Reality doesn't change because you don't want to hear it

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.

This is why, even when I’m enraged about a problem I’m calling about, I make a point of NOT taking it out on the person I’m talking to. If the anger does spill into my voice, it’s time to apologize and admit that I’m pissed but it’s not the fault of the phone rep and it’s not directed at them – and then reel the emotions back to civility.

Oddly enough, this tends to get my problem resolved with satisfying speed, if it’s indeed resolvable by the phone rep.

I dunno. I spent many hours on the phone with AT&T trying to get a faulty internet connection resolved. Some people tried to help, more people gave me blatantly idiotic advice (example: one person told me that my internet connection was flaky because I hadn’t finished filling out my account profile, which consisted of un-checking the “send me special offers” box and telling them I was male, and insisted that once I’d done that, the Internet connection would no longer go down randomly). I was told that if a service-person came out to try to resolve the problem, they’d charge me $70. A tier-2 broadband person told me I had to call the telephone line number, so I did so, and the telephone line guy kept interrupting me when I was trying to explain the situation to him, because he was convinced I needed to call broadband, not him.

From the other side of things, working with poor tech support, or even good support in a shitty bureaucracy, can be absolutely enraging.

Edit: I’m not saying you’re like the AT&T idiots I dealt with. I’m just venting.

I always get awesome stuff from support. Probably has to do with me being calm, collected and nice. If I’m ever flustered to the point where I accidentally act like a dick, I apologize and explain that I understand they’re doing everything they can, but it’s still frustrating.

I had an issue with AT&T U-verse recently, where they charged me $450 for what I was told on the phone was a deposit, I got my first statement and it said “Non-refundable service fee.”

Needless to say, I was well pissed off. After talking to a Tier1 support guy, I (politely) asked to speak with a supervisor, manager or someone with more authority on the issue, I told him it wasn’t an issue with him, just an issue with that he couldn’t handle. He said he understood, transferred me, I explained the situation to the next guy, etc etc.

Long story short, I ended up with 40 bucks a month off of service, for the next year, plus a $100 gift car.

I have intimate experience with all levels of AT&T support. There are some good people at higher levels, but the front line people are badly trained with horribly insufficient resources at their disposal. I’d sooner ask a stray dog if there was an outage in my area than call AT&T General Care. Not that they’re blatantly incompetent, they just DON’T KNOW.

For any level of tech for any service, today’s utter genius is tomorrow’s hopeless moron. It all depends on your knowledge and experience, and no one can possibly know everything. I get calls all the time on things I have never heard of or experienced, and sometimes I just can’t resolve them. Sometimes while I’m hopelessly lost on an issue, someone in my area will come along with a simple and brilliant solution. Sometimes I’m the one giving that brilliant solution to others, because I’ve done it half a dozen times and they’ve never encountered it.

The only time I ever get really pissed off over that is the rare time when I get some abusive jerk who googled it, wasn’t able to find any information on his issue, then is angry because I don’t know the answer off the top of my head. It’s like they expect us to have encyclopedic knowledge of every possible outcome of using our product with every third party product available, and everything that can go wrong, even software issues with software just released today. I got news for you, bud. They don’t pay me anywhere near what you seem to think I make, and I didn’t write the software or design the product myself. Those people are not providing tech support, they’re working on the next release, or the next product.

Then there’s the snotty kids. Call with an issue I haven’t heard of before. I research, meaning more than likely I googled an answer, and I provide it. They ask where I found that answer. I tell them truthfully that I found it on such-and-such board. “Pfft. That’s it? You GOOGLED the answer? I could have done THAT!” Yeah, you fucking bitch, you could have, but you didn’t. I gave you the correct answer, and it worked, so shut your yob. If it’s such a bother for you that I was able to google it, then perhaps next time you’ll do it yourself. But I doubt it.

Hey, Lassie! What’s the matter, girl? What’s that? Have I made sure my modem is plugged in?

When I get a call from our front line people and they’re flustered or bothered because someone is asking for a supervisor, I tell them not to sweat it. Don’t argue, don’t push, just get them over to us as fast as possible.

