Customer service jobs – be it through telephone, or email, or even face-to-face – can be the most distressing yet a bolstering avenue for your career. Especially for the youths and even more specifically for business and management students, who are on the brink of starting their career, my advice for them would be to take up customer service jobs as a start.

People considering themselves as major introverts might think this as a dreadful nightmare (and even might stop reading this article – but don’t click the exit/back button just yet!). What most people fail to realize is that customer service jobs are such where they need to listen more than speak – and introverts are good at listening (or at least pretend to listen). While you might also feel like killing people for their stupidity during your customer service job, there are a lot of additional perks that come along with your salary and benefits.

Youths starting their careers are usually in the late teens, which is a phase when they feel they can do anything – they have the energy, enthusiasm, and passion for a lot of things. Also, they get easily furious and angry, with boiling hot blood flowing through the veins in their age. A customer service job helps in controlling this anger-temperament. They have to hold back their words of aggravation in many instances while dealing with customers. This will help them calm down even in similar occasions in their personal lives as well. Furthermore, it will also help the youths teach manners and respect. Usually in South Asian culture, no one is called with their first name only in the offices unlike the Western world – you either add ‘sir’ or ‘jee’ to express respect, regardless of how stupid, ridiculous, or annoying the other party is.

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The customer service job will also help the youths understand the human nature, and prepare to act accordingly. After dealing with hundreds of customers, one can get acquainted with the variations of human behaviors and their actions in a certain state of minds. For example, if you work at a front desk and see someone charging at you with red-face or closed fists, then you better start preparing to handle a furious customer who will dump all the accusations to you as if you’ve just eloped with his/her child. Thus, it will also help the youths to understand compassion, and empathize with the other person they’re talking to.

Finally, and most importantly, people with customer service orientation are the ones who develop good public relations (PR, the official jargon) and demonstrate visible results within the organization. Imagine an accountant who just inputs numbers to Excel sheets – could their results be ever visible as compared to the customer service personnel? Heck, no – never! This is why customer service personnel are the ones who quickly climb up the corporate ladder, get quick promotions, and eventually become better managers than the rest. With all these benefits, the stupidity of customers comes for free – which can infuriate you during the job, but becomes a good dose of laughter later on. And yes, you will always have a story to share when you clasp that beer bottle and hangout with a bunch of your buddies.