A classic case of a customer service rep NOT LISTENING to the words coming out of your mouth.
I was just placing an order from a catalog that comes in my dad’s name over the phone. She asked for the customer # on the back cover, I gave it to her. She asked for my name, I gave it to her.
CSR: That’s not the name I am showing on record
Me: That would be Gerald, my father. He passed away several years ago.
CSR: So he won’t be placing orders with us again?
Me: 8-/ He’s…DEAD.
CSR: Oh. sorry.
I mean…seriously? If my DEAD father places another order with them… I really want to know about it!
Well, since I do CSR for a living, on the phone, I have to say that I speak clearly enough I doubt that she mistook passed away for moved away. And I’ve never known anyone that didn’t know what passed away meant.
Whatever, I found it quite funny and just wanted to share.
Le sigh… My Dad died in '91 and we’re still having to insist he won’t be needing credit cards, etc. Maybe it’s karma since I once told AOL (on the phone) I was dead so they’d finally give up and let me cancel the service. I was desperate, and dead.
Where was this CSR located? I read recently where India was outsourcing some of their CSR contracts to the Philippines because the people there understand the US idioms such as “passing away” better than the Indian CSRs.
I am sure the CSRs in India understand “passing away” just as well and maybe better. India was a British colony for a long time and medium of education is still largely English.
Most Indians who work for call centers are young people and one of the fundamental requirements to be eligible to work for a call center in India is to have reasonably good English speaking skills.
Since it is the same call center that handles calls from different countries like the US, Canada, UK and Australia, the reps are then made to go thro a tailored course to make them familiar and be able to talk in the same accent as their clients.
She sounded very American… I don’t think she was from India or anywhere else. The company is The Lakeside Collection. shrug Like I said, I just found it amusing more than anything else. A friend I told about this said that when the CSR said ‘so he won’t be placing orders with us anymore?’ I should have replied:
‘Why yes, in fact he & Jesus are going over the catalog right now!’
This reminds me of something I read once. A reporter was sent to cover the Johnstown Flood. He cabled his editor a piece starting something like this: “God looked down upon the devastation wrought in Johnstown today, and thought…”
His editor immediately cabled back: FORGET THE FLOOD. INTERVIEW GOD.
Another article on Philippines Overtakes India as Hub of Call Centers - NYTimes.com. I found several places that says the euphemism “passed away” is believed to be predominantly US. I cannot find out when “passed away” came into use but ngrams show ‘‘died’’ dropping sharply about 1920.
Years ago, I was on a call with a fella from a call center. He called me, and I owed a credit card company some money, and we were negotiating a payoff amount. He kept saying “rupees” instead of dollars, and I kept screwing with him because he didn’t seem to realize he was saying rupees in place of dollars. So he would say something like, “if you could make a one-time payment of 600 rupees…” and I would say, “OK, that’s about 10 bucks, right? I can do that.” And it would go over his head, and we went round like that until I just hung up.
Makes me wonder what currency symbol is used in India for rupees. If his screen said “$600” and that’s just what a sign in his local food store would say, it’d sure be easy to say the wrong thing when not thinking.
I am so sorry to hear about your dad. Some reps just don’t have the brains that God gave a tree sloth. (I used to answer toll free numbers also.)
Best one I ever called was Frontier Telephone. I was calling for a lady I worked for named Meg. She was a therapist at a clinic and was blind. I called the customer service number and spoke to a young man named Jason. I explained that I was Meg’s secretary and was calling for information, because I had heard that visually impaired people were eligible for free directory assistance.
He tells me that there is a form that the doctor must fill out, and I told him that was fine, please fax it to the office. He then asks me if she is a Frontier customer. Headslap #1.
This is the best one though…as we are finishing the conversation, he proceeds to ask me if I knew that blind people receive the directory assistance service at no charge because they are not able to look the number up in the phone book. I thanked him for that bit of information and hung up…and then almost died laughing…Here’s your sign, Jason…
English here- it’s commonly used this side of the pond too.
My Grandpa recently died, and my Mum applied to get some documents he had stored at the bank, having sent them copies of all the required documentation as the executor of his will.
