A happy story

I am so happy to share a good story for once. While I’ve most definitely had more neutral/pleasant calls than negative, the negative ones usually stand out in my mind much more. I don’t think I’ll forget this call though.

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So I work for a local ISP. We actually do Tier 1 support for a few other ISPs nearby, but in our own city, we were only providing DSL internet service off of *famously terrible phone company’s* (FTPC) phone lines, not our own infrastructure. *FTPC* recently decided they were no longer allowing ISPs to utilize their lines to provide internet and so all customers with us were either going to have to go directly to this company for internet or find an alternate provider.

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Now, for the most part, I’m happy that we’ll no longer have to support these connections because they generally were very low-speed plans with bad service and troubleshooting them usually meant trying to get *FTPC* to admit there’s a problem and schedule a tech. However, we’ve had a lot of customers who have been with us for 15-20 years who now have to leave us and many are sad to be leaving, because our call center gives great 24/7 support and *FTPC* does not.

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Anyway, onto my call. I call this lovely older lady who has already called *FTPC* to get her service switched to them. Although her service is now active with them, they won’t walk her through configuring the modem she has there (which she bought from us only a few months ago) to work on their network.

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I gamely assist her logging into the modem, but the modem won’t respond properly to let us change the settings. Since she is already on their network, I cannot login remotely to her modem to make these changes. She also lives too far away to just bring the modem to our office to configure it for her.

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So, we’re basically stuck and cannot get this almost brand new modem to work.

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*FTPC* is scheduled to come out on Tuesday to fix her connection but this means she’ll need to buy a new modem from them as they told her they refuse to touch the 3rd party modem. As a senior citizen on fixed income, having to buy two new modems in a year is a lot. I feel absolutely terrible that I cannot help her get our modem to work, but she is so sweet and thankful to my company for good support for all those years. She is staying as an email-only customer with us, so that’s something.

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I decide to ask Customer Service if we can do at least a partial refund for this lady, since the modem is only a few months old and this is such a tough situation.

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Happily, the CSR lead approves the refund (a **full** refund at that), so I got to call her back to give her the good news.

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I gotta tell you all, I have never felt so good in this job before. This job is not easy and often, I feel like I’m not really doing any good in the world, doing basic tech support. But I will never forget hearing the pure relief and happiness in this kind woman’s voice when she said thanks for getting her the refund. Made my entire day.