If nothing else, I’ve gotten something out of the inventive minds of the self-righteous recreational outrage addicts in this thread. Somewhat typical of the Dope. Invent facets of the story that don’t exist to further your outrage, imagine that it happened in a way that furthers your idea, ignore details that don’t fit what you want to be angry about, etc.
Yes, it bothers me somewhat, but it teaches me more about Human nature. And the nature of the mob mentality.
Perhaps they wouldn’t invent facets, if you’d answer the questions you were asked.
By the way, you seem the very kind of ‘help’ no one likes to connect to, when experiencing difficulties. I’m not saying you are, just that your posts here, kind of make you seem like a jerk.
No matter how you slice it and dice it, if the best you can do is tell a customer, calling for help with a error on your end, ‘can’t help you, but I’ll sell you something else’, you have no business in customer service, chip on your shoulder notwithstanding.
Let me try this again without the personal judgments.
From your OP:
Your company screws up and you don’t have any means at your disposal to fix it. “Not a problem!” you think, “I’ll just sell her a brand new plan! She already has the refund and can apply the money toward the new plan! Everyone wins!” Except the onus is on you guys to fix things internally, since you were the ones who screwed up. You (or someone else with the proper abilities) could set up a new account and transfer the details of the old account into it, preserving the original terms of the agreement. Instead you wish to breech the agreement and start a brand new one. The minute you used the word “sell” the customer had had enough. If you had even phrased it slightly differently, something like “Well, Ma’am, the cancel already went through, so I’ll have to check on how to restore it. Let me put you on hold.” Then you ask your supervisor or kick it up the chain. It doesn’t matter that your bosses have said not to kick calls up so often, obviously there are certain cases that warrant it and this surely sounds like one.
Remember, you posted to the Dope. You knew ahead of time the approach many here take. Now you have the gall to blame others for your decision to share your experience.
Your employer has a fuckwit approach to customer service. Whether it’s the fuckwit attitude training they provide to their customer ‘service’ representatives, or whether it’s a job prerequisite appears to make no difference here. Ultimately, you do have the power to do what is right and just.
You are correct in one thing; the title you gave to your own OP. You are correct. Reality really doesn’t change because you don’t want to hear it.
Yay for Duckster. An excellent post IMHO.
I am also curious about the details of what the customer was offered.
But if it’s the same plan, costs the same, etc what difference does it make? If she’s just going to throw the money they refunded back at them to get the same plan, cancel the plan they meant to, give her that money back, it all comes out the way she intended to in the end. The way it sounds to me, instead of listening to the details, she flew off the handle and got abusive right off the bat. Because her delicate little ears heard the word “sell”. That’s a good lesson in why you never give customers too many details. Just make things the way they want it, with minimal of involvement from (or inconvenience to) them, and be done with it. That was my policy in my days of phone support.
I would have stopped that call too. No one should be rewarded for that behavior.
Oops. Never mind.
Years ago, back in another century, I worked front line, in-store customer service for an international Scandinavian furniture/homewares purveyor. (Guess who.) In that capacity, where I was a complete peon, we were given this sage bit of advice: when a customer comes in with a problem, never tell them what you can’t or won’t do for them, because they don’t give a flying rip about that. You tell them what you can and will do, and then do it.
When the company has f-ed up, the customers do not care about internal processes, about chains of command, about software issues or anything else. They care about their time, their money and their problem and they know that it needs to be made right and you are presenting yourself as someone who makes things right, so you’d better do that or connect them with the person who can. Every minute that they have to waste of their time to get you (as the representative of the company) to fix things for them only compounds the problem.
When the solution to a problem isn’t what the customer has asked for but will still make them whole, you’ve got to use a little diplomacy. “Ma’am, here’s what we’re going to do. Your original warranty program was cancelled erroneously and I do apologize for that, it shouldn’t have happened. We’re going to create a brand new warranty for you with the same terms as the one that was cancelled. It’s going to cover you for the same period of time and provide all the same protections as the original warranty. And that new warranty will begin today. Now, because the original was mistakenly cancelled and your credit card has been refunded already, I need to re-enter your credit card information, because the system does not retain that. As soon as you provide that for me, you’re going to be right back where you were on Tuesday when we made this error. Okay?”
Because no one likes to be told no. No one likes to be told “we screwed up and we’re not going to fix it” and that, when you boil it down, is what this woman was hearing. So if someone really wants to provide her with customer service, they step back and take another approach. Nuance matters.
Wow, that’s some comically terrible advice. Don’t tell the costumer what he doesn’t want to hear, just do it anyway using a lame subterfuge that smells like fraud.
Is English your first language?
Cause I sure as hell didnt see any subterfuge or fraud there. The customer gets pretty much what they had in the first place (with perhaps a short time period of “free” warranty, a minor freebee) at no additional cost to them.
In fact, if the OP hadn’t got mad at the caller for getting mad at him, I suspect that procedure wise, thats probably pretty damn close to how the whole thing would be handled.
This scenario is possible: that the OP was just about to bend heaven and earth to restore the customer’s account to what it was (or better), and misunderstanding the generosity she was about to receive, the customer went into a sudden rage from which there was no way to talk her back down. That’s certainly the interpretation most flattering to the OP. But his coyness thusfar about explaining exactly what the “new plan” would entail for the customer suggests it isn’t quite that simple. Perhaps when he’s done practicing sneering gestures in the bathroom mirror, he can return to fill us in.
