You’re being unreasonable. I demand to speak to your supervisor!
Weren’t you afraid she’d call back, talk to the CEO of the company, and get you fired?
As long as you’re clear with the customer that company policy is to not allow customers to talk to a supervisor, period, then all is good, but if you aren’t clear about that up front then I would hate to be your customer.
It’s all about setting expectations and the customer understanding whether they can expect proper customer service or not.
No. We aren’t allowed to say ‘company policy doesn’t allow me to put a supervisor on’. And I promise you, your idea of ‘proper’ customer service isn’t the same as his or his or hers, etc.
And a lot of people ‘hate to be my customer’. When people buy from me, they say, “You are awesome! What a pleasant personality” When they don’t buy from me, they sometimes say, “Fuck off, nigger”.
A good service representative would be able to hide that he does, in fact, hate your guts.
Bullshit.
Our SOP is that we are the last line and they have a paragraph of suggested wording in which we tell people that we are the last line, there is no avenue of escalation beyond us, and that no one else will give them a different answer. It is company policy and we will never get punished for following that policy.
I’ve been doing this job at this tier for almost two years. At least once a week someone demands my personal information because I’m refusing to do something goddamned stupid or the outright impossible. Go ahead and complain, here’s my name. You can only get to one department (note, different department) where they might be considered senior to me, and there is no way in hell I’m going to be fired for not helping you when you’re demanding I do the impossible or I do something outside my scope of support, or that I give you everything for free as well as throwing in a pony and an ice cream cone.
In all this time I have only once been called on the carpet and asked “what happened here, here’s what someone said you did wrong” and I had no issue explaining how the customer claimed that I was insulting them by laughing at them. The person demanded that I put an entire executive team on the line RIGHT NOW and my response was a natural “WHAT?” that came out as a sort of laugh, because it was such a silly demand. Yeah, I got a little heat from my idiot immediate supervisor, but not one iota from anyone above him in my food chain.
Hell, just this week I had four people (an unusual week) demand my information and threaten to get me fired or just to complain about me. One because I could not just ship her free product (oh, and get it to her SAME DAY) and trust that she would eventually return her damaged product; one because I was unable to physically mail a picture to him (I can email it, I can’t print it off and mail it); one because he’d been told three weeks ago that he needed to provide some physical documentation before we could do something and he kept making excuses to not give it to us and was now demanding that we just waive the requirement because he was “out of time”, and one because she kept demanding a repair without being willing to tell me what was actually wrong with the product and I was allegedly being abusive by asking too many questions.
That’s the life at this tier. You get used to the dickheads and their idle threats.
Damn, I missed the Robot Chicken pilferred joke about how I am now Joe Smith because I have been “fired” so many times only to be put back on the phones under a completely different name.
Companies make policies and come up with standardized practices and limited options for a reason. Unfortunately, idiots like you (Steophan) think I am “blaming the customer for (my) inability to give them the service they are paying for” by not being able to completely over-ride company policy, reprogram the computers, run out to the warehouse (a few thousand miles from my desk) and MAGIC something to you right now.
Here’s the deal: If you are the top person I’m going to get when I want service or need some information, you damn well better be able to give me what I need. Putting an ineffectual buffer person between me and what I need so that the company doesn’t need to worry about actual customer service anymore is bullshit, and I will call down Fire from Heaven to land on the head of anyone who tells me that
- They don’t have the power to help me and
- Nobody else is available.
If you think that I shouldn’t give Customer No_Service hell because they are just innocent bystanders, then think again. By taking the job, they have agreed to act as a shield-and shields get dented in battle. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the lightning storm.
Good job, Gandalf.
If you are on the other end of the line and you signed on to provide Customer No-Service, you deserve whatever the customer dishes out. Nobody drafted you, so in my opinion you volunteered to be on the wrong side of this war.
Trust me; I am tickled pink to hear you call “fire from on high” or whatever.
This Customer No-Service crap has lasted this long only because the person on the other end of the phone line has been put forward as The Innocent Bystander Who Has No Say Whatsoever So Be Nice To Them. This is just a cheapjack effort by corporations to absolve themselves of responsibility.
To hell with them and to hell with people who voluntarily front for them.
Barking fire and screaming blood at some guy being paid anywhere from $8 to $15 an hour who has tools X, Y and Z, because he can’t give precious widdle you something he can’t give anyone else isn’t accomplishing anything except annoying the CSR and raising your own blood pressure.
Lucky me, my company allows me to hang up on abusive people without fear of consequences. Play nice or I will get you off my phone. Then, depending on how my day is going, I will either laugh at you for thinking your childish temper tantrum can hurt me, or I will call you an asshole and move on with my day.
Look, I’m sure that we all have different things in mind here. When I call Comcast and want to know why I suddenly don’t have internet at 10pm on a Saturday night, I’m not going to tolerate bullshit answers and the “transfer to a different department” game. I know from experience that Rogers in Canada has some of the worst CSRs on the planet. I was once transferred 7 times in 20 minutes while trying to get something resolved for one of my customers. It is inexcusable. God knows I’ve dealt with enough incompetent people within my own company. The only warning I’ve ever gotten was a verbal warning for telling another rep that he needed to seriously reconsider whether or not this was the right job for him because he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.
