Customer Service Thread

Update on potentially awful job!
It's was actually pretty good today. I'm working BOH now instead of the register, and cooks are hella chill. We were slicing tomatoes with a very, shall we say, forceful slicer. Main cook was slicing, owner was working on something else, and I was filling sauce bottles. A tomato ROCKETED through the slicer and onto the floor. I froze, thinking the entire kitchen was about to get a legendary chewing out, but the owner just starts laughing and says something along the lines of "Not bad. I think that's the farthest one's gotten yet."
As compared to yesterday when I gave a man the wrong take home styrofoam container for his leftovers and the other owner spent ten minutes up my ass whisper-screaming because I used the 3 cent box instead of the 2 cent box.

 

Today I got a text from a friend at Rock City asking me to cover a shift for her. I stopped working there in august.

 

What the heck?

 

Yeah, somehow she never noticed in four months that I was gone. Some friend, right?

 

Okay so, back like a while ago bc I can't tell time passing, it was my third day on the job at a retail store. First night closing by myself bc the person who I was supposed to be working with had called in sick. So I was alone in a department I barely knew the rules to. Well, I'm cleaning and closing, humming a merry tune, and then the phone rings. It was disruptive, loud, and I just knew I wouldn't like the phone. But I go on it, and I did my customer service voice that's barely more than a squeak, and I ask her, what she needs. She tells me she needs 100 white cupcakes and asked if we could do that. I didn't know. I told her to call back at another time when there would be someone there to answer her concerns. She hangs up on me, and I go back to cleaning, thinking I did a fantastic job of customer service.

Well soon an assistant manager comes up and she is angry at me. Telling me off for telling the customer I didn't have time (which I didn't really, but I still never said that) and pulls me to check if we can and basically demands I answer the question. I tell my manager that number one, I never said that, and two, how was I supposed to know? They didn't even let me look at the cupcakes. I tell her what I really said, and she leaves after telling me that she would tell her that I was new. Umm, me being new had barely anything to do with what just went down. That customer had taken my words and distorted them. I learned abt how unreasonable customers could be that day. I still flinch whenever I hear the phone, bc I'm scared that another customer like Cupcake Lady will get me fired. Thing is, that's not my worst story from this store. That was just my first exposure to bullshit customers.

 

I had a customer say she recognized me from a previous visit the other day. What made it odd? She said she recognized me by the way I bag yarn. You know, that and not the fact that I have blue hair or anything super obvious like that.

 

Customer comes in during a lake effect snow travel ban because he was sure there wasn't going to be a line. Like. Fucker no, there is not a line, but we are trying to close the store so we don't get stranded. Just come back on a Monday morning like a normal line avoiding person :/

It was coming down 3 inches an hour and getting a suit tailored is your first priority? Please. Go home and make yourself a hot chocolate, you're ridiculous.

 

Like this is what was going on, and this guy is like "what a great time to avoid lines"



Honestly.

 

So, good news: I found the stuff I'd written about working at the call center. Bad news, either I didn't tag all of it or I didn't write as much as I thought I did. But there's stuff here.

Like the dude who was trying to hoard data. He was paying $30 a month for a grandfathered add-on that gave him 6 gb, and he was asking about our plans, trying to see if it was worth keeping the add-on. Well, the most any of our plans offered at that point was 3 gb of data. Which was a fair bit! And more than he usually used, as far as I could tell with only three months of billing to look at. (He'd been a customer for more than three months, obviously - that add-on was a few years old - but the system only let us look at detailed billing up to three months back; after 90 days, it would only show us how much the bill had been for. I'm not sure if that's the cause or the effect for customers being warned that they had 90 days to dispute any charges. Probably the effect.)
Anyways, from looking at his usage over the past three months? He'd was barely touching any of the data - he'd used maybe two gigs of it, and that was the highest he'd gone. So a 3 gb plan would've worked fine for him and been more cost-effective. But he wasn't entirely sold on it, and ended up ending the call without having made any changes to his plan.

And the lady who was trying to get info on what was allegedly her daughter's account. Which...well, at least where I worked? 'Protect the customer's personal information' was drummed into us. Like, "if you are the reason why a customer's credit card info gets stolen, we will fire you" levels of drummed in. (...from what I recall, anyways. I may have taken it more to heart than others, but we were supposed to be really careful about that shit.) So if you weren't the account holder and you weren't an authorized contact (meaning, someone who the account holder had gone "yes, this person is allowed to know information about the account and possibly make changes to it"), we could not tell you fuck all about the account. And this lady is trying to get me to tell her how much is owed, and trying to get me to add her credit card to the account so that she can do automatic billing, and I'm having to go "nope, can't do that, you're not an authorized contact", and she's getting increasingly upset about it.
But, like - I don't know you from Jesus, lady. You could be anyone - it is not actually that hard to call up a cellphone company and go "yeah, the account I'm calling about is [phone number], they're my family member" and try to phish info out of the customer service agent. And our system had stuff like people's SINs and passport numbers or driver's licenses - if you got access to that, you could do some serious damage to that person in terms of identity theft.
Lady ended up hanging up, very frustrated, after I finally went "you're going to have to talk to your daughter about this, I can't add anyone to the account without her authorization" and the team lead actually praised me (if I'm remembering right) for having held my ground there (which was really nice, because I was actually still in training at the time!).

And the dude who tried to pull "I used to work in the same job you do and I would be able to troubleshoot this without any problem, you're clearly doing something wrong" on me when he wanted me to fix an issue with his phone. The issue? It wasn't sending or receiving texts between 6 PM and 12 AM. And about half the troubleshooting tips the manual gave me were "turn the phone off and then back on again, and then try X to see if the problem is resolved".
This is, understandably, a little bit difficult (try "impossible") if the customer happens to be calling you on that phone. And I explained that! I explained that he needed to call us on a different phone than the one he was having issues with, or he needed to go to one of our stores, or - basically, just contact us in a way that actually let us do the troubleshooting bits that required restarting the phone to see if that fixed anything. And he went "nope, I could've done this while the customer was on the same phone, you're clearly incompetent" and hung up all pissed off at me.

Oh! And the lady who was contesting overage charges on the basis that she'd bought a travel pack. Whiiiich she had. In August. And she was contesting charges from October, and while she'd put a decently beefy talk text and data travel pack on her phone for August? Once it ran out in September (as it does, because travel packs last for 30 days), she replaced it with the cheapest travel pack we have.
It is useful to know that the very cheapest travel packs that aren't for "so you're hopping the border for a day and don't want to get an American phone" purposes do not include data - they're strictly talk-and-text, and they're pretty limited. Guess what she used while she was in the States. Did you guess "lots of data"? Gold star for you! And she got charged $7.99 per megabyte. And she'd have had to go through a couple screens in order to approve those charges, so it's