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

[elbows]

So you knew all along how to resolve it, but chose not to?

Nice customer service skills. And good one, on ‘teaching’ her to behave.

You are a petty tyrant who chose not to ‘reward’ her because she was angry, (your company being at fault), at being told it ‘couldn’t’ be done, and you would only ‘sell’ her a new plan.

When you withhold something your customer deserves (a restitution of the services she hired) because they are upset when you flat out say you can’t/won’t be able to fix this (an outright lie, it now appears) and can only ‘sell’ her another plan, you’re being a petty tyrant.

[MeanOldLady]

Sorry, BubbaDog, it looks like you’re never going to get an answer to your questions. Tis a pity, because I was wondering the same things.

[cosmosdan]

@Chimera

Let’s put it this way.

It was an extended warranty.
It was already credited back to her credit card.

At that point, we, like any other company, are unable to call the credit card company one week later and say “this was a mistake, undo it.” Just doesn’t work that way. All we can do is say “Well, you got your money back on it and the refund process is complete. We can, however, sell you another extended warranty.”

Yeah, I think some posters here are missing the larger point. Certain customers treat the inevitable mistakes over rather mundane stuff as if we’re dealing with a kidney transplant for their dearest loved one.

Welcome to real life. People and companies make mistakes. The question is how can the error be resolved with the least amount of inconvenience and hassle for the customer. Let’s not have the unrealistic expectation that mistakes should never ever be made or that those mistakes won’t result in some hassle.
If you feel the company you are dealing with is unfair or incompetent then you get to make the choice of not doing business with them. If they make a mistake and then offer a fair and reasonable correction with an apology, say thank you and move on with your life.

Making a mt. out of a mole hill, throwing a huge hissy fit, expecting to be royally compensated for every inconvenience, and acting like a petulant spoiled foul mouth child doesn’t help. I’m tired of the attitude that customers acting like royal assholes is somehow the companies fault because we actually made a mistake.
There’s a decent adult way to deal with things and there’s behavior like this crazy bitch exhibits. It doesn’t warrant any excuses. American consumers, spoiled by cooperate execs that aren’t on the front lines, have decided they can be abusive and demanding and get away with it. I’ve dealt with customers that get loud and nasty because that’s their method to get something for free or an additional discount. Screw them.
I don’t mind letting customers who have a legitimate complaint vent a little but obscenities, screaming, personal attacks should never be tolerated. They need to learn they are not entitled to behave like assholes simply because they spent a little money.

Those of us who deal with customers have a nice phrase. “Firing the customer.” If you’re constantly a pain in the ass to deal with and consistently too demanding, take your business elsewhere. The worst complainers are a small percentage of our business.

That’s my solution for the OP lady. One more childish outburst and I’ll refund your other account and you can start over with someone else.

[elbows]

too demanding

This kills, truly.

It was their mistake, when called on it, she was told it couldn’t be fixed, (a lie, it now seems), but that we’ll sell you something else.

Shit customer service by any measure.

[cosmosdan]

@Shodan

It is not impossible.

As villa says, if the CEO called customer service up and said, “Fix this issue immediately at no cost to the customer” it would happen. Therefore it is possible, and (as I said) it is merely a matter of finding the person who has the necessary authority.

“That would mean a lot of trouble for me and some expense to the company” != “impossible”.

Customer service people who say “that is impossible” usually mean “it is less trouble for me to blow you off than to do what you want”. Ergo, the way to proceed is to make it more trouble to try to blow me off than to do what I want.

Polite intransigence is the way to deal with bureaucracy. I’m not going to be nasty to you. I am also not going to take No for an answer. If that annoys you, then there is a good and simple way to get rid of the annoyance.

Regards,
Shodan

That is sometimes the case but we’re talking about a specific case here. The CEO of the warranty company has no way of undoing a refund once a separate CC company has processed the refund.

They should be able to sell another extended warranty with exactly the same details as the canceled one. If in the interim the details of the product offered has changed then the customer should be offered one that is the closest or even a little better.
I also agree that how we phrase things and our choice of words makes a difference to most customers. They don’t want to hear about what paperwork we have to fill out or the details. They care about the end result for them.
Describing things as a solution and/or a benefit for them gets a more positive response than explaining what you can’t do.

Still, asking them to undue the cancellation and a completed refund is like asking them to go back in time. It’s a completed transaction and we can fix the problem today but we can’t actually undue what was done a week ago. That shouldn’t be a concept impossible to grasp.

