from the bank. Another said they have more cans of air freshener than they do fire extinguishers.

Anti-bacterial wipes were also a popular item. When you have customers who are standing there holding their stack of checks to deposit in their mouth while rummaging through their pockets, purse or paperwork or sneezing or coughing on their stuff right before they hand it to you, I guess you need all the germ-fighting tools you can get!

What else am I missing out on that you guys get to face on a daily basis? Or is this not universal? Was I just speaking in a part of the world where soap's not especially popular among some folk?

Oh, it's not just those bankers. I am with a bank in the heart of the Ohio Valley. We have many farmers, including livestock farmers. Try smiling at your desk while being overwhelmed by the odor of hog waste! Or how about those customers that leave their mark on you in the form of waste laden footprints on the carpet. And, of course, let's not forget the blessed soles that believe they must sit only two inches from your face and share with you breath that would stop a Mac truck at high speed. Dealing with these issues is just part of the job. Dealing with the issues using dignity and grace so that your customer has no idea of the problem they have share with you is called Superior Customer Service!!!

I used to have a hard-working customer who only bathed and changed clothes on weekends. If he came in on Monday, he would be clean, freshly shaven, and wearing clean clothing. By Friday, he had a week's beard, kind of "rusty" hands, face and arms, and his clothing had all kinds of spilled debris, food, etc. If he came in on Friday and I saw him coming, I would meet him in the lobby if it was fairly empty, ask him to have a seat on the couch and we conducted business there. I had a small office and could not handle the odiferous aura he left upon leaving. He was a good person and always paid as agreed, but was a challenge due to his "personal" habits, etc.

My "favorite" was a retired priest who not only had a gambling problem which necessitated his coming into my office nearly every day to cover his checks; he was also an escapee from a nursing home, wouldn't bathe and wouldn't let anyone else help him. As if that weren't bad enough in my small office, one day he came in and lost bladder control in my new upholstered chair. Yikes!

I have seen muddy footprints and a trail of hay more than once in our lobby. Maybe that is so they can find their way back, I just dunno.

Sometimes it is hygiene, sometimes it can be medical reasons that cause an offensive odor. I have even not hired people because of an foul odor coming from them. There may be some ADA implications there, but my reasoning doesn't stink.

Bad breath and body odor are horrible, I know. But, try having a customer sitting at your desk and tiny roaches start crawling out of her hair! YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This thread is grossing me out.

That last customer sounds like an alien from Men in Black.

Oh my gosh. I had NO idea.

I am ROTFL.

Sometimes, on a day like today, I just have to jump in. I had a customer who mowed lawns for a living. He would collect payment as he went from house to house and would put the checks in his wallet. His wallet went in his pocket and by the time he got to our office, he, the wallet and the checks were a sweaty mess. It's quite difficult to endorse a check when it is damp. I usually had to wipe the sweat off my counter too...Blech!

What about perfume or cologne? That is pretty tough to take sometimes. Not to mention the customer that smells like they smoked three Camels at once in the car with the windows up before coming into the office.
We found that citrus air fresheners were most useful. Orange was our preference.... Happy Friday everyone!

We had a customer to leave fleas behind one day at a secretary's desk. After the customer left the secretary kept jumping and scratching and having a "fit". We finally went and looked and sure enough there were fleas hopping around on the carpet under her desk. We also had a head teller that didn't mind letting anyone know that they didn't smell good. She has been know to spray them with desinfectant as they turned to leave her window!

This happened back in the 70's when I was a rookie ag lender. I had a bachelor farmer customer with poor (no) housekeeping habits. He came to my office one day carrying a large cardboard folio of farm records. We sat down at my desk and had a cup of coffee. When we started to talk business, he reached into the folio and yanked out all the records at once. A virtual Niagara of mouse-nibbled paper bits and mouse droppings cut loose, fluttering over and completely covering the desk, me, the coffee cups, and the floor! It was even in my hair (had some). It didn't bother the customer - he just sat there and pieced together the bigger puzzle pieces. Then he asked to borrow the scotch tape!

And in keeping with the BOL tradition, there must be a dissenting point of view. Being from a very rural area in Appalachia, our banks have had more than our share of hard-working customers with less than perfect hygiene habits. However, when I was a branch administrator over our network of branch offices, nothing would peeve me more (and be sure to catch my ire) than to see a customer service/front-line employee whip out the can of Lysol or air freshener in the presence of customers and worse yet - make comments and references about the situation while other customers were present. Even though the employee may have waited until the offensive customer left the building, they did not usually wait until the lobby was empty. It was my position that this showed another side of our bank's personality to customers; while we may treat our customers nice to their face, when they leave, it's another story. (In addition to being just plain rude.) We are all professionals and we should be respectful and wait the few extra minutes to ensure there are no customers remaining in the lobby before we try and get rid of the offensive odor or substances.

Every bank office has a resident nut case. I still remember customers with problems like those cited, and we accepted the working person as they were, but what we had the most difficulty with were the little old ladies that took all of the paper products from the rest room, or those that would come in a couple of times a day and dump a box of sugar cubes in their purse from the coffee bar. One gentleman would send his young son in with a very large bag to take all of the refreshment we put out for customers. Or the non customer with no ID that sued us for the price of his shirt that he tore putting his fist through our front window because we wouldn't cash his out of state third party check.

Plus I think we all have had the elderly person that escaped from the home and would come to the bank because our people were nice to them.

My nut case list is long and I have no doubt those on this forum have an equal or larger list.

The neat thing is Banking Is People and you do get to associate with some terrific people. After 30 years in banking the good people list is just awsome to reflect on

I worked for a large international bank for 10 years, and many foreign customers did not have the same hygiene habits as americans. My favorite less than hygienic customer was a foreign gentlemen who had never had any experience with an ATM machine. He LOVED the machine im my lobby, and had the most amazing habit of yelling everything out loud to the machine, like his name, his PIN number, the amount of money he wanted, etc. (No amount of explaining could get him to stop!) After he received his money, he would plant a BIG KISS on the machine to thank it! Needless to say, I had a big box of wipes, and I cleaned that ATM every day!
Leslie

I think the staff at the first bank I worked for was pretty accepting of odor issues. We were in southern Michigan farm country, and we had our share of cattle, chicken, and pig (PLEASE wipe your feet) farmers. You could tell when the fields were being fertilized, or when the stalls in the barn had been mucked out.

Our biggest challenge was politely ending the 'conversation that would not end'. A couple of our unwritten rules of engagement were: "Don't get Millie started about the grandkids when we're balancing, or on Fridays after 2:00"; and "Never, ever talk to Jack about the space aliens". I learned that last one the hard way.

Jack was 70-something, with maybe 3 teeth. He wore a long, heavy coat year-round, and one of those leather bomber hats with woolly ear flaps. He sat on the benches along the main drag in town, playing the accordion. And since he was hard of hearing, he had to play it loud. He talked loud, too.

But the only time I heard him whisper was when he cornered me at the side of the lobby one day & told me that aliens were watching him. He was absolutely convinced of it, and he wanted to know if we'd plugged up all the holes in the walls that they watch through. Then he showed me the aluminum foil he kept in that bomber hat "to block their signals".

This was likely the most tragic conversation I've ever had. Anonymous was right - "banking is people" - but sometimes we aren't all that prepared for what they throw at us.