Typed up the title and thought “Wow, that may as well be about a couple of my past bosses or even one or two former friends!”
No, this is about Suzy Selfimportant, a customer I had on the phone today.
She had two plans, and had called some time back to cancel one of them. Unfortunately, the wrong was was cancelled and the amount refunded to her. The refund had already been processed and credited back to her credit card.
She calls back today, demanding to speak to a Manager.
Well, as Tier 2 support, I take “Supervisor” or “Manager” calls and am fully empowered to act as such and speak on behalf of my employer. I am the last line of support, there is no one above me if I don’t choose to allow the call to go past me. Or put it another way, I’m not SUPPOSED to allow calls to get past me. I get bitched out and lectured about how I’m empowered and expected to deal with these things myself. And frankly, the other departments that I would take this to are exactly the same kind of thing. There ain’t no Ubermanagement place I can take your call. You deal with me, or you fuss, fume, swear and hang up, then call back and get someone else in my exact same department and job position. So fucking deal with it already.
She wanted me to cancel the cancellation, and put the plan back into effect, then cancel the appropriate one. Ok, so I look into it, and figured out that the cancellation process has already been completed (it had been over a week) and she’s been given the money back. It is not possible for me to cancel it, we need to sell her another plan. I inform her of this.
BOOM.
Walltowallscreamingandcarryingon about how I’m not listening to her, I’m not telling her what she wants to hear, I can’t do my job, she wants to speak to another manager because I’m not doing what she wants.
I calmly and professionally explain the entire thing again, with her screaming non-stop at me the entire time. No chance she’s actually listening to me at all. Then she starts swearing at me and demanding someone else, because I’m clearly NOT telling her what she wants to hear.
Ma’am, I’m telling you exactly what has happened here and what we need to do to resolve it.
Same shit. Screaming over the top of me, not listening to a word I say.
I terminated the call.
You know, I realize the previous people made a mistake and cancelled the wrong plan. I realize that’s not necessarily her fault. But all I can do is tell her what has happened and what we can do to resolve it. I can’t wave my (non-existent) magic wand, roll back time and undo everything.
On the other side of it, she, like some people on this board who have expressed much the same thing, doesn’t seem to realize that telephone support people are not her personal punching bag. We’re only paid to take so much shit, and we are certainly NOT required to take your personal abuse. I can’t tell you how many ‘supervisor’ calls I get because some screaming jackass calls in multiple times, swears at and verbally abuses our people to the point that our people hang up on them, then after being hung up on 3-5 times in an hour, they ask for a supervisor. They’re hanging up on you because you’re an ABUSIVE ASS. And we’ll keep right on hanging up on you until you fucking knock it off. I will hang up on you if you do it again, and unlike our Tier 1 people who won’t bother to log the call, I most certainly will, and I will note that I terminated the call because of your abusive language. Which then means that future agents who get you on the phone will be forewarned that you’re a jerk, and are less likely to be sympathetic if you start to misbehave again.
But back to the title. I can only tell you what happened and what we can do to resolve the issue. I can’t change time, space or shoot magic pixie dust out of my ass to change the Universe for you. Yelling about it won’t help. In fact, it just makes me that much less willing to bend what little time and space I can manage to change for you.