Bad customers...Bad Bad Bad Customers!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I think it’s fine to use if you’re talking to someone who’s obviously not able to help you. This does happen - companies hire low-level people for $9 an hour and get them to read a script. They’re told never to deviate from this, because of course they’re not qualified to do otherwise.

Not all companies do this, though, and it’s frustrating to deal with someone who assumes that because you’re the person who answers the call, you therefore must not be qualified to answer. There are good representatives out there at companies of all sizes, and I’ve had many people demand to speak to a supervisor right when I picked up the phone when all they needed was a simple transaction done that I could easily handle. This is what makes companies force customers through scripts - customers abused the benefit of the doubt.

When I was taking supervisor calls at a major call center (outsourced support), even low-level reps had basically the same powers as supervisors anyway. Pretty much all of the calls went like this:

a) I’d reiterate the policy exactly the same way as the rep, and the person would accept it because I’m the supervisor.

b) The person would demand to speak to MY supervisor, and then all the way up the chain to the company president. I’d tell them no, and they’d freak out, and eventually I’d end up hanging up due to abuse. These people generally always wanted something that was impossible - like major changes to our client’s product line, or to bill us for 18 overdraft fees that were their fault, or to charge us $500 an hour for the 15 minutes they waited on hold during a busy period.

(In extremely rare cases, we would escalate to the call center manager; generally this was only done if the person had a potentially real complaint about another supervisor. This was done just to make sure that the person didn’t go directly to the client’s corporate offices without us investigating the complaint. It was pretty pointless anyway since everyone who got to this point basically was just lying to get something in return. In this one or two cases a year, every single person I ever knew about demanded escalation to the next level. In this case, it was a regional manager of about a dozen call centers, each with different clients. Absolutely not.)

At my current job, most people are OK since we have zero hold time and are pretty customer friendly in every policy, but you get the occasional crackpot who wants something unreasonable. Unreasonable people generally always want to talk to someone else other than you - they want to wear you down because a lot of companies basically pay people off to go away. Most of the time, offering a refund takes the wind out of their sails, and since most of our products are under $50, this just makes a lot more sense than going crazy to try to help a crackpot.

If someone refuses a refund because they have unreasonable demands or is abusive to our staff, we have in the past just refunded them anyway and told them that’s it, goodbye, we no longer have a liability to offer support to you. Extremely, extremely rare, but there are those people out there who just can’t be reasoned with. I remember one who insisted that some turn of phrase on the website was misleading. I explained what it meant (it was involved with what the software does and supported configurations). That’s not what the customer needed, so I offered to refund him in full immediately, even though the customer was pretty clearly misreading it and didn’t have the technical ability to understand basic computer functions. He said this was unacceptable and that we were committing fraud, and that if we did not compensate him for his time trying the product that he would call the police, etc. etc. He was a super important lawyer who bills some astronomical number per hour and wanted that money right now. Nobody ever, before or since, misunderstood what we were trying with that sentence, and I even had the web guy rephrase it to remove any possibility that it could be read in the way the customer read it, but he just wouldn’t let go. I escalated him to my boss and he was no more reasonable. My boss just refunded him and told him to go away.

42

Part of the problem is that it’s so easy to get away with this stuff.
I used to work the front counter for an industrial supply company that had a very liberal return policy. Keep the customers happy at all costs (i.e., condition the dishonest ones to take advantage of us)!

A guy came in saying he wanted to exchange a defective hoist, with a 3-week old receipt. “Just stopped working.” It had cost something like $800 new. Okay, I say, and I look up his customer history, as was standard procedure, and found he had bought the new hoist at one of our other locations, exchanged it as defective the next day at another location, echanged that one as defective at yet another location, and so on, six times.

“Huh,” I said, “you’ve gotten six bad hoists in 3 weeks?”
He was clearly surprised that I picked up on that, and said, “Oh… yeah, they just keep going out on me.” So I began quizzing him on how he was using it, whether he was exceeding the weight capacity and so forth, and he acted quite offended that I would suggest he didn’t know how to properly use a hoist. Then I opened the box to find what was clearly a very old hoist. It was the same brand and model, but it was obviously well-used, worn, chipped paint, scratched, etc. Not only that, the brand logo had been changed years before and this one sported the old logo.