[The_Flying_Dutchman]

I’ll never understand these customers who get abusive and expect the other end to solve their problem.

However I do understand that by the time they go through all the hoops of these new fangled automative answering systems and “on hold” times that they’re most likely put in an angry frame of mind.

[cosmosdan]

@Chimera

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.

Exactly. Allowing a customer to vent frustration is part of customer service. Listening to abuse is not and should not be. It isn’t asking too much to expect adults to communicate in a reasonable manner even when they are pissed or frustrated.
I can’t answer questions and find solutions if you don’t stop talking and I won’t tolerate screaming, obscenities , or continued abuse.

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.

Right again. Hanging up on them after a warning or two is the correct way to handle out of control customers.
“I want to help you but I need you to stop swearing at me if we’re going continue our conversation”
When or if they gain control of their temper you give them the same quality service you’d give someone who was pleasant and reasonable from the start. It’s not personal . It’s just that we should not encourage or tolerate or reward certain behavior.

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.

And had the customer bothered to listen and comprehend they would have understood this early on and saved themselves and everyone else a lot of unpleasantness.

[cosmosdan]

@VinylTurnip

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.

Of course. Let’s assume the customer service rep with lots of experience was the bad guy and the customer wasn’t really that unreasonable.

Tragically, there are customers who are total assholes and that unreasonable. Fortunately they are a very small percentage but they seem to stand out.

[Beware_of_Doug]

I can understand why chimera isn’t responding any longer. I don’t approve, necessarily, but I can understand.

From what he said, saying “I can’t do that” is not so much company policy as doing the job the way he believes it should be done. Indeed, if customers are to be assumed spoiled children a priori, schooling them in Reality may actually make some private kind of sense - “private” in that it does not extend outside the skull of the phone rep.

[cosmosdan]

@elbows

So you knew all along how to resolve it, but chose not to?

Nice customer service skills. And good one, on ‘teaching’ her to behave.

You are a petty tyrant who chose not to ‘reward’ her because she was angry, (your company being at fault), at being told it ‘couldn’t’ be done, and you would only ‘sell’ her a new plan.

When you withhold something your customer deserves (a restitution of the services she hired) because they are upset when you flat out say you can’t/won’t be able to fix this (an outright lie, it now appears) and can only ‘sell’ her another plan, you’re being a petty tyrant.

Except that’s not what happened and you’re making shit up. The only way you can teach someone to behave is to not reward or tolerate unacceptable behavior.
If you give your kids a cookie every time they throw a screaming fit you’re teaching them that screaming fits yield positive results.

Now maybe , just maybe if certain words were chosen {we don’t know exactly what words were used so your judgment here is BS} some of this might have been avoided.
Starting with a positive “I can fix this and get things back to how they were” rather than " I can’t cancel the cancellation" { if that’s how it went}might have helped, but what the OP did was perfectly reasonable and acceptable. Any reasonably intelligent adult should be able to comprehend the proposed solution without resorting to screaming obscenities.

It just kills me when someone vents about abusive customers and posters come by to abuse them more and defend bad behavior. You really have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.

[cosmosdan]

@elbows

This kills, truly.

It was their mistake, when called on it, she was told it couldn’t be fixed, (a lie, it now seems), but that we’ll sell you something else.

Shit customer service by any measure.

No dip shit, it wasn’t a lie. You can’t cancel a refund that’s already gone through. The customer wasn’t told the problem couldn’t be resolved. A sincere attempt was made to explain to the customer exactly how the error could be fixed at no cost to her but instead of being a frustrated but reasonable adult and listening to find that out the customer chose to go off the deep end and get abusive.

If you get a refund on something you actually wanted then the solution is to sell you that thing again because it doesn’t cost you anything more and you actually get what you want. The thing is you have to stop throwing a childish screaming fit in order to realize what the solution is.

It’s simply ludicrous to expect absolute perfection form a customer service rep while excusing the customers horrendous behavior. It’s a joke right? Please tell me it’s a joke because I’d hate to think you are just as ridiculous as the customer mentioned in the OP.

[MOIDALIZE]

Chimera has earned the Pit Thread Backfire Achievement.

[Risha]

I don’t think that anyone is saying that screaming abuse at the CS rep is appropriate. If chimera had written his OP about that and how he hung up on them because of it, we would all be on his side. The problem is that he actually wrote about how it was impossible to fix the issue, and the abusive customer wouldn’t accept that. Then when called on it, he admitted that the problem could be fixed, but he decided that the customer didn’t deserve it. That’s what we have a problem with.

