Customer Service Thread

OKAY SO i have set a new (personal) record for Stupidest/Meanest Customer Yet

Spoiler: under a cut because wow long

yesterday i got a phone call from this guy & he wasn't explaining himself very clearly and he confused the shit out of me, but what i managed to get out of him was that about a month ago he had bought a pair of shoes & then ordered another pair to be shipped to the store, and when he came to pick up the second pair of shoes we had "very long lines" at the .com pickup desk (my desk, which is also the returns desk which is also the customer service desk which is also the home department registers which is also sometimes the kid's department registers and the shoe department registers and the window coverings registers and the "i didn't want to wait in the line up front" registers and i could go on) so he went over to the shoe department to try them on, and they didn't "fit right" so he just, in his own words "left them there." and now, he would like refund . for the pair of shoes he decided to just leave there. a month ago. i think????

and because i was so baffled & we were hella busy yesterday i told him i'd get back to him later, after i did some investigating. a little later i was in the back warehouse where we keep the packages i was talking to one of my managers and she was like... "what?? what- how does he expect us to help him?" and i was like "I KNOW RIGHT" and she and another manager who happened to be back there & overheard this nonsense told me to get the date/time he was in the store and they could look at the security cameras & whatnot to figure out what exactly was going on and i was like, okay good

anyway i got back to the desk and didn't stop dealing with customers until literally i clocked out (my coworker mary was there for 45 minutes after her shift just helping us put stuff away because it was bananas)

so today, guys, today. it's a slower day, i'm by myself until my back-up person comes in (at two) & the phone is ringing nonstop (as it tends to do when i'm by myself) and i look down at the note i wrote yesterday about Weird Shoe Guy so i wouldn't forget what was going on, and literally who should be the next person that calls but Weird Shoe Guy Himself! "hi brittany," he says, "you didn't return my call yesterday?" and i was all like "oh yeah, you!! i remember you!!! sorry i didn't get back to you, it was very busy yesterday, but i've been meaning to tell you- so i talked to my managers and they said" blah blah blah. and then, oh my god guys, and then. Weird Shoe Guy replies, with the most condescendingly pleasant tone i have ever heard in my life, "oh, well. i can just call discover and dispute the charge and get my money back and you guys would be charged a fee- i don't know if you know this, but i own a business, and when we get chargebacks not only on top of the lost sale you get charged a 50$ fee. so if you're too busy to call me back or help me, i can just call them, but i thought i would give you a courtesy call first."

you can not imagine the restraint it took me not to just go "oh fuck off."

instead i was like "... oh. well. would you like to talk to a manager about that?" and he was like "oh, i thought you were a manager?" and i wanted to just shout at him "YOU ARE A BAD PERSON AND WHY DO I HAVE TO DEAL WITH YOU" but instead i just put him on hold and paged a manager to pick it up because i was goddamn done with Weird Shoe Guy, so i have no idea what happened after that.

so umm. like pro-tip guys, if you want a refund for something, maybe don't just abandon it at the store & then call back a month later?????? because you still have to actually return the thing????????? wtf is wrong with people??????????

but like at least all of my managers are super understanding about the bullshit i have to put up with. i told val (she's basically an ornery grandma, i love her) and she was just like, "WELL FINE! LET HIM!!! what an idiot!!" so i felt vindicated

 

gasp, it's almost as if we cannot magically read a customer's mind and know that they've changed their mind about wanting a thing, and thus there's an elaborate ritual called "you have to return it properly or tell us it needs to be fixed or replaced".

and yes, he can absolutely do a chargeback. which would be followed by your store going "uh, actually he's trying to get money back for a product he admits he didn't properly return, he just dropped them in our shoe department and abandoned them and then never told us about having any issues with the shoes until a full month later". at which point, discover's probably going to give this guy the biggest side-eye and refuse the chargeback, because actually, credit card companies can be shockingly reasonable about refusing to let people be sketchy assholes who want to pretend they never spent money on something.

