Had my first death threat

I’ve been in customer service a long time. I’ve worked in a call center in one form or another for over 10 years now. I’ve worked for two major banks and as you can imagine I’ve heard a lot of stuff from a lot of people in that time. Lot of swearing, lot of screaming, lot of questions about my intelligence and comments about how much I make. But for the first time ever I had a death threat.

Caller called into the bank that I work for presumably about a billing dispute that was lost. I say presumably because it never even got that far in the course of our conversation. All he said was that he was “fucking livid” because we had “double billed him”. After reviewing his account for about 5 seconds while he rented I saw that we had taken a credit that had been previously posted off. I tried to stop him from his screaming and explain this to him but he then proceeded to tell me why I was wrong and I why was an idiot and was completely stupid for saying so.

At this point he’s using a huge amount of profanity and insulting me without at any point allowing me to explain and, I will confess I put on my “authoritative voice”. I didn’t Shout or lose my cool but I became sterner and attempted to cut him off mid-sentence. At this he said,

” you talk to me like that again I will come down there and rip your fucking head off you piece of shit!”

So much hate in his voice. Honestly it stopped me in my tracks. I can take a lot of crap but that genuinely made my hair stand up on end.

Once I found my voice again I told him in as firm a tone as I could that it was not my job to take that type of abuse and I would ask that he refrain from that type of language or speaking to me in that way if he wanted to continue the conversation. That was when he asked for a supervisor. I put them on hold and my manager asked if he would accept a call back, I said that I honestly didn’t want to even talk to him again considering the way he was talking. Once I explained what he had said my manager agreed and took the call. Later he said that that guy was a total dick and that he was reaching out to the home Branch about having his account closed for abusive Behavior.

If this guy had had 30 seconds worth of patience and was willing to listen I could have explained to him his problem. Instead now he’s getting his account closed by his bank. Just goes to show you don’t think you can just say whatever you want to service personnel unless you want to reap the consequences.

TLDR; asshole thinks his account was being double billed threatens to rip my head off and will probably get his account shut down as a result