I worked in a call center for a large Bank for close to two years, starting from the bottom of the food chain all the way up to leadership and then towards a another team where I am currently.
During my time there I handled tens of thousands of calls, complaints, escalation, hopeless customers… the works. One very story always comes to mind when I read this sub-reddit, so I decided to share!
This was about 5 months ago when I was supporting my colleagues who were taking calls by answering questions and handling any ‘can I speak to the manager’ asshats which I always enjoy. I guess most of the fun is that I was no level of seniority to my colleagues, but the idea of me being a point of escalation always tingled customers marbles, so to speak. In Australia we have a function where you can link your mobile number or an email address to your account so that when someone is transferring you funds, you don’t need to provide any bank specific information which is pretty great. This feature is called NPP (New Payments Platform), relevant for the story, and when you register it automatically populates your name with the account you’re linking it with to prevent fraud. This feature also will cause the transfer to clear within 60 seconds to the other persons account, which brought Australia to the 21st century… finally.
So, this customer was your typical deadbeat, jobless, government benefit living bogan (Also known as ferals or trailer trash, bogans are usually people of low socio-economic status, that live in cheap housing and drive old Holdens and Fords). We will call her Stacey.
Stacey had just received her government pay that day and had then transferred the money to her mobile number, which was linked to an account with another bank. The customer had escalated the call because she was ‘testing the new payment system’ and the funds had not been received in her account with us and she was furious. Essentially she was trying to say that she had transferred funds from her account with us back into it to ‘test it’… yeah, sure…
I took the call, S = Stacey, M = Me:
S – I am so sick of you f***ing banks stealing my money. I sent money to my mobile and they’re all gone.
Me – I understand you feel you are out of pocket currently. If the mobile was not linked to an account, they would have returned. Otherwise, they must have gone elsewhere – let me take a look for you.
S – I know what’s happened, you c***s are keeping me from feeding my kids!
Me – (we are able to do a search and see where an NPP account is registered to) I can see that where you have sent the funds to is another bank registered in your name, do you have an account elsewhere?
S – No, I don’t have any other accounts – you aren’t listening to me! (plus another number of slurs etc. which I can’t be bothered typing)
Now, it’s worth noting that as a bank, we have the due diligence of looking after our staff and our customers and take threats extremely seriously. We have all the details of our customers, where they work, their address, contact details etc. and of course their transaction history. The same customer transfers the majority of their money every month to the same place with no issue, all other transactions are gambling related… go figure.
From here, I explain a number of times that the funds are not going to show up in her account with us and will be in the other banks account which is registered in her name… this level of logic and fact are too much for the customer to bear.
S – I’m going to kill you and burn down your f***ing house, fuck you.
At this point I end the call, thanking her for her time (niceties always peeve people like this off) and contact our Securities team. I lodge an incident and the police were dispatched to her home and a report was lodged against her for threatening to kill a person.
I have no idea who in their right mind would threaten this when they know nothing but my first name and I have ALL the details about them on file, but what can you expect from this kind of person.
TLDR; customer is wrong and when provided facts threatens to kill me. Police called to her house.
submitted by /u/Ravience
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