 

HONESTLYYY!!! like I'm pretty amazing but I do not possess mind reading abilities, I do not know literally ever customer who has ever walked into the store, I don't know our entire inventory by heart. I want to help you, I really do, but please dear God just give me something to work with.

 

I used to take customer service calls for one of those As Seen On TV companies, and certain products would be so popular that the manufacturers couldn't keep up with demand, so there would be very long backorders. They would send notices in the mail every month or so to let the customers know that they hadn't been forgotten, that they could call to cancel the order if desired, that their card wouldn't be charged until the product shipped, etc.

Some people would call to cancel, because the same products could be bought at local stores by the time their turn in the backorder queue came up; unfortunately an astonishing number of people wouldn't call to cancel until just after their product had shipped. Sometimes they would call because they saw the charge and wanted to know why they had been charged, and I'd have to explain that we charge their card the same day the product leaves our warehouse, it is ground shipping and the estimated date of delivery is [date]. Sometimes they just had random bad timing and called to cancel but the product had finally shipped, and i'd have to explain that they basically had the choice to receive their order or to refuse delivery. (do not under any circumstances open the box or else your shipping & handling charge can't be refunded, and also you'll have to pay to ship it back to us; leave the box unopened, write "refused" on the box, return it to your postal carrier or take it to the post office; that's the only way to get all the money back.)

Some people would declare that they were going to dispute the charges, and I honestly don't know what they thought that would accomplish. I'd have to explain to them: if you refuse the charges, you will only delay getting your money back. Your credit card company will contact us, we will provide documentation that your product was shipped, we have tracking information to show when it is expected to be delivered, and they will accept that as a legitimate charge and you won't get your money back. Since they sometimes take time to process disputes, by the time they are in contact with us you may have received the delivery. If you keep it despite disputing the charges, they will not be happy with you (read: they could technically charge you with fraud if they're as sick of your bullshit as i am). If you have refused delivery correctly, but it hasn't gotten back to us, the your card company will regard that as a legitimate charge BUT when the product arrives we won't be able to refund your money because it won't have been released to us. And since they don't bother to tell us when they've finished their dispute paperwork, they money just sort of materializes in our bank account, we won't have any way to know when we're allowed to refund your money to you until after you hear back from them and contact us again.

So long story short, disputing the charge on a product you ordered is pretty much only going to delay the process of getting your money back. Cancel the order and you won't be charged. If you've been charged and the order has shipped, find out the ETA and be ready to refuse the delivery, and when it gets back to our warehouse you will be refunded. If the delivery date passes without your product being delivered, contact us to let us know and we might actually be able to refund the charge at that point. But if you dispute the charge, you are going to delay the process by like a month while your bank confirms that you did indeed place the order and we have documentation that it was shipped. You will accomplish nothing.

 

I thought of this thread because I had a random memory come into my head, SO: I used to work as the business manager for a utilities brokering firm. We dealt with a lot of farming co-ops and I spent 70-90% of the day phoning and emailing customers and suppliers. One day I was phoning a new prospect on his mobile, who picked up, and I gave him the spiel about why I was phoning and what we did and then started into the nitty-gritty, MPANs and unit tariffs and such and he suddenly goes, "Hang on I don't have my paperwork here, I'm in the tractor," so I say, ok, when's a good time to call back and he says to me "It's fine, I can see the farmhouse, I'll just go get the papers" AND THEN I HEAR HIM GET OUT OF THE TRACTOR CAB AND START RUNNING ACROSS THE FIELD STILL ON THE PHONE TO ME.

I'm saying that I can phone back no problem, please don't go to any trouble and he's insisting that, no, it's not far and then he breaks off in mid sentence and I hear wind noises and he comes back on the phone with "Sorry, I had to leap a fence" so I eventually endured about ten minutes of running and heavy breathing and by this point my colleagues are asking me what's wrong because I'm attempting to break the keyboard with my face, and the poor bugger on the phone is still running.

