Hey guys! I’m new to this sub, but I’d like to tell you a story of a caller I had to deal with several years ago, when I worked for a shipping company that offered tours to Heligoland. (I am from Germany -> sorry, when my grammar may not be completely right.)
The call-centers purpose was to deal with bookings, changes in bookings, confirm bookings and so on. In short: Inbound only. I am a very polite person and am able to stay calm. I never had to hang up a call and could sometimes even calm upset callers (maybe I’ll do another post for the one I have in mind). But then there was this one older man.
Remember: He called to do a booking. So he called us, I greeted and we talked about the travel data. I chose a seat for him on the catamaran (like with airlines) and wanted to proceed to get his personal data, which were necessary, because we needed complete data if something should go wrong with the prepayment. I noticed how he kind of moaned because of that and how his mood became worse. We just finished first name, last name, address, city and email as I wanted to write down the mobile number in the next step. FYI: The only purpose for this number was to inform the customer in cases when the catamaran won’t leave the port because of too high waves etc. And that was something I wanted to tell the caller too, but never got the chance.
So I asked for his mobile number and he started screaming into the phone what I needed this info for and why everyone is collecting so much data and totally freaked out. I was very surprised by this reaction and my heart rate increased by about 1000% 😀
I waited until he was done with his first round and wanted to tell him the purpose (mentioned above) for transparency and so on but I wasn’t nearly halfway done when he began his second round and screamed so loud, that I couldn’t even understand anything because of the distortion caused from his telephone (over-modulation).
Upset like I was I told him pretty clear and loud, that I’d only continue his booking if he’d finally calm down and treat me like a normal person. Of course he didn’t. That was the moment I decided to tell him loudly – whether he might hear it or not during screaming – to book his tour at the counter in a passive aggressive tone that said “go fuck yourself” in a subtle way and smashed the button to hang up the call.
I deleted the booking completely, because we were not allowed to book a catamaran tour without payment information (even if it was possible) and I didn’t even reach that point because of his rant. And somehow the deletion satisfied me, because I knew that the counter would be pretty crowded (good weather = high season) and the catamaran was booked pretty well on those days he wanted to do the trip. So the chance to book a spontaneous trip at the counter would be very low.
Although I felt satisfied I wasn’t able to answer calls the next five to ten minutes because I was so friggin upset by that a-hole 😀
submitted by /u/starfoolGER
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