[MOIDALIZE]

Here’s my impression of Chimera

[cosmosdan]

@Beware_of_Doug

I can understand why chimera isn’t responding any longer. I don’t approve, necessarily, but I can understand.

From what he said, saying “I can’t do that” is not so much company policy as doing the job the way he believes it should be done. Indeed, if customers are to be assumed spoiled children a priori, schooling them in Reality may actually make some private kind of sense - “private” in that it does not extend outside the skull of the phone rep.

Even people with years of experience don’t always use the exact optimal words in every conversation. A reasonable customer will spend a few moments listening to a proposed solution before escalating into a screaming fit. Had this customer done that she’d have what she wants already.

Customer; " The wrong policy was canceled and I’m a little upset. I want you to cancel the cancellation and reinstate my policy"

CS rep " Yes Ms Smith I’ll take care of that right away" might be optimal without going into any details of exactly what happens. That’s assuming it can be done that way because if you actually have to charge them again you probably need their permission to do so. Thus a brief explanation is required to get it done.
If the customer refuses to listen to a brief explanation of how their problem will be resolved at no cost at all to them, and instead launches into an abusive tirade, what the hell do you expect a CS rep to do? Answer; exactly what was described in the OP.
Sometimes it takes a new face or voice to start over with a customer. Once they’ve decided you have a combative, rude, and generally bad attitude, {even though they are wrong} a new face, name, voice, can help. I don’t approve of siding with an unreasonable jackass if they demean a fellow employee.
“I’m glad you’re helping me because that other guy was an idiot”
“No he’s not, and I’d like to help you resolve this so please don’t go there”

[cosmosdan]

@Risha

I don’t think that anyone is saying that screaming abuse at the CS rep is appropriate. If chimera had written his OP about that and how he hung up on them because of it, we would all be on his side. The problem is that he actually wrote about how it was impossible to fix the issue, and the abusive customer wouldn’t accept that. Then when called on it, he admitted that the problem could be fixed, but he decided that the customer didn’t deserve it. That’s what we have a problem with.

You need to read the OP again because this is completely wrong.

from the OP

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.

bolding mine

he was offering her a solution and trying to explain to her exactly what he explained to us in a later post. She refused to listen and got abusive and he hung up.
Just what you said he didn’t do right?

I can understand those of you who haven’t worked with the public or spent time in customer service being dubious about the description of her behavior but anyone who has spent time in CS understands that it’s not an exaggeration. Some customers do behave that way and although they may be the exception to otherwise nice reasonable people they are exactly the ones we need to vent about a little. {what the PIT is for}

What I find surprising is the seeming inability to even comprehend what is written in the OP, the need to mischaracterize it and piss all over the OP and make accusations of lying.

What an abusive customer doesn’t deserve is someone required to sit there and take their screaming abuse. That’s what Chimera said and it’s correct. It’s not that the customer doesn’t deserve a solution to the companies mistake because they’re abusive. It’s that they don’t deserve a solution in the midst of that abuse, and they don’t deserve to heap abuse on the very person who is willing and able to help them. Step one is for them to get a grip and begin to act like an adult again so that the CS rep can solve their problem, no hard feelings.

[cosmosdan]

@MOIDALIZE

Here’s my impression of Chimera

Gosh that’s cute and clever. Let me try. Here’s my impression of you

[MOIDALIZE]

You seem to be taking this awfully personally, cosmodan.

[Rysto]

@MOIDALIZE

You seem to be taking this awfully personally, cosmodan.

Well, the lot of you are being a bunch of self-righteous jackasses. Some people do take offense to that.

[drachillix]

@villa

Rectifying an error at the expense of the company is always possible, even if only the CEO has the authority to sign off on it.

yup, but we couldn’t have the op change reality just because it’s againt policy.

By refusing to pass this on to a supervisor who could fix a customer, hate to say this chimera but you are the problem here, not the customer. Impossible here only means, “your status as a customer and any ongoing business you represent, are not worth the time it would take to fix our own fuckup”.

From a business that pushes paper for a living, that’s a piss poor attitude. You are not talking about a product that has been refurbished and sold to another customer, we are talking about a policy that does not fit the cookie cutter actuarial response to the product in question, that can be prorated and or adjusted. Just because the company failed to write a policy for it does not make this the customers fault and she is justifiably pissed for being treated the way she is.