In the meantime, we have:
[ul]
[li]An admission that the company was in the wrong[/li][li]The OP is “Tier 2” support, meaning the customer already had to go through at least one level of unhelpful bureaucracy[/li][li]The OP is the last line of defense—sort of, that is unless he *feels *like escalating the issue, which depends solely on the customer being persistent (but in a suitably ass-kissing way)[/li][li]A lot of phrases like “can’t” and “not possible” in the OP, which I’m willing to bet are what the customer also heard, instead of things like “I’m sorry” and “let’s see what we can do to resolve this”[/li][/ul]
These things, and the overall tone of his posts, make it much easier for me to imagine that the OP probably copped a bit of an attitude with an already angry customer and thus threw fuel on the fire. Customer service is about defusing those kind of situations, not digging your heels in and flexing your petty tyrant muscles just because you think you can. It may make you feel powerful, but it’s exactly the opposite of the right thing to do and it gets zero sympathy from me.
And yes, I worked in support for several years and dealt with all manner of irate asshole—and in almost every case, there was a way to calm them down, by resolving the problem or at least by convincing them that I was committed to doing so.
No.
I inferred the credit card would be charged. That needs to be clearly stated. If I misunderstood I apologize.
Yeah, I guess people with shit jobs (such as yourself) need to scrounge for what little scraps for whatever (perceived?) power they can, yes?
I believe the suggestion was to charge the credit card for the same amount that was erroneously credited and was covered by the let me get your charge information. But yes, in real life it would be better to say the exact amount, as in “You’re going to see a charge of $12.42, which is the same amount that we credited you last month so this won’t cost you anything.”
I’ve a sneaking suspicion that the customer in question didn’t either. Did she speak in a frustrated, perhaps even measurably angry tone? More than likely. But did she literally “scream” at Chimera? I tend to think not, as I find that the word is one of the most overly misused words in current society (e.g., when someone says that I was “screaming” at them, more than likely I was just talking to them in a fairly cross manner).
I like the continued assumption that I dug in my heels and was a petty tyrant. Next step is go Godwinize the thread, I guess.
No. I attempted to tell the customer that I was trying to help her, but she didn’t stop screaming at the top of her lungs to listen to me. That gets zero sympathy from me. I can’t help you, I can’t even change direction, if you refuse to listen to a thing I say.
As you say, “in almost every case, there was a way to calm them down”. I do a lot of that when I get these calls. But it involves the other party actually being interested in doing something beyond screaming. “Behavior that is rewarded is repeated” - so I have a tendency not to reward customers that believe that screaming abuse is the way to get what they want. If you cave in and give them what they want just because they’re being dicks - and I can see this in my work experience here and in past industries - they just learn that if all else fails, be a screaming jerk.
Upon review, she called back later, screamed at someone else, and they hung up on her too. Someday she’ll figure it out. As I said before, I get calls from people who have claimed to have called 3-5 times and been hung up on every time. I can’t tell them, but would very much like to tell them, “then stop being an asshole and that won’t happen.” In the majority of cases, I am able to get them calmed down and focused on resolving their issues. Sometimes I have to straight out warn them that I will end the call if they don’t knock it off. A few times I have hung up on them because they keep doing it, or I have had them swear at me and hang up after I tell them to stop swearing. I don’t take it personal, it’s just part of the job.
As for resolving things on the system side of things; I have worked with computers for 30 years. I am keenly aware of system limitations. You may think or say or even demand that companies do something outside their system limitations, but in most cases, you’re not going to get it. In some cases you will, because they have special procedures to create exceptions or work-arounds due to rare events. But honestly, the most likely outcome is that they will do something within their system limitations even if they TELL you that they’re doing something else. “Tell the customer we’re going to miracle his case, then do steps X, Y and Z which is pretty much what we’d said we were going to do in the first place and will, for all intents and purposes, look the same to him.” I firmly expect that this will be the outcome when and if this is finally resolved. We will refund the plan that should have been cancelled, and apply those funds to a purchase of a new plan (which carries the exact same dates as the plan incorrectly cancelled - nothing different there), which will be discounted to cost exactly the amount refunded for the plan we cancel here. Net payment = Zero. At least, that is what I would recommend happens here. Seamless and transparent to the customer - incorrect plan disappears, plan on proper item in place, done.
I hadn’t intended to post any further in this thread, so this will be the last.
Which generally is an acknowledgment that one has been bested by others in the ideas department. Have fun playing with your ball the way you feel like playing with it, though!
Fair enough.
Thanks (though I think the OP appreciates the apology more than I)
Which is what should’ve been done in the first place, minus all the minutiae about “system limitations,” which customers don’t (and shouldn’t have to) give a shit about. If you’re saying you advised the customer you could fix the problem at no cost to her and that she continued screaming for no reason, sorry but I simply don’t believe you. I think you focused what you *couldn’t * (or wouldn’t) do, and it went downhill from there.
I’d ask what company you work for to ensure that I never give it my business, but I’d never buy an extended warranty anyway.