So I said, “I’ll be right back,” and I went and spoke to the manager and explained the situation. We both agreed that the guy probably had a bunch of old hoists and figured out a way to replace them all for the price of one, and we were amazed that he kept getting away with it.

He came out front with me and very calmy said, “Sir, this is obviously not the hoist you bought 3 weeks ago and we will not accept the return. Furthermore, I think you’re scamming us and I’m going to put a flag on your account notifying all locations not to accept a return or exchange this item for you.”

The customer got kind of huffy but didn’t put up much of a protest. After all, he’d already stolen 6 hoists and must have figured it was best to cut bait at this point, and he left. I checked the account every now and then, and there never was any more activity.

But my manager was pissed that his scam had gone on for so long, and called the managers of all the other locations about their employees’ due diligence on returns. He told me that the prevailing attitude was to side with the customer for fear of losing future business. Which makes no sense at all since this guy’s “future business” essentially entailed stealing from us. Crazy.

43

Our policy is really simple.

Once you threaten to sue, we can no longer assist you. We can only advise you to have your attorney contact our corporate legal department, and end the call. That is partly because we don’t want our people sticking both feet in their mouth in response to what the unreasonable customer might say, and partly because we don’t want to have our people attempting to negotiate based on threats from the customer, or giving in to unreasonable demands because of those threats.

I’ve talked to a couple of attorneys who have demanded their billing rate in compensation for the time spend arguing bullshit with us. The straight up answer is NO. Don’t like it? Well, if you really are an Attorney, you should know the likelyhood of you actually getting that money out of a large corporation is about as likely as a basketball sized diamond dropping from the sky into your lap.

44

Occasionally, people would say this to me when I was a retail grunt, and I’ve NEVER understood why they thought that I’d care. You came in, made unreasonable demands, yelled at me when I couldn’t comply, and you think that it personally hurts me that you’re leaving and not ever coming back? Now, tell me “I’m shopping here again tomorrow!” and then I’ll be genuinely upset.

45

This isn’t exactly a scam, but it was a case of customers trying to pull shit they knew they shouldn’t.

I used to run a pizza restaurant half a block from a university. We served beer, and charged much less than the local bars and whatnot. So we had a lot of college kids in all the time, and trying to prevent/deny/catch underage drinking was a constant struggle.

A group of kids would come in and order pitchers of beer, and nine times out of ten there would be at least one person who “forgot their ID.” My policy was clear: if I catch someone in a group drinking without having shown ID, the beer gets taken away without a refund, and the entire group gets kicked out and told never to return. I would tell them this up front. Do you think they listened? Of course not. When they got the boot, did they show understanding that they had fucked up and had to pay the consequences? Hell no. I was just being an asshole, of course.

In a sightly different vein, this is one of my favorite underage drinking stories: Two guys came in and sat down at a booth. After putting his stuff down, one of them went to the bathroom. While he was in there, the second kid went into the first one’s wallet, took his ID, and tried to order beer with it. This was called to my attention by one of my employees: “look at this picture. I don’t think it’s him.”

I looked, and immediately knew my employee was correct. I knew the guy in the ID, you see - he was a former employee, and had just spoken with me a couple of days prior about coming back to work for me. So with a smile I approached the kid and said “You know what? I know Bob here. You are not Bob. I suggest you leave now.”

The kid got all indignant and said “aren’t you gonna give the ID back?” I replied that no, I would not give it back. Then I pointed to a couple of cops who were eating their dinner about twenty feet away and said “you’re lucky I don’t give it them.” The look on the kid’s face was priceless as he literally turned and bolted from the restaurant at a full run.

Since I knew “Bob,” and knew he most likely would not have willingly given out his ID, I held on to it and gave it back to him when he came to talk to me (and apologize profusely). If I hadn’t known Bob, the ID would have gone straight to the cops. Bob still got his old job back, too.

46

Catching fake IDs used to be so fun. I once moved back to my old home town from Oklahoma, and happened to get someone trying to use a fake Oklahoma drivers license. Problem was, I knew what one should look like. Here, let me show you, I just got back and this is what yours should look like, see the difference? :stuck_out_tongue:

47

Many many times in my youth I heard this:

“So yesterday I went to Star Market to get some beers, and this bitch at the counter was all like ‘You got some ID?’ and I was all like ‘No, I left it at home’ and she was all like ‘Get out punk’ and I was all like ‘oh yeah? Well I’m going to fuckin’ go home and get my fuckin’ ID, bitch!’, and I fuckin’ walked out of there!’”

