Hello there!
This is a story that happened a while ago at a job that I don’t do anymore (thank god). We were a rather small customer service division, so that everyone knew and could see each other. We provided tech support for a mobile phone service provider which sometimes meant dealing with repair issues. The company itself was a service provider so they hired lots of people and let lots of people go on a regular basis. This resulted in people not being educated that well about every topic. So it wasn’t surprising if an agent couldn’t help a customer.
A guy called about something pretty stupid (I think he had his phone in the shop due to repair and had a temporary replacement phone, which was a Huawei brand phone). I heard a colleague talk with the person. A few minutes later another colleague asks around if customers can get a different replacement temporary phone. This went on for a while until my phone rang and I had a customer on the line that had called a bunch of times that day (which you could read up on in the notes). It was always the same topic. I think he didn’t even try out his temp phone, he just assumed the brand was shitty due to the name.
So I figured that my colleagues who had an exploding customer that day had actually the same customer. This means this guy almost made a female colleague cry, another one irrationally angry and wasted a lot of time occupying our staff. It was up to me to get rid of him since he wasn’t going to stop.
As I answered the guy immediately said “Oh, finally, you sound really competent. I have been calling all day.” Apparently I sound very important. He mentioned that he had to talk to “useless girls” all day and he’s glad that I’m a guy. Since I knew this was eventually going to lead to an argument I changed the topic to his issue.
I very politely talked to him about his issue and told him basically that he’s lucky he got any temporary replacement at all. And that all the other people told him this because we can’t grow magic phones and throw them at customers. It’s just logistically not going to happen. He “understood” that but wanted me to “bend the rules” a bit. After a not so long while I told him that there’s nothing we can do and he should please stop calling because he was preventing other customers to get help.
Of course he didn’t agree. In fact he mentioned that he “has to pay for every call so why isn’t he getting what he wants” a few times. Of course he wanted to talk to supervisors all the time. After the call I actually went to a supervisor and bugged her (she didn’t want to have to do anything related to this guy) to get his account banned from calling. This was done when something like this happened, which I knew because I had been there a while. My poor colleagues. The supervisor just had to make a quick call, of course that requires work and makes us look bad or something, so the guy still got through a few times after that. We agreed to just hang up if someone got him.
He spent almost the entire day calling, this was one of those times where I just couldn’t understand how someone would dedicate so much time and effort to an issue that is not a big deal. That job changed my view of humanity as a whole for good.
Edit: TL;DR: Prejudiced guy keeps calling all day, doesn’t have an appropriate issue, doesn’t stop. Supervisors don’t do their jobs. Colleagues are harassed.
submitted by /u/frerky5
[link] [comments]
