After six months in customer service, I thought to myself yesterday, this isn’t so bad, to be honest. At least, compared to my last job (a long story). I actually enjoy talking to a lot of these people who treat me like a human being and are sociable. Yet, every once in awhile a colossal asshole rises from the pack and adheres him or herself to my memory with a searing blaze of idiocy and malevolence. This is one of those stories.
Lately things have been worse. People are tense about the current situation in the world. (It’s very surreal to have little old ladies call and start freaking out about the war on the phone. I mean, we sell beauty products and acne medication, but they just can’t stop bringing it up.) People yell a lot, and get upset a lot more when they’re tense and worried. I understand this and I try to take it all in stride. I was briefly a 911 dispatcher, and I wish we used some of their training because I find it very helpful. I can usually calm down someone from completely flipping out and screaming to polite and even thankful in about a minute or two. It’s a handy skill.
Yet, there are some people who aren’t just upset about the situation or stressed about money. I can understand people who get a little miffed when they get a bill they’re not expecting or when their account is overdrawn because they forgot to allocate for an installment charge. Most people listen to reason. We get a lot of people who have simply misunderstood the situation, we explain it and they usually say “oh” and even chuckle; we make errors sometimes too, and we correct them. Most of the time everything is fine and dandy, and fortunately the company that we provide customer service for is pretty tolerant with issuing refunds, free products, and so on when appropriate.
I had a chap the other day though, let’s call him John Smith. He was one of those one in a thousand calls where a person just refuses to listen to reason. It gets to the point where I even wonder why they call, because they have already made up their mind!
Actually, John Smith (I never refer to name and call people Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. because we don’t know if it’s them calling or a family member, or whatnot, and also it’s really easy to mix up genders with some folks’ phone voices) insisted that he was DOCTOR John Smith. He pointedly introduced himself this way. “This is DOCTOR John Smith” (emphasis most certainly his). This always irks me. What do I care if you are a doctor? I am very happy you got your PhD or went through medical school or whatever, but you’re calling for your acne treatment and I don’t care who you are. You can work at Hardees part-time for all I care, you get the exact same treatment from me.
Anyhow, DOCTOR Smith informes me how VERY important he is right off the bat. He had a medical practice and his time is VERY important. He was so very interested in our product but we have wasted his valuable time and now he doesn’t want to buy it. Ok, I wonder, now why are you calling? If your time is so valuable, can’t you just dictate a letter to your secretary and have her mail one to us? But, oh no, Doctor My-Time-Is-Incredibly-Valuable proceeds to chew me out for a good twenty minutes.
Why, might you ask? Have we made an error on his bank statement, making him call a busy evening and wait on hold? Have we sent him the wrong thing? Does he have a damaged product? No, not that, it’s even worse: he was reading our web site and he wasted his time reading it for half an hour.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, may I ask why?” I foolishly venture.
Well, at that point he proceeds to tell me that he is going to contact the Attorney General because we are a SCAM. We malignly try to mislead people. Why? Because we are a subscription service, and it doesn’t say that on the front page. No, it says that on another page (and not in fine print either, it’s in BIG print). But, because he didn’t get to that page first, and because he was reading our lists of ingredients (which, for some reason, list just that, not how our services work!) first. Now, we’ve wasted all his Valuable Time and he demands compensation for it.
Let me explain a little here. We have an acne treatment that is used continuously. It is intended to be preventative, and it comes in a two month supply. When you buy at a certain price (a discount) you get them automatically every two months. I won’t lie and say the reason isn’t monetary, but a lot of it is because the product will go down drastically in effectiveness if people run out of it, wait two weeks to call and order and have it delivered, and start again. We are actually very nice about returns (even for stuff that’s been entirely used) and you can cancel it. We’ve been in business a long time and we are not a scam. However, people see this and they think that subscription automatically means scam – not being wary, which I can see, but that this should be automatically illegal or something. The good DOCTOR “Smith” apparently felt this way.
So, when he gets to the HUGE statement that says you ARE SUBSCRIBED TO A SERVICE, IF YOU DO NOT WANT MORE PLEASE CANCEL (which, amazingly, a lot of people miss. It’s like two sentences long in big print right above the “Order” button, as well as in huge print on the invoice, the welcome letter, and it’s in the catalog also) he freaks out and calls on the phone because we have wasted his valuable time trying to scam him.
I try to explain, you can CANCEL! He says, “Oh no, I know what will happen, I’ll be getting them forever and you’ll charge my card multiple times for the same package! I’m not giving you people my card number!” (Why on earth it’s ok to give a company his card number over the Internet without the subscription, but with is a SCAM, is apparently a nuance I was missing)
At this point he starts freaking out about how he’s going to “report us” to law enforcement, etc. etc. At this point we haven’t even charged him for anything. I can understand when people get a bit upset when they thought their kid cancelled but didn’t, or sent back a return with “cancel” on it but it arrived late and another package had been shipped already. But he starts in with the lawyer-talk and how he’s going to bring down our whole “scam”.
I try to interject that you don’t even have to pay with a credit card. We can take checks or money orders, and after the first package, if you fail to cancel, we send the packages out with bills. I can’t say anything because he constantly interrupts me. I get so far as “Sir. there is an alternative to paying by credit card–” and he starts again. After a few tries I just turn the volume on my headset down a bit and let him wind down.