This was usually followed by multiple high fives. Yeah, you showed her!

48

They’re sociopaths. They’ll transition seamlessly from just returning paint to returning paint because it wasn’t mixed right, usually done in a hostile manner (i.e. “This god damned store is ridiculous. Can’t mix paint right and won’t take it back. Just after my money.”)

It’s actually pretty interesting when you’re able to take a long view of it. There’s definitely a system, a sequence of the paths they’ll use to get one over. They usually start with aggression, trying to intimidate you into getting what they want or at least rile you up so they can complain about your customer service skills. After that fails they move towards cooperation, trying to get you on their side against the store (“I’m sorry for losing my temper, you’re obviously a great employee and they don’t belong putting you through this either.”) When that fails they move into, “Let me speak to your manager mode.” On the walk to the managers office they transition to irrationality. The closer we get the more irrational, irate and profane they get. Depending on what manager is on duty that day they either back me up or cave in order avoid confrontation and make me feel like an ass.

It seems like Home Depot’s corporate policy is to prefer the latter (except in cases of obvious fraud). Make the customer think he’s been taken care of and get him back to the store. Sometimes I wonder if that actually does make the store money in the long run since it’s not uncommon for a “contractor” to routinely return custom orders because it “doesn’t fit” (read, “I don’t know what I’m doing and framed the opening to small”). Sure the guy may spend $40,000 a year at the store, but how much of that is profit and how much of that profit is erased by the $9500 loss we took when we took back a 9’0"x5’0" bow window because it “didn’t fit”.

49

This always amazes the hell out of me. Businesses go out of their way not to piss off people who cost them money by being dishonest. Do we live in some sort of bizzarro world?

That’s even the case in academia, at least in some schools.

One of my grad school profs told me that he’s had students’ parents in his office quite a few times trying to get their kid’s grade raised, or trying to talk the prof out of giving the student an F.

On a few occasions, when it becomes clear that their demands are not going to be met, they start to talk about getting a lawyer and suing. At that point, my prof stands up, declares the meeting over, and tells them that he can no longer talk with them. Any future correspondence on the matter will have to be done through the university’s lawyers.

Of course, once he calls their bluff like this, they are usually ever so eager to rescind their threat and to go back to talking, but once the threat is made you can’t take it back, and he simply holds up his hands and says, “Sorry, but i can’t talk to you anymore.”

50

I agree with Crawlspace - they’re sociopaths. There are bad customers where there is some sort of misunderstanding, then there are the bad customers who just seem to make a point of doing things the dishonest way. These are the bad apples people talk about.

I used to tend bar at a hometown sort of place. Lots of regular customers, some of whom would be looking for angles like sending back half finished drinks because it “wasn’t made right”. Then there was that guy, the big spender. He still makes me gnash my teeth. Always had to have the top shelf brands, couldn’t stomach the cheap stuff. There was always something wrong with his drink that he didn’t discover until it was almost gone, like I didn’t gave him a full shot, so he wanted his money back - or a new drink. I guess I was trying to save money for my employer, I don’t know. Now this wasn’t an expensive place, you could make it a double for 50 cents more but that wasn’t the point. He had to make sure that everyone knew that he had money but was getting ripped off. He would try to run me out of change by using $100 bills, then expect me to give him his drink for free if I couldn’t break the bill.

51

When I was a first level support tech, about once every 6 weeks I would get something from a second level support tech saying “You gave me this call saying this guy was an asshole, and he was the sweetest person in the world”. My first week as a second level support tech, I saw the other side of it.

People will be complete screaming dickface assholes to the front line people because they want the person to be intimidated into giving in, or getting them to a manager that will do it for them. Once they get to the manager, they usually know that being that much of a dick isn’t going to get them what they want, so they change their tune. A small but significant number of people will throw in outright lies, claiming that the first level person has insulted them, lied to them, whatever.