Anyhoo, we did get to the house and he did find his details and I stick all the relevant info into the database and ask if he wants me to send a quotation pack out in the post. And then he asks me to do it over the phone (which, fine, our systems could calculate that stuff quite quickly) and, I'm not kidding, he then says "I've got to get back to the tractor, hang on" AND STARTS RUNNING BACK.

By the end of the call I've lost the will to live because I just listened to over twenty minutes of a guy panting down the phone into my ear as he ran across multiple god damned fields in an effort to save some money on his electricity bills.

 

That is amazing???

 

Dear dumbasses:

A promotion where you save up stamps in exchange for Free Shit means that you must actually exchange those stamps for the Free Shit. Otherwise, you could obtain an infinite amount of Free Shit and, this particular Free Shit being genuinely valuable, no company is going to allow that to happen. This is what "exchange" means. I should not have had to explain this once, let alone multiple times.

 

I wish I could say that I couldn't imagine that. But. Sadly, no, I can picture some of my customers doing exactly the same damn thing, because about half the people calling in to try and pay their bills would go "hang on a minute, I'm in the car, it's a bit tricky to get my wallet out" and I'd go "uh, you can call back once you're not driving and we can handle this then" and they'd go "no, no, it's fine".
Like. Dude. Dude, no, I promise you, if getting your phone bill paid is that important, we can wait the five or ten minutes it takes you to pull off onto the shoulder so that you're not actually driving while you do this. We don't actually properly close, even! There's maybe four hours where we can't take your payments, on Sundays, and that's because all the servers are down for maintenance; any other time? If you can get through to us, we should be able to process your payment.

 

I hate it when customers think I should know their regular order by now. Like, I have dozens of regulars, and I mean people who come in every Wednesday or every single damn day and always order the same thing, or almost always, and I still have to double check to make sure I get their details right. If you come in a couple of times a month you aren't regular enough to stand out. I don't know why you think otherwise, but when I actually tell you that i'm drawing a blank, what i mean is "I could not pick you out of a police line up, please just order your damn meal."

If you argue with me you are an asshole. You are a self-important, entitled prick. Just stop. Just accept that the world is a lot busier than you want to pretend it is, and that you are less significant than you want to imagine you are. Read some fucking Lovecraft and get over yourself.

And if you force me to admit that i have memory problems DO NOT fucking tell me i'm to young to have memory problems, like YES THANKS FOR THAT I KNOW MEMORY LOSS AT MY AGE IS UNUSUAL THAT IS WHY I FIND IT DISTRESSING I SURE DO APPRECIATE YOUR TACT AND DIPLOMACY YOU UNTAGGED POMEGRANATE NOW TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT.

 

Please do not tie up multiple different sold-by-weight items in the same produce bag, it makes it exceedingly difficult for me to ring you up. Even if they all cost the same amount, we still need to know which things have been bought so that we know what to order more of!

Items sold by count are okay as long as they can be easily told apart by sight.

 

not a client vs. me issue but
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T HELP ME, MICROSOFT?
"it's been activated too many times" - no, first of all, it fucking hasn't. it's an OEM key and your terms of service don't say anything about how many times it can be activated, only that it can be activated on one motherboard, which, newsflash, motherfuckers, IT'S THE SAME GODDAMN MOTHERBOARD IT'S ALWAYS BEEN IN THE MACHINE
"call the manufacturer of the machine to get a new key" - also no. bull fucking shit. you can see that my key is perfectly valid and it is your responsibility to give me a new one if you've blocked the current one, OR UNBLOCK THE CURRENT ONE. it's your guys' fucking fault the computer force upgraded to 10 and that 10 was so incompetent that it can't be recovered by the normal means or at all if you don't want to lose all your fucking files, or that it even BROKE in the first place. NO OTHER WINDOWS OS FUCKING DOES THAT.
GIVE ME A GODDAMN FUCKING KEY

 

Today: lady comes in reeking of pot wanting to find a way to hang some maps on her wall. Ok. She doesn't want to tape them up because it'll damage them. They're fantasy maps from Popular Fantasy Series so probably not that easy to get ahold of new ones if damaged like it would be for maps of our good old planet earth.


