I hate professional customers sometimes

I hit the lottery today, I had two aweful customers.

I work in the technical support for a phone compagny. Because they have a monopoly for landline’s network, they have strong regulation for this service one of which I can’t transfer calls to other services if the customer didn’t chose the correct one (bonus point: it’s the same phone number for all the services, the difference is made by the server when you enter your phone number). Also, because we’re outsourcers, we have a KPI for same day recall and same week recall.

Half an hour through my shift I receive a call from a doctor, they’re moving and she wants me to forward the incoming calls to another number. She already called the day before for the same reason. Actually she wanted to call twice a day to activate and deactivate the option and didn’t want my colleague to do the tracking.

Forwarding calls are strictly controlled for professional customers. We already had people impersonating other businesses to steal clients from them. One of the rules is that, apart for lines failures, we don’t forward calls, the customer must do it on internet or from the automated voice server with a personal code. Exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis.

I was asking the customer if she tried to activate the option via the automated server. She started screaming at me for 3 whole minutes, telling me that my colleague already forwarded the calls, there is no reason I don’t do the same, and started implying that I’m incompetent.

I stood for myself and didn’t let her go on. I asked a yes or no question, why is it that hard to answer?!

Because of this encounter she accepted I do the follow up to deactivate. I told her I’ll call her back at about 12 o’clock. I called at 12:03 she already called back …

The second one had many products, one of them a mobile modem gifted by the ISP in case of a malfunction or a business trip. They work with a SIM card and you need the card’s number to access to the technical support. Because I’m in the landline support, I don’t have access to tools for other products. There is way to bypass certain things, but won’t get much and the customer will have to call the right service anyway.

When she calls, she tells my about the mobile modem, I tell her she have to call the mobile service but she didn’t have the SIM number. I work my ass to find any information. I tell her that I have to put her on hold so I can do the search she doesn’t even aknowledge me, I thought she didn’t hear me, but she just commented on what I was doing to her colleague and was belitteling me. I brushed it off and started my hunt, I finally found a number but I wasn’t sure it was the one and I tell her that and she answred with disdain and telling me I’m making her lose her time going from one service to another, and it’s funny that I took so much time to find a number I’m not even sure about.

I told her that she didn’t have to talk to me that way, her disdain won’t reach the ISP’S CEO, and she on her side have to organise her stuff and her data, I’m not obligated to search the number for her.

I’m really proud that I could stand for myself and maintain a professional attitude. When I started I was even affraid to talk about some charges! I learned a lot from this job.