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The time that I got yelled at in 2 languages

Hey everyone, this one is a lot shorter, and from my first few months of being a CSR, still very green.

Another day of the monotonous when this call came in.

Has anyone ever had to work through an interpreter? It’s not that fun. You have to remember to say “Go ahead” whenever you are done, and when you forget the interpreter often gets annoyed.

Anyway, this happened at the same call center as my last post.

WS = woman’s son

W = woman

> Me: Thank you for calling [company] my name is cappy6124. May I have your first and last name please?

WS gives me his name and says that he want’s to talk about his bill.

> Me: Sorry WS but I see that you aren’t authorized on the account is there any way that I can speak with the account holder?

> WS: Well, she doesn’t speak English very well, she speaks Polish, can you get an interpreter?

> Me: Sure thing!

I was very excited to do this as it was my first time using an interpreter, I thought it would be kind of fun. It was at first, until I found out why WS called in.

The woman had received a bill for just over $2000. The woman’s son had bought a new phone and given his old phone to his sister. Being the first phone that the sister had with the “app store” (I use this term loosely as the phone was an LG Dare, remember Tony Stark’s phone from the first Iron Man?) she had ran up quite a bill with app/ring tone purchases and guess what, everything she downloaded accrued data charges as $1.99/MB. Here’s the problem, WS was not authorized on the account, so how did this phone get activated? There are a few ways.

  1. If you know the account password you could do it by dialing a number on the phone.
  2. You take it in to a store and they don’t bother to verify the account, and don’t bother to offer any blocks (stores are the worst and often mess up accounts worse than customers can).

I believe this issue was caused by the second, but having very few remarks on the account from when the phone was activated, there was no way to know who activated it. So, trying to help her out, I went through the standard negotiations that we were trained to do, when the customer finally said the following, yelling out of frustration, rightfully so, with the interpreter also yelling the translation (this had been going on for about 10 minutes).

> W: Why are you doing this to me? My son already went through all of this and they said they were going to fix it! Why are you telling me that you can’t do anything now?!

> Me: Wait? What? Somebody already promised you the full amount?

I started looking through the account notes again, there it was! Another CSR had promised the customer 100% refund because W had agreed to block data and the app store, but, their supervisor declined the credit stating that it was out of policy. They then proceeded to call the customer and leave a voicemail saying that they could only credit 25 or 50% (I can’t remember which). Doing that is a big problem, as we had already offered the full credit.

I should note, that the supervisor was correct that the credit was outside of policy. Because this is technically a case of fraud (in the eyes of [company]), and would have to go through the legal group, and charges filed. Which, of course she wouldn’t want to do, her son didn’t know any better.

I spoke to a supervisor, and they said the same thing and agreed to process the credit, which was even better for me as I was scored on how much I credited accounts, and this would have really hurt my stats for the month.

W was so happy, she was crying. I was able to follow up on this account, because I had to set up a case for my supervisor. She credited the account, and all was well!

submitted by /u/cappy6124
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