Convo with Extremely High Fantasy Fan proceeds as follows, roughly:

Her: I just want to cover them somehow...I don't really want the frame part.

Me: ok, we don't laminate, but we do dry mounting with different finishes.

Her: I don't want it to be shiny or anything.

Me: there's a matte finish. But it'll be permanently glued to foamcore, and I can't guarantee what the creases will look like after. (They were stored folded up)

Her: ok...is there anything else I could do...

Me: well, if you want to protect them you can put them in a poster frame. They're standard size.

Me: *shows her frames that are on sale*

Her: oh no...that's too heavy.

Me: ok, there are lighter ones over here. (The ones that are just strips of plastic holding the clear plastic on)

Her: oh...those are too expensive. Is there anything cheaper.

Me: *they're more expensive than the "heavier" ones because they're not on sale...* *shows her literally two strips of plastic for the top and bottom of the poster*

Her: ...oh...I wanted something to cover the front and protect it...

Me: if that's what you want, you'll need to either get frames for them or have them laminated.

Her: but I don't want it to be too shiny...

Me: *internal screaming*


We went over different parts of the conversation several times because she had forgotten them within minutes I finally urged her to wait for the frames to be on sale so she would leave me alone.

On top of that, why do customers always do the whole "I want this specific thing, and when the employee tells me the price I say it's too much, and when they suggest lower priced alternatives I reject them because they're not the specific thing I want" and they keep asking questions in a cycle as if your answer will change and the price will go down magically.

Just. If I tell you that's how much it will cost. THAT'S HOW MUCH IT WILL COST. I don't have the authority to haggle on behalf of a multimillion dollar corporation.

 

I feel this. So much.

 

Don't come into the store 2 minutes before close, especially if you aren't sure what you want :p

 

haha so literally less than 2 minutes after those people left and we closed the door after them some guy comes into our (clearly closed! the door was just unlocked because we were about to leave) store

"Oh sir I'm sorry, we're closed"

"I just want to look at this coat over here"

"I'm sorry, we're closed, we're about to leave"

"But I just want to look at it!"

"You'll be welcome to come back tomorrow morning at 10 to look at it, we are closed and have to lock the doors"

"fiiiiiiinnnnne"

W h a t is wrong with people

a couple other highlights from this holiday season:

My boss caught a guy trying on pants on the floor, who said he thought he was hidden enough between the shelves. He then tried to change back into his pants still on the floor and had to be firmly pointed to the fitting rooms

A Trump supporter (identifiable by his red had and prominent "elect trump" buttons) had to be asked not to use racial slurs in the store

One of my coworkers got screamed at because we were closed on thanksgiving

A couple of guys keep coming in looking for "Trump" ties. We only carry our own brand.

Trump stuff in general actually, because we're in kind of a weird position. We're a fairly conservative menswear store, so a lot of our customers are in his demographic. At the same time, we're on the Canadian border, so we have a lot of Canadian customers, and they tend to make fun of him pretty loudly. We're also in a mall, which means we get way way weirder shit than the stand alone stores do. This has caused some amount of excitement.