On a regular basis, I am the second, third, (the other day the) fifth person on a call and I can resolve an issue that none of the previous people were able to resolve. Why? Sometimes because I’ve just been around long enough to have encountered it before (in an industry that doesn’t value experience), sometimes because I’m just a better researcher and a better friend of Mr. Google. Likewise, some of my co-workers know how to do some things I don’t, or have other arcane knowledge I lack, because I haven’t run into it before, or I don’t remember the issue being addressed in some document back in June 2009.
Every day I take “supervisor requests” from people who are doing their job as best they know how, but are missing one minor detail. Refusing to support people who are out of support, but not bothering to even find out what the issue is (hint: if it is hardware and they’re in warranty, take the call) or because our people just don’t know how to look shit up, or are too green to know how to go beyond the most basic troubleshooting steps, or are just assholes. I have no problem taking supervisor requests, because I know I can resolve 90%+ of them to the customer’s satisfaction, and as in several calls today that came up to me that way, I leave them happy customers with all of their issues resolved because they got to an experienced agent who can fix their issues.
So really, I understand asking to speak to someone’s supervisor when shit isn’t getting resolved. You’re just not getting mine because there is no further path. You don’t like my answer? Call back and speak to one of the scores of my co-workers who might know when I didn’t, or who will give you the same answer I did when you just don’t like my answer.
When I say things like the previous posts, it is because of my experience of taking call after call from people who expect me to magically deliver product to their office free of charge on the same day or threaten all sorts of stupid shit because I can’t do it… I don’t give a fuck if you are an EMT, or a Surgeon, or a BIG IMPORTANT ATTORNEY or a Cancer Patient. I’m not able to deliver a new computer or other device to your office or home within the next two hours. It cannot be done. I’m also not going to give you the password to your ex-wife’s user account in our system just because you call and claim that you were awarded it in your divorce. Cough up the legal paperwork and our legal department will look it over. Call me and demand it? Fuck off.
I’m not a Wizard, I cannot work magic. I cannot teleport product, read your mind, influence other people’s mind from a distance, or conjure up things from nothingness. I’m not going to ignore my company’s rules because you refuse to answer questions, or because you think you’re above our policies, or you’re “special”, nor can I, as I stated above, create new processes and reprogram our computers because the way our company does things doesn’t work for you. We’re not cheating you, we’re not mistreating you, we’re certainly not giving you bad customer service just because it isn’t how you want us to do things. The ways some people expect us to work would open us up to massive fraud and loss, and lawsuits. Our company isn’t that stupid.
And Czarcasm, if you think that customer service people deserve to be abused because they’re your enemy and they signed up to wage war on you, then you’re too fucked in the head to be a contributing member of society. Get some help for that anger management problem.
He is the innocent bystander. Blame the middle/upper management who have insulated themselves from the consequences of how they run the company and the policies they implement.
If you cannot provide service to the customer, then your job is not Customer Service.The last time I checked people weren’t drafted into the job. I am not going going to ask you to do something that is against the law and/or human decency, but don’t you dare tell me you don’t deserve any crap if you can’t provide the person who does deserve the crap because, as far as customer service is concerned in this country, the crap has been building for too damn long, so don’t even try to tell me to swallow it. Once again, if you sign up to be the shield between what the customer needs and the management that feels it doesn’t have to provide it once it’s gotten its hands on the customer’s hard earned money, then expect to take the hits or get the hell out of the way. Telling me that you don’t deserve my ire and then refusing to direct me to those who do just doesn’t cut it anymore. If the corporation you work for gave you the job of Customer Service without the means to actually do your job, then blame either them for screwing you oveer, or blame yourself for taking the job in the first place.
Should I also blame the people that shanghai potential employees and force them to do the company’s bidding?
Geez dude. Aneurism City, Next Stop.
Have we seen you in one of those videos, launching yourself over the fast food counter because they gave you the fish instead of the chicken?
Been tazed at the DMV because they called 65 and you were number 63?
Call down your “holy fire”, nutbag. My time as a Security Officer taught me how to stand calm and laugh at people losing their shit. It can be very entertaining.
Crappy diversion tactic-try a bit harder next time. Customer service in this country has turn to shit for the most part, and most of the shit has been swallowed by the customer. Do you deny this? When you think you are being screwed over by lousy Customer No-Service(and that is what it is for many companies-a division designed to to stop the customer from bothering the company), are you actually satisfied with,“Sorry sir-I don’t have the authority to help you and I cannot connect you with someone who can.”? Have you never been on hold for an hour and a half, only to be told that, despite your having followed the recording’s instruction to the letter, they are going to have to transfer you to another line where you wait on line until your phone dies…if the line doesn’t go dead on their end all by itself. There are large companies out there that deliberately design this maze to get people to give up in frustration and just accept that That’s Just The Way It Is, and Nothing Can Be Done About It.
Is that you?
QFT