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I work in a call centre. It’s a small-ish, family owned business, so we managers wear many hats.
Another post reminded me of this story from around fifteen years ago when I was just a team leader.
Our sales team had sold a customer a landline phone package, as a verbal contract.
As a result the admin team had, as per the regs, posted them their contact pack. At this point the customer has, by legislation, ten days to change their mind and cancel.
On day 11, our team has applied to move the phone service from the big national brand company (who used to be the single publicly owned supplier before the government broke them up & privatised them in the 90’s) to our service.
This leads to the customer phoning up, spitting their dummy out as they never signed the paperwork nor posted t back. It transpired that the customer assumed that they would have to sign. To be fair, we’d only had verbal contracts since the law was changed in 2000, so at this point a lot of people hadn’t interacted with them. However, as they didn’t want it, they’d simply binned the paperwork.
I gently explained that they had a “common misunderstanding”, but legally, as a business owner, they where “reasonably expected to know” basically what I’d explained above.
But, we don’t want angry customers, they’re not worth it. So, I use my little bit of power to offer to let them leave back to big national brand company, and all they’d have to do is pay for the services they used while with us. To accomplish this, they would simply have to call big national brand company and ask to move back.
They refused. They refused to pay us at all under any circumstances. And they demanded we put them back with big national brand company as it was, apparently, our fault.
The thing was, you can’t unilaterally put your customer with another company. Otherwise, we’d just forcibly shift all out bad customers away. This lead to us arguing in circles, until the customer hung up on me.
A week later, it was billing day, and the customer’s bill was posted to them, due for payment by the Thursday. No payment was forthcoming., so on the Friday our Collections team called them, only to be told where to go. All right then.
We closed for everything except for emergency maintenance at 1630. At 1629, the Provisioning team deactivated all services (except 999/emergency, and calling in to us to pay your bill) for all customers who had not paid or made arrangements with Collections. Including these jokers.
Now, these where the days when the intermewebs where not quite ubiquitous, and businesses still relied on the phone a \*lot\*.
Thus, on Monday, the customer called in on a mobile, absolutely incandescent with rage. We where crippling their business. Fun times. We told them that once they had cleared their bill, they where free to leave, and we would refund any over-payment, but they would still need to ask big national brand company to take them back. I was hung up on again.
On Tuesday morning, the customer, who was based around ten miles away, barged into out building, marched into the first office she could find, and picked up and threw a monitor at our Accountancy junior. A 21” CRT monitor. For those too young to remember such things, those things weighed around around 35-40kg.
Thankfully, it was wired into the PC under the desk and simply moved in an arc to smash onto the floor as it couldn’t get anywhere. Needless to say, the police where called.
The customer never did pay nor get their number released. Likely cost them a small fortune as they where too stubborn & prideful to accept help.
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