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Before anyone continues to read this post, please consider that I DO NOT condone or encourage this or any similar behaviors to avoid calls. I am still going to tell a story where I really wanted to do this thing in a largely unfair situation. About a year and a half ago, I used to work the night shift for a major electricity service company from Texas. A call came through around 3 or 4 AM in the morning and it was a seemingly nice lady asking about our plans and home security products. This was easy since I gladly gave her the information stored in the campaign’s system. She asked if there was a tech support team for her interested products, I said yes because that’s what I saw on my screen and provided their 24/7 phone number (this team was technically not from our company, so we couldn’t call them or transfer the calls). She thanked me and happily left with everything I provided from my end.
Ten minutes in auto-in and only a few moments away from taking my thirty minute break. The same person calls back and I got her again. I assumed that maybe she just wanted some extra details on the things she asked in the previous interaction. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the intention of her callback. She was annoyed, angry, and apparently confused. The number that I gave her to contact the tech team was the right one, however, it was no longer 24/7 as my system’s page had on the display. She found out about this after she dialed the number and got an automated message. First of all, it was absolutely not my fault that the team failed to give us an update on our system or email in case a customer needed a specific time frame to call them. I immediately apologized to the woman and explained that we hadn’t received any notification or update saying that the time frame for the team had changed. Even with my efforts, she thought I had somehow betrayed her trust so badly and that I lied about the product. She didn’t want anything else after I had confirmed all her additional doubts and complaints. I just waited for her to release the damn call so she couldn’t get the phone survey option.
There was no way she could receive one survey through email because she wasn’t a customer for the company in the first place. I wait for like 15-20 seconds and she still doesn’t release it. This clown knew what she was doing and had the nerve to request “Umm, can you please hang up. I need to give you the survey”. She knew how our customer experience system worked. At this point, I only had two options:
1. Kick the Ethernet cable – If I had done this, the call would have ended from a connection error. This means that the IVR wouldn’t have detected me pushing the release button and thus the person would’ve never gotten the survey option. If she tried to call back immediately to give me the negative survey out of spite, I would’ve been logged off already due to my 30 minute scheduled break. I doubt she would’ve had the determination to wait that long just to give me a bad review. Plus, if any of my coworkers got her and she complained about me not giving her the option to give me a survey, they wouldn’t have been able to trace her phone number to my line because she was not an enrolled customer. In short, I could’ve gotten away with it at the cost of possibly another coworker getting the negative survey instead.
2. Accept my fate – Release the call and acknowledge the fact that this witch is ready to ruin my metrics for giving her the information on my system which never got an update or reminder. I take the bullet for my coworkers and go to my break with anger.
I went with option 2. Shortly after I had calmed down a little from that unfortunate scenario, I explained what happened to my former supervisor -a great guy- and totally understood that the survey I had received was undoubtedly unfair. To this day, I have no idea what were the real intentions of that caller. It seems that I wasn’t the only one who got her because she was also chatting with some agents online telling them to quit their job and join some low tier electric company instead. So maybe she was trying to attack people who worked at our place to advertise her own? I don’t get it. She’s the one who suddenly turned two-faced and blamed me on something where I had no control or awareness of an update we never received. Also, if you made it through this point, thank you so much for reading.
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