Now he starts saying “I want the name of the president of your company, and I want you to transfer me to talk to him right now.” (This is 8pm on a Sunday night.) After being interrupted about ten times, I explain the president of the company is not available to take calls transferred from customer srevice. I personally don’t know the name of the president of our client’s company (we are a third-party customer service organization) and I don’t even have access to the corporate number. However, our policy is, if we don’t have the information, we’ll get it.
So, I explain to him, I’d be happy to take down his name and number and call him back with the best information we can provide. Alternately, I’d be happy to give him an address to mail a letter to that we can forward to the corporate office (really, it would not likely get as far as the CEO, it’s a huge corporation, but they do take customer mail quite seriously).
He declines and wants to talk to the president of the company right then. I explain again, this is simply not possible. He says “What, am I not IMPORTANT enough?” I wish I could say “yes”. What does he think? Do you think I can just pass the phone to him and that he’s sitting in the next cubicle?
He starts saying that I know I’m lying, that this is all part of a scam and that if it wasn’t a scam we’d put all the information right on the front page. I explain simply that this isn’t possible, we sell a lot products and we can’t have all available information right on the front page on our web site! It does say it very clearly in other places so that it would be impossible to miss before ordering unless you just didn’t read any of the information we provide. He says “No, you know why they do it, it’s because you’re trying to scam me”. At this point I even have to laugh a little bit and say “If we were trying to scam you, why would we make it so obvious to you before you even order or before we have any information about you?” I mean, if we were going to scam at least we would try to get your credit card number or name and address or something first, or else we wouldn’t be a very good scam, I think.
At this point he finally listened to what I said earlier and says, “You mentioned an alternative.” Aha! You are not hard of hearing, you are just ignoring me! So I explain the credit card number vs. check thing, and then he says “No, I’m sure I’d just get packages and return them and you’d say I’ve never got them”. This is wrong–if a customer says they’ve returned it over a certain amount of time ago, we credit back for the return. Besides, he could always get delivery confirmation if he was that worried. But, at this point, he doesn’t matter. We’re automatically liars no matter what we do.
So, now he starts making demands. “This is what you are going to do. You are going to send me this kit for the price advertised.” I say, “Ok, but that will come with the club membership.” He says, “No.” I explain again to him, as I’ve explained about ten times in the span of this conversation, you have a choice. You can get this discount for being in the subscription program or you can pay a bit more and get a one-time order. He says “No, I want the offer advertised.” I say “OK, sir, all of our advertisements explicitly say we have a membership included in that price.” He denies it; apparently because it’s not on the front page of the website, it doesn’t count. None of our policies count unless they’re posted right next to the name of our product visible at the top of the front page.
At this point I could probably have caved, thrown up my hands, and just taken an order and cancelled it later myself, but he had been such a jerk that there was no way I was going to go out of my way for him. (We shouldn’t be doing this anyway.) We don’t want the sort of people who are abusive to our customer service people and rant and scream until they get their way. Besides which, I didn’t trust him not to manipulate what I’ve said and get me in trouble later – after all I would have to enroll him and disenroll him, and he wanted to never be in the club at all. I’m sure some other customer service rep would make a mistake in how they presented it to him when he assuredly would call back, and say “So I see you cancelled your club membership…” and then he’d freak out again. He had been exceedingly rude and dismissive so far, so he was getting the policy line, and that’s it.
I explain it to him several times, calmly and politely. He starts to freak out and says “I want the highest ranking person there on the phone right now!” Oh really? Great. What a lot of people don’t know is that asking to talk to my supervisor makes my day. As far as I’m concerned, the problem is solved (I don’t have to deal with it anymore) and the senior reps who answer those calls understand that people will lie and try to get reps fired because they’re mad. I have absolutely no fear of that. My calls are often monitored; my direct supervisor knows I am never rude to customers. I explain that I’m not transferring him until I speak to the supervisor myself, and that I’ll wait on hold with them. (Most people wait on hold for a few minutes to talk to us, and we don’t want them to feel like they’re getting transferred around like a lot of the phone mazes out there, so for any situations like this, we always wait with them to make sure we explain the situation to the senior rep so that they don’t have to go through it all again and so that we can pick back up on the phone with them if necessary.)
However, I changed my schedule recently and I didn’t know that on Sunday evenings there aren’t always people available for supervisor transfers. D’oh. I wait about twenty minutes before I give up, not knowing this. Dr. My-Time-Is-Valuable is, of course, still on the line.
I explain to him calmly that nobody is currently available but that I would be, again, happy to have someone call him back directly with the information he requested. Apparently the twenty minutes in Hold Heaven have chilled him out because he actually accepts this (I really expected another ten minutes of bitching).
At the end of this call, absurdly, he is actually nice. After screaming at me and calling me a liar and a cheat, he now says “Thank you very much, I appreciate it” and hangs up. What the fuck? I guess he finally got it all in perspective.
I forwarded the message for a callback and I never heard from Dr. My-Time-is-Valuable again. It’s sort of anticlimactic, really. I wonder how long he’ll be a thorn in our sides before he gives up and finds some other company to dog. Maybe he’ll go after Planters because their mixed nuts have too many peanuts on them. After all, sorting through all those peanuts for the cashews must really waste his valuable time.
) Anywho, I listened to the tapes on a road trip with my mom and they were pretty interesting. For example, when you have the type who constantly interrupts you and tries to steamroll you, you have to break in and say, “Doctor Smith, you interrupted me,” and then continue on with what you were saying. Don’t act angry, but keep repeating as often as needed.