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The most satisfying callback ever

Every so often you speak to someone who’s such a dick you enjoy giving them bad news. This is my favourite such occasion.

I spoke to a guy who angrily asked why all his accounts had disappeared off his internet banking. There was a big flag on his profile saying his accounts had been closed, he wanted to know

  • why the accounts were closed
  • what was happening to a £2000 (US$2600) direct debit indemnity he had being processed

(A DDI is where you can claim back a bill you didn’t authorise, the bank normally give them the money back the next day and sort it out with the other company afterwards. This was clearly a fraudulent claim as it was for like, two years worth of council tax)

I said I’d ring him back when I found out as I could tell it’d be a juicy one. Basically the guy was one of the most absolutely awful human beings we had on our books, I found notes from a complaint handler who’d transcribed some of the things he’d said. It was all heavily censored expletives and threats of violence, over the course of several months. The worst was just “disturbing sounds coming from other end of phone” and god knows what they meant by that.

So needless to say, the accounts had been closed. It’d been authorised by the Ops Manager of the head office call centre so it was pretty serious. There was a letter in the post politely telling him to fuck off and never come back.

The DDI issue was a difficult one, I had to make sure he got the correct process but also avoid giving him the £2k we’d never see again. Because his accounts were closed it was even trickier, normally it gets paid into their account and if the claim’s unsuccessful we just take it back out. Normally these claims are for like, £30 though. I eventually managed to get the manager of the DDI team to manually get the claim refuted.

I then had the most satisfying outbound call of my career where I told him in no uncertain terms that he had his accounts closed for being an absolute dick, and he wasn’t getting his money. He tried challenging me multiple times while I was explaining and I just talked over him. I didn’t give a shit. I’d already talked to all the people who’d made the decisions so there was no chance of misinterpretation and I’d done my homework so I knew all the answers.

“Well I’m gonna go into the branch and get them reopened!”

“Nope, I’ve spoken to the manager of that branch, they’re not letting you in after you racially abused one of their staff”

“Well you’re legally obliged to give me the money for my DDI straight away!”

“Actually, no. We have 10 working days to investigate, if we feel the claim may be fraudulent. Which we do.”

I could tell the exact point when this fucking guy, who was used to screaming at people being overly cautious and polite as we’re trained to, realised he wasn’t gonna win this one. My heart was racing the whole time as you do when you get shouted at, but it felt so good to wait for him to start ranting again, and just talk over him like,

“Yeah, I think we’ve just about covered everything here, sir. You’ll be receiving that letter by the end of the week.”

Click.

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