Y’all have left out my favorite customer call: The caller ID return call.
Me: <Company Name Here>
Caller: Yes. Someone called me?
Me: Well, I don’t know who called you. Do you do business with anyone at <Company Name> or possible one of our sub-tenants?
Caller: I don’t know. What is the name again? But can you tell me who called this number?
Me: No. We have 40 people here and I can’t keep track of them, nor do the tell me every single call they make.
Caller: Well then. *
*gets all in a huff and usually gets mad at me because I can’t monitor every single phone call. Like I can tell that. People, use your heads here! When I say I don’t know who called you, I really can’t tell. The main number of our firm shows up on caller ID no matter what extension, so I really have no clue and no control.
Have you asked the receptionist if she is, indeed, transferring these calls? If you’re a woman, there is a prevalent attitude still in the workplace that every woman on staff is expected to do secretary/receptionist duties. Your receptionist may have been told that you are her back-up, without anyone bothering to tell you (yes, this has happened to me).
Looky at all these pushed buttons! I am sooo down with this thread…
The reason why you can’t use your cellular phone right now is because you haven’t paid your bill in three months. Yes, the five letters and the six text messages sent to your phone did indeed tell you this would happen. No, I can’t turn your phone on unless you pay your bill.
The reason why you seem to keep making payments and getting nowhere is because you go two months without a payment, then make a partial payment on the past due amount. Of course you’re always in the red, is the concept of simple math beyond you? And no, the fifteen dollar credit you’re obsessing about is not going to make a measurable difference in the five hundred bucks you owe us.
The reason why your bill is so high is that you talk on the phone too much. Go over your minute allowance and every fucking minute after that will cost you. Yes, I do think you should change your rate plan, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why you’re balking at paying an extra twenty bucks a month to prevent the three hundred in overages you run consistently. What are you, stupid?
I’m sorry your phone is broken and you think it’s a piece of shit. We are a wireless company, and we sell a service. We do not make the phones, we aren’t responsible for the performance, coolness or water resistance of the phones. We won’t give you a new one when you drop it in the toilet and that’s that. We’re already discounting the damned things to you at a pretty fair rate, and we figure it’s up to you to get a copy of Consumer Reports and decide which fucking phone is the good one.
It’s unfair that when I try to transfer people using internal VDNs I get the piece of crap IVR that citizens get. I’m a goddamned professional, I know who I need to get to and I shouldn’t HAVE to push the fucking buttons! Grrrr!
You misunderstand me. I’m not offering to manage the technology; in my view, the technology is the PROBLEM. When I said “you need pages,” I was talking about fresh-faced young men and women dressed in red suits with gold braid and brass buttons, little red pillbox caps with black patent leather chinstraps, and black patent leather shoes.
The way it works is this: The receptionist/PBX operator rceives the call and transfers it to the correct extension. Should there be no answer, the call is transferred to an in-house cellular phone and the phone is handed to the young man or woman in red, that is, the page. The page walks through the building until he or she finds the target of the call, then hands the cell phone over.
That’s the kind of work I could do for your company (even if, when it comes to youth and fresh-facedness, I come closer to fitting the description of a carny than a page), and that is the type of telephone service that, were I to receive it as a customer, would bring me back to a company again and again.
Yes, I am a woman, and yes that is the prevalent attitude around her. However, she’s the receptionist under the HR department, I’m the exec. admin. assistant for the President. But, then, that doesn’t stop random Directors, Managers and strangers from assuming that I exist to be their little slave, and I am ‘new’ in comparison to her, so you never know!
Excuse me, I may need to lie down for a little bit. That sounds too useful to be true. We could expand their tasks, of course? They could also pick up the people who are too stupid to use a cab from the airport (or too cool to use the employee shuttle that goes right to and from the airport every 20 minutes) and thus call me up to transport them.
Please understand that when you receive my Call From Hell I’m aware that the problems I am calling about are not your fault or your responsibility. If your company made it reasonably possible to get in touch with the folks I really should be talking to, I’d be talking to them, believe me. And if their voice mail was not full / functioned properly / wasn’t being ignored for days on end, I’d be more amenable to being transferred. But at this point you’re a live person and unless you can transfer me to another live person more able to look into the problem, you’re your company’s representative and your company owes me some customer service.
Maybe the orangutans in the ISP branch of your company changed my account password by accident and I’m locked out of my own web space; maybe the folks in accounts denied the medical insurance precertification claim with a letter indicating that they thought it was a request for reimbursal; or possibly your merger & acquisition division’s computers did something to cause $425,000 worth of IRA accounts to disappear into the ether during your bank’s recent of my bank.
I would not be speaking to you in this imperative inflexible manner if I hadn’t done the telephone-transfer loop-de-loop a couple dozen times. Yes, I know you don’t “support the free web space”, but either you figure out why I’m blocked from it or else you give me the name, title, and direct phone number of someone who can. Yes, since you keep repeating the mantra that you don’t support free web space, I am going to explain in a long paragraph or two the difference between supporting a feature and giving your customer simple fucking access to it, and the ramification of you folks making changes on your end as opposed to me not being able to figure out authoring problems that aren’t your responsibility here on my end. Yes, I heard you the first two times you explained the procedure for appealing a precert decision, but I wasn’t given a precert ruling and I either do or don’t go in for an operation in two days so you will find someone with access to information telling them who has the authority to bring this up on their screens, because since it wasn’t treated as a precert I don’t have a percert case number to refer to and therefore can’t appeal the fucking nonexistent precert nondecision, which is why I’m calling you yet once again and will do so nonstop until 15 minutes before Tuesday’s operation if need be, comprende?
But yeah…sorry that it’s you. I’d much rather be speaking with the responsible people and making their lives miserable instead. Please find me one of them and I will leave you in peace.
