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"You owe me for my time"

It’s probably something you eventually hear working in a call center. You get a customer who has a problem and after helping them with it they go on about how valuable their time is because they are a (insert profession) and they make $x.xx per minute so you owe them for them having to call you. Well here is my recent one.

Quick intro. I work for website support for my company. Field of business is irrelevant for this particular story, but suffice to say you can manage your account with us on our website after registration. I’m not great at the line by line dialogue format of story telling so I’m going to do this in paragraph form.

Customer pops into my line. We’ve been having a large call volume so he has been waiting for me about 30ish minutes. A fact that he let’s me know right off the bat and expounds upon for a good 2 to 3 minutes explaining how that must mean we are all incompetent and our company sucks. After his initial monologue I finally get the “how can I help you” offer out and a “sorry about the wait time”.

Customer goes into another long monologue about how terrible our website is to use and he can’t get registered. He let’s me know how he works in a tech field, setting up networks and physical computer infastructure or whatever. I’m honestly tuning him out at this point because I’ve already looked up his account by the caller ID and see what his problem is and his irrelevant ranting is just delaying things.

Finally he finishes, I finally get to the “sorry to hear about that” and ask for the account details so I can help part. Again, I already know what the problem is so as soon as he verifies I quickly start talking before he can go off on another tangent. So the reason he couldn’t get registered is because he wasn’t validating the email he used during registration. Anyone who has ever registered for any type of online account knows this step of the process. You filled out all your info and it tells you some variation of “check your email and click the link to validate the account”. Well he isn’t doing it. He just keeps trying to login with the info he filled out the form with. Now when you do that and the account is just missing the email validation it will tell you that’s why you can’t login and offer to resend it. Normally for people with this problem if I feel like walking them through their mistake I’ll ask them to try to login and read me that screen. It usually takes all frustration with my company away from them when they realize it was their mistake. Not this guy though. I knew I just needed him off the phone as quick as possible.

So I tell him his mistake and he seems to calm down and back off. Then he starts in with that dreaded “well you know I work from home and my hourly rate is $x.xx, so with the hold time and amount of time it took with you, your company owes me $x.xx”. He asks who does he talk to about getting compensation for his time. I tell him flatly that it doesn’t work like that and he won’t be be compensated. I don’t dress it up at all. He immediately ramps back up to full indignant customer again. He demands again for payment after another monologue and I refuse again. The next part goes like this:

Customer: you’re company is going to pay me

Me: No sir

C: I will get paid for my time!

M: no sir

C: I demand that I get paid for this!

M: no sir

C: stop saying “no sir”!!!

M: my apologies sir. You won’t get paid for this call

C: supervisor!!!

I explain to him calmly that I am a supervisor (we’re allowed to say this) and that he won’t get compensated still. He demands someone above me and I accept to transfer him but I let him know that no one will compensate him.

Customer suddenly gets calm. I’m a little weirded out with the sudden change of tone but whatever. He says he accepts not getting compensation but since I am on the line, I have to help him with another problem. I agree to help with anything on the account I can. He says before he gets into he needs to put me on hold for a second and move to another room. I already know where this is going but I agree because I have to. His side of the line goes silent and I start watching the clock. We have a hang up rule for abandoned calls but this guy is “smart” and checks in every minute or so with “are you still there? Just give me another minute,”.

Finally after 25ish minutes of this, he comes back on the line and explains to me that the time he has wasted speaking to us is now even with the time he has kept me tied up on hold and he considers us even now. He says it in such a smug satisfied voice like he pulled one over on me. I just start my “yes sir, is there anything else I can help with?” line but he hangs up on me.

Our department isn’t very focused on call stats, so I don’t have to care about my AHT, so while this guy thinks he punished me and my company, he really just gave me another break for the day since all I did was browse Reddit on my phone while he kept me on hold. Congratulations random asshole, you did nothing.

submitted by /u/lucky2u
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You can take a man out of Belfast, but you can’t take Belfast out of the man.

I want compensating for my time