This one Stuck with me.

Hi fellow call center workers! FTP and on mobile so please forgive any formatting issues.

I just recently started work in a call center for a major telecommunications company, I’ve never been a call center agent before so this has been quite an experience.

I have to say, I love this job. I’ve returned to work a year after having my first baby and it’s changed my life. After giving birth I was diagnosed with post natal depression so it has been a hard road to reach some kind of normality in my own mental state.

Facing people has been difficult so this is the perfect job for me because I love speaking with people yet nowadays I feel quite anxious having conversations with strangers face to face (which I had to do alot of in my previous line of work).

So onto the story! I work as a service agent and upgrade agent passed this customer through to me named Pete. Agent told me it was just a call to order a return bag for sending back unwanted equipment. So I thought great a nice chilled out call and I told the agent to send Pete through to me.

Turned out the reason the Pete needed MULTIPLE return bags, as he had been sent four fibre devices to try to improve his services. Pete had Adsl internet. In other words nothing they did improved the service so for some reason our technical department had sent him four smart hubs. ???

As you can imagine, this did not work. So myself and Pete are getting into it and I’m looking over his account. This dude has been paying on time for months for a service that isn’t worth a fuck to him. He’s got three mobile phone contracts with us and took out a fibre connection at another property he owns just because he wants to stay with our company.

Pete is probably one of the most reasonable people I’ve ever spoken to. I asked what he would be seeking as a resolution and he just wanted the service he was promised or obviously a release from the contract free of charge at the property where his line speed is 1mb per second. That’s barely even a connection! So that’s fair enough right?

So I approach my manager about this issue and the answer I got was ‘so what?’ ‘Soooo this guy is paying for something thats no good and he is obviously a loyal customer’ (I’d checked on his bills from mobile and the other property he has, never missed a single payment in five years of being a customer.) I fought for this guy, and I mean I fought hard. My manager wouldn’t budge to let Pete out of his contract though and told me to send him off to tech.

SIGH……

I went back to Pete and explained the situation. He appreciated the effort I had made for him but was still pretty defeated and said he will just pay the termination fee that will release him from the contract.

I consulted with tech support to see if there was any way we could at least waive part of the fee. Big fat NO! They couldn’t do it because the service faults had not been reported close enough together for them to consider it an ongoing issue! So I had a plan, I told Pete he could take the easy option and pay the fees to terminate his account.

OR

I told him if he was willing to put in some extra effort to report every single drop in signal, every time his speeds were low. I pretty much told him to phone us every time there was something wrong with his services. I told him it would be a lot of frustration and waiting and would definitely not be easy. Pete being a reasonable yet tenacious chap said ‘lets do it!’

My stats are gonna be SCREWED from him calling back so often but if it gets this one guy out of an extremely unfair situation then so be it. My other stats are pretty good so I can risk one of them to help Pete.

I passed Pete on to a tech agent named James to start the whole process, first of all explaining the entire situation to James before passing the call to him. Because obviously sending a customer to another department without telling the receiving agent that it’s a full on complaint, is a real dick move! That means you, Josh in upgrades!

Anyway hope you guys enjoyed the story and I hope they leave Pete out of his contract! Much love to you Pete!