“I’ll take you and your company to the cleaners!”

Hi all! First time posting so be kind 😂

So a bit of backstory: I work for one of the UK’s large internet, home phone and TV providers. I deal with tech support, sales, general customer relations and so on.

Now my company only suppling home phone services opposed to business phone lines is important to the story as you’ll soon find out

So a customer who I shall call MK I.E Male Karen calls in to express his rage that we’ve “been overcharging his phone bill for months. I used to pay £10 per month but now I’m paying £70.”

Checking his account he’d downgraded from paying a set £10 to make unlimited amount of calls to a pay per minute plan and due to making 90 ish calls to the same number per month he had been charged for the usage per minute, which racks up huge costs.

Of course MK is furious. States he doesn’t use his house phone to make calls so shouldn’t be incurring charges. He only has his house phone to divert calls to his business as his house number was being used as a business line, we should have told him this would happen (a typical line from customers in my industry.) MK wants a refund for the £210 in charges he’s incurred due to his own error.

For those who don’t know much about phone calls etc. – when you divert a call from line A to B it is actually line A (MK’s home phone) calling line B (MK’s business phone) in order to transfer the line to them and therefore counts as making a call, therefor still charged per minute.

I inform MK that diverting the call is the same as his home phone calling his business and this is why there’s charges. I also inform him we provide domestic and not business lines and that using the line for business is a breach of his contract with us, so I can’t refund him for the charges.

Long pause on his end and then I practically hear the foam coming from his mouth as he starts screaming at me that “as a customer of 6 years I’ll take you and your company to the cleaners if you even think of cancelling my contract and if I don’t get my charges back I will sue for loss of earnings and the stress you will cause me, the loss of my f-ing customers and blah blah blah”

Being an experienced agent I’ll usually warn customers 3 times about abuse and then will disconnect the call. However, through the whole experience something isn’t sitting right with me about the info he’s giving and how his bill is so damn high from diverted calls all to the same business number…

…So I ask about the volume of calls that are coming through and what business he’s running. By this time he’s so furious and acting like an invincible big man and so sure he has grounds to sue if we disconnect for breach of contract terms that he reveals he’s running a call centre with 36 agents using our phone line service.

Basically his customers would call his house phone number he was paying us for, it would divert to his call centre, where his customer service agents would then answer the diverted calls and arrange boiler repairs and installation etc.

This of course is a huge breach of contract and a massive cost to the company I work for.

Usually at the point a customer telling us “I use my house number to run a business” it’s not huge. It’s more along the lines of a designer, DJ, hairdresser, freelance IT, who gives clients their home number because they don’t have an office etc. This guy however, takes first prize for his audacity of running a call centre from our services. So I tell MK that I’ll speak to another department and call him back. You know, “yes mr customer, I’ll see what I can do mr loyal customer”.

So I speak to our compliance and fraud teams to investigate the breach of contract.

The fallout: They issue MK with a 31 cancellation letter, informing him that: 1. He has 31 days to find a new provider before we cut him off for breach of contract 2. Because his line rental was still within a minimum term contract, he has to pay early termination charges. (18.99 per month for the 15 months left of his contract =£284.85 additional charges to him) 3. He will not be receiving the disputed charges because he’s broken his contractual agreement with us.

Funny thing is if he was nicer I’d have let it slide. I’ve never emailed compliance on a customer except this guy.

Good riddance.