 

Oh god the "we're about to close" thing. Just. Flashbacks to that one time when I was stuck on a call with a customer, who wanted to sign up for our phone plan and get a new phone. He really, really badly wanted to do this. Except! He counted as a new customer. Because while he'd had an account with us before, it'd been under his ex-wife's name. And that account had giant warning stickers on it going "DO NOT LET [customer] SIGN UP UNDER THIS NAME, DO NOT LET HIM HAVE ANYTHING THAT ALLOWS HIM TO CHARGE MONEY TO THIS ACCOUNT AT ALL EVER, HE IS NOT ALLOWED TO DO THAT, HE IS NOT ALLOWED TO USE THIS ACCOUNT-HOLDER AS A REFERENCE".
So of course he tries to go 'can I use my ex-wife as a reference'. (Basically - okay, we need some info so that the system can run a credit score and check if you're reasonably likely to pay your bills consistently. You can use someone else as a reference, going "okay, their credit score will get used instead and I absolutely promise I'll pay my bills".) And I have to explain no, can't do that, anyone else who'll be willing to serve as a reference for him? Because this dude needs a reference, or there's no way we're willingly giving him anything but a pay-as-you-go account and he doesn't want that, he wants a month-to-month account.

(Of course he does. I mean, it's great for me, because if I manage to sign a new customer, that looks good.)

So he gets his mom on the line and uses her credit score as a reference. This is, afair, a guy who's nearly my dad's age who's getting his mom to use her credit score so that he can get a cell phone with a month-to-month account. And she's just barely got enough that the system will allow it. But the system is allowing it, so we're going forward. We're getting the info I need to set up the account, but it's taking forever for each piece - they're having to dig everywhere to get an ID that the system will accept for either of them, and his has been tragically lost somehow and he can't get it replaced. (Of course.) So I have to wrestle the system to get it to accept hers, and note that this means that the account's going to be in his mom's name till he can give us a valid ID and get it signed over into his name. He says he's okay with that.

It's, like, two steps to go before we're done. We've been in this call for nearly two hours now, which is longer than any call's supposed to go. People have been packing up and heading home around me, because it's gone 11 PM and then it's gone 12 AM, it's almost 1 AM and the call center closes up entirely at 1 AM. I see the last supervisor leaving out the door, and he pretty clearly does not realize there's anyone still in the office. And I can't shout to him to stay, because I'm in the middle of a call.
And then the call drops. Everything I've been doing for the past two hours? Gone.

Normal procedure is to call the customer back if the call drops. But we're also not supposed to stay past our shift unless we're scheduled to work overtime and no one is supposed to stay past closing time. And it's 1:10 AM at this point.

Reader, I went "fuck this shit", signed out of the system, and booked it out of the office as quickly as I could.

 

Also, per comments from housemate who works at our local grocery, do not forget or "forget" to label which bin you got the bulk goods out of. Even if you've remembered exactly how much they cost, they still need to know how much of what's gotten bought so that they can make sure to order more of it.

 

On a related note, if you need to do an exchange for, as an example, makeup in one shade for a different shade of the same brand, or a 12 pack of soda for a different flavor, you can't just swap them out and leave. They are not the same product. We need the barcodes. Please get in line.

 

re: coming in right before closed - my coworkers and i have resorted to talking amongst each other about how long of a day it's been and how we're ready to go home to get clients to leave sooner, make them feel slightly bad. :D

 

Oh man, on that subject I remember having someone once who only came up to the register maybe a minute before we closed. Despite us making announcements over the PA system in 15 min intervals.

She had something like two carts of stuff from the clearance section and wanted to know the price of each one (despite them having stickers with the discounted price on them???) And basically kept or rejected stuff as we rung it up. And then complained that she wasn't getting an overall discount because she was "buying so much". I think we ended up staying 1/2 hr past the time we usually did. :(


Other holiday season nightmares: a couple months ago we got new registers. But for some reason, when they installed them they didn't give back 2 of them so we only had 5 instead of 7. Apparently once the holiday rush hit they hastily installed the last two after two miserable weeks of long lines. I wanna know who made those decisions because it can't have been anyone who actually works here.

I'm just glad I'm not a cashier anymore. I do frequently get people coming and making puppy eyes at me hoping I'll ring them up in my department, but if they're not placing an order with me, I send them downstairs. "But the line is so loooong" tough beans, everyone else has to wait in it so you do too.