One of the things I noticed when I was a T1 agent was that, about every month or two, I’d get some peer feedback from a T2 agent saying “You said this guy was a jerk, and he was the nicest guy in the world. What’s wrong with you?” Well, my very first week in T2, I learned the truth of it. They’re playing a game. They have learned that the fastest way to get past the T1 agents and get to a “more experienced” agent is to be mean and abusive. Then when they get to the person they think will be able to resolve their issue, they calm down and act more professionally. Sometimes only because they’ve learned through experience that we are less willing to put up with the abuse and, unlike our front line people who are expected to be nice and polite even in the face of nastiness, we are allowed to be slightly less pleasant if we need to be. That they can complain about our lower level agents and be believed, but complaints against higher level agents tend to be ignored if only because more of our calls are recorded, and thus it is rather easy for us to prove that WE were polite and professional and you were a complete ass. But most often, they settle down because they feel more comfortable having gotten to a higher level of support.

That and, as acting supervisors, we have the ability to do things our lower level techs cannot. We can submit things to engineering, we can grant credits or reductions in certain costs, we have other procedures and doors not open to the front line agents.

Hell, like I said in the Walmart thread, sometimes people just want to complain, and making that complaint to a “supervisor” rather than some anonymous employee makes all the difference in the world.

So if someone wants to get to a supervisor, it’s an easy call for frontline agents.

Let them. Give them to me.

Hell, some of the real psychos are a hoot.

I don’t understand why you couldn’t reinstate her old plan and cancel the one she wanted canceled. I mean, why sell her a whole new plan? Is that impossible?

Evidently it would be like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Shit, man. A car?! You must really have a way with tech support. The most I’ve ever gotten is a “thank you, sir.”

:smiley:

I really fail to understand how this kind of thing happens with seeming regularity at telecoms and internet companies especially. Mistakes like this are done on purpose right? They must be because there is no other excuse… except complete incompetence. Oh wait.

I’m not blaming you, and I know how a business works - I work in one. But this kind of regular fuckup is intolerable.

I am always super nice to anyone that has any human decency that works in those positions but I have never gotten a gift car before. I am going to shoot for that next. A general rule in life is to treat people the way you would want to be treated if you were in that same situation. I think someone even came up with a name for that once. I have had bad luck with assorted customer service people sometimes just because there are bad ones out there but you can almost always find someone reasonable.

Your customer may have been a complete bitch, and you may not have been the one responsible for the problem, but try to keep perspective: your company fucked up, and you were the ambassador telling her there was “no way” to fix it.

I’d have been right pissed off too, and though I wouldn’t have screamed, I would’ve wanted to talk to a supervisor also if I felt you were stonewalling. Customers are sick of hearing there’s “no way” to fix a problem that should be fixable. Frequently, with enough persistence you discover that the “unfixable” problem actually *is *fixable if you just get the right person with the right skills and the right attitude. Sometimes that takes getting past several layers of indifferent/incompetent bureaucrats. which sometimes means being a squeaky wheel.

You don’t deserve verbal abuse for doing your job, but save some of your contempt for your employer who put in the position of public punching bag *sans *the ability to adequately resolve problems that your own company caused.

That’s not what Chimera said. S/he said that there was no way to cancel the transaction that had already taken place (“O, call back yesterday, bid time return!”) and would have to sell the plan anew. That (along with cancelling the wrong plan) would have solved the problem. But this lady didn’t want to hear it, apparently.

On my last job we T1 people got our butts chewed if we had to many Sup calls. It was a sign we weren’t doing our job well enough.

Or else they feel that they are too important to talk to a peon. I’m sure you know how many times we hear “Do you know who I am?”

Ma’am I assure you that your neighbor’s satellite dish is not causing you to have strokes, but if your that concerned maybe you should try covering you’re windows with tin foil.

It was only a $100 one! What could she get for that - a second-hand Chrysler?

How about a slightly used Tata Nano?:smiley:

Pretend I didn’t fuck up my yours and you’res on that last post.

No way! I, for one, am going to pester you to you’re grave for it.

I hear you can get some good deals on a used Toyota too.

Well, it may be different there, but to me:

  1. “new plan” means new price level,
  2. my previous bonus points have disappeared,
  3. maybe a new number and / or email address
  4. A new contract period (eg, plans here are normally for 12 or 24 months, if cancelled plan was out of contract, but now you want me to sign a one year contract)

Now none of this may be the case, but when I read the op, my immediate thought was that it was Chimera that was being the nasty one (although this doesn’t justify ranty screaming from the other side), if I had been the customer I would have been mighty pissed.

And last time I got like that (to my shame) I went on a screaming jag* until the agent on the other end started screaming back

*in my defense though, I only screamed about the company, I didn’t abuse or insult the agent - which the agent later admitted.