When the manager/supervisor denies them, most people, even if they get angry, will back off or reluctantly accept it. It’s the true sociopaths, nutjobs and greedy fuckers who will then return to the first path, accusing you of insulting them, demanding YOUR supervisor, threatening to sue, blah, blah, blah. Honestly, the best way of dealing with it is NOT to give in and give them what they want, but to understand that this is just another tactic on their part that has absolutely nothing to do with you personally. It’s all about them. In public places, store managers will generally give in to silence the person rather than allowing the public drama to make other customers (real customers) uncomfortable. I don’t blame them, as it is easier and faster than having to call the cops, wait 45 minutes for them to arrive, risk damage to the store or physical violence, etcetera. If you’re working a chain store, it’s not your money and it isn’t worth your life or health.

52

My fiancee is a high school teacher so these all sound familiar to me. Especially #5 - some kids even copy/paste the footnote citations!

53

Someone tried to rob a bank nearby here. Stuck up the tellers and took whatever cash they had. Their getaway method? They decided to walk home. In a city that pulls out the helis and everything else for a bank robbery.

Stupid, stupid woman.

54

My crew used to love me for listening patiently to someone’s rant and saying quietly." I understand. the answer is still no" When some dick would demand to speak to the manager they’d almost giggle.

Two stories about a good friend who had a take no shit from anybody attitude.

He learned it by working in a music store for an owner/manager who wouldn’t tolerate crap from customers. One day a customer was being a particularly aggressive haggler and my friend was dealing with him and his adolescent son. Finally after serious haggling, a lunch break followed by more haggling he gave the guy a smoking good deal on the item. The guy had won.
When they got to check out and he gave the guy the total plus tax the guy said. “Oh no you said that included tax”
“No sir I didn’t, and I absolutely can’t do that. I’ve already slashed the price.”
“Oh no that’s what you said and now you’re changing the deal”
“No sir I never said that included tax. I gave you a great deal but you still have to pay tax”
“Oh that’s bullshit,”
The assistant manager intervenes and the customer is swearing up and down he was promised the price with tax included. My friend walks away because he’s getting pissed and is afraid he’ll lose it. In the backroom the owner/manager sees he is upset and asks whats wrong and he explains about the customer. The owner walks out and goes to the cash register that is slightly elevated from the sales floor. The assistant manager was ringing the sale up and caving to the customer but the owner manager takes the receipt out of his hand and says “NO DEAL!”

The customer is dumbfounded. “What do you mean?”
“You were offered a great price and didn’t take it.I’m the owner, now it’s no deal. You’re not getting a discount at all”
“Wait a minute. This guy was just ringing it up for me. Aren’t you going to honor what your employee said?”
“I sure am. My employee said you’re a fucking asshole and I believe him. Now hit the road”
I’m sure his son learned a valuable lesson about haggling.

2nd story
Same friend comes out to the front to find the assistant manager being raked over the coals by an irate customer. The guy isn’t just loud, he’s vulgar and insulting and the intimidated assistant manager is taking it. My friend listens for a while and quickly decides that’s enough. He walks to the door behind the customer , holds it open and says “Hey Buddy” when the customer turns around he points to the open door.
“Take you attitude and that filthy mouth of yours out of here right now”
“Now just a fucking minute…”
“You’ve got 5 seconds to walk out on your own. After that I’m throwing you out”
“Well you can’t…”
“1”
“Goddammit I’ll…”
“2”
When Danny got pissed there was something about him that let you know he didn’t make idle threats. The guy left mumbling manly curses as he went.

You can get away with more of that when you work in an independent store. It feels good to occasionally shut the assholes down.

55

When I was fresh out of high school and an undergrad I worked at Victoria’s Secret Catalog. I worked in customer service and then got moved to the “Office of the President” which was really just a title given to about 8 of us so we sounded important. Our job was to take “executive” level complaint calls and try to resolve them. If the CS reps got a call escalated it would go to a lead. Leads calls were escalated to supervisor. Supervisors could escalate to a manager or us. I worked in the evening so a lot of calls went straight from the rep to me.

One evening a rep called through with a woman who asked for a supervisor. She’d called in an order and then asked for customer service. She told the rep that she was promised free shipping on her next order but the sales rep didn’t give it to her. The service rep did. Then she said she needed the service rep to send UPS out for a pickup because the bra she got was damaged. The rep, knowing that you don’t send UPS out to do a pickup on a $20 bra, told her that if she mailed it in we’d reimburse her for shipping since it was damaged. She refused saying she wouldn’t be inconvenienced for shoddy workmanship. The rep told her to keep the bra with our apologies. She said “Ok, but send UPS out anyway because I have a jacket to return to you. It came to me damaged, too.” The rep refused and she escalated to me.

I took a few minutes to look at her account and then took the call. She rambled on and on just railing about the poor service while I looked her account over. She finally said to me something like “I know on your screen it shows how much I’ve spent with you guys, another rep told me that. Take a look at it. I’m worth more to your company than you are.”

I looked and she’d spent (no lie) around $75,000 over about 6 years. Wow. Still, when I started poking around a bit I noticed that she did a lot of returns. To shut her up I sent out UPS to pick up the jacket and she said “Not the bra, it was given to me” and I told her that I’d call her in a few days to make sure it got taken care of.

In the meantime I spent HOURS picking apart her account. I even stayed late off the clock to look. I’m so glad I did.

This woman had been running a scam for years. VS was (at that time) VERY liberal with their return policy to the point of ridiculous.

Here is what she’d do:
[ol]
[li]Sales people would get incentives for selling certain things. If there was an incentive push on a certain style of panties they’d try to sell up those. For every sale they made they’d get (a small) bonus. Those can add up. So, she’d always say yes to at least a few of their suggestions to make them happy. Then she’d tell them she was supposed to get free shipping on her order because of an earlier mixup. Free shipping was something sales could hand out easily and they were happy for their incentive sales so she’d get it. So, clothes coming in without shipping. She’d use a VS credit card and defer her billing.[/li][li]She’d wear the items as much as she wanted because she knew that at that time you could return anything to VS no matter how long it was.[/li][li]When she was ready to make a return (probably around the time the bill was due) she’d call customer service and bully people into sending UPS out to pick up the package by saying the items were damaged. When packages come back to the warehouse they dispose of undergarments automatically and then check the other products to see if they can be sold again. They didn’t automatically know it was returned for damage (might be wrong size/color) so they never caught on to her.[/li][/ol]

When I finally went back and matched up orders and returns I found out that out of $75K in sales she had literally only paid for and kept less than $2,000 in items.I took this info to the customer service director who had me go to a conference call meeting with her so she could inform other people. They decided they would ban her by name, address, and credit cards but first they would test her. For the next month they monitored all of her packages. Her orders were flagged so a supervisor would pick and pack her order and then bring the box to the director’s office. The director would inspect and photograph the items. Then they’d ship it out.

They busted her. She called in to return one of the items and said it had a mustard stain on it. A girl in my department talked to her and said “That’s really unusual, I’ll have UPS pick it up and have it delivered to my office.” Sure enough, she spread mustard all over the item and sent it back.

The director ended up having the legal department write her a letter telling her that her business was no longer wanted and would not be accepted and then called her. They sent the letter certified mail and she told the woman what we’d found and said that if she continued to try to purchase clothes from them she would have legal take over her case.

Naturally she could have started ordering via someone else or using money orders to hide her name, but they put some kind of exception in the database to monitor her region for odd or heavy purchasing to be sure.

It’s people like her that caused them, as a company, to change their return policy.

56

How about you? Did you get an Attagirl from higher up for starting the process to pry this barnacle loose?

57

I did! They gave me two $500 gift certificates to the Limited Brands store of my choice! At that age and time I thought that was RICH STUFF and I was thrilled

thanks for asking :slight_smile:

58

Wow, good catch and dedication.
I first heard the term chronic returner at Circuit City. Customers would buy stuff just to play with it , out of boredom I guess, and then return it. They liked us to believe that they were good regular customers. They were regular alright. Just not good.
Your lady was even worse. There are still a few companies out there that have very liberal return policies like LL Bean but I’ll wager they keep an eye out for chronic returners.

59

Well, actually the truth is if you actually are a really important attorney/physician/stock broker/ business person who bills into the hundreds per hour, you have a secretary to actually handle your shit for you. Cell phone and (most) internet/cable companies allow you to add another “person” to talk on your behalf, and their name is on record with your account.

The blowhard probably makes 75k and was grasping at straws.

60

Also, Sleeps, that is a CRAZY story. My only question is, why did she demand UPS? Did I miss part of it, or was that just part of her schtick?