What’s up, everyone? Long time lurker, first-time poster (in this sub anyway).
I work in the CC for a pretty well-known ISP here in the U.S. as tech support. We’ve all gotten those crazy, angry, psycho callers, and gods forbid we get those “good cop, bad cop” speakerphone callers, but this one was one of my favorites. So this happened shortly after Christmas, I think it was NYE, but the days tend to blur together for me, so I just lose track. Anyway, I’ll be TC for “Typically calm” and the Obstacle course lady will be OCL.
The call starts off as most other calls do, CX calls in stating their internet isn’t working and they’re trying to stream something. I get their information and pull up their account in the billing system and make sure that they’re current and don’t have any debilitating work orders that would cause this. (We participate in E911 services and if someone’s house can cause an interruption in the E911 service, we’re required to physically terminate that residence’s services until it can be fixed, no big deal, but also not related to the call: moving on). Once I’ve made sure their account is good, I pull up their equipment and find out that their modem is offline. Normally this is where I would ask the CX if they have tried rebooting, but I take my pre-troubleshooting research a little further, so at this point, I’m checking the other devices in their neighborhood and discover that they’re in an outage. Usually, our billing system alerts us to outages, but sometimes accounts slip through the tracks.
This is where the call gets fun.
TC: “I do apologize for the inconvenience, however, I’ve just discovered that your area is experiencing an outage and nothing I can do on my end will be able to resolve the issue for you.”
Fiancé: “Okay, well could you maybe credit the account for this?”
TC: “Let me just take another look at your account and make sure it qualifies.” I look through the credit history to make sure they’re not credit fishers and they aren’t. “Alright, so your modem has been out for a few hours now, this qualifies your account for a 1-day credit, give me just a few momen-“
OCL (screaming): “YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING TO GET THIS WORKING NOW?!”
TC: “No ma’am, the problem is somewhere in your community and does not involve any of the equipment in your home, unfortunately, that means that no amount of troubleshooting will resolve this.”
OCL: “I BET YOU’RE THINKING ‘THIS BITCH JUST SITS AROUND WATCHING TV ALL DAY!’ WELL I DON’T! MY HOUSE WAS A 10 STAGE OBSTACLE COURSE YESTERDAY AND I JUST WANT TO RELAX RIGHT NOW! ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY THAT I WON’T BE ABLE TO WATCH TV AND RELAX!?”
TC: ‘I don’t care if your house was catering for the president on his birthday, I’m not a magician and we’re not Staples, we don’t have an “easy” button.’ Is what I’m thinking, here’s what I say (sternly, mind you, my tone of voice almost never leave the “friendly” range as I like to call it): “I understand your frustration, however, I am not a maintenance technician and I cannot magically repair an issue that is causing all your neighbors to have the same issue you’re having. Now, your fiancé has requested a credit and I’ve already applied it, at this point, there is nothing more that I can do. If you’d like, I can go ahead and remove the credit and you’ll get nothing out of this. Needless to say, yelling at me is not going to fix your problem and you’ll just have to wait until our professional and capable technicians are able to locate and fix the problem.”
OCL: …
TC: “If there’s nothing else I can do for you tonight, thank you once again for calling (ISP) and have a nice day.” At this point, I terminate the call before OCL can say anything that will prompt me to reverse the credit.
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Gotta love when they think that we can magically fix the issue. My coworkers actually turned around from their desks and said things along the lines of “What the fuck, Atra?” Because no one has heard ever heard me back talk the CX. I found out later, during a routine coaching (we do them monthly, wether we need the coaching or not) that my Supervisor had actually pulled that call (at random) and we had a good laugh about it. The lady’s fiancé must have done the automated survey, cause I got all good marks on it too.
TL;DR: Customer calls in about broken internet, turns out they’re in an outage, crazy fiancé hops on the phone and demands a magical fix because she had an obstacle course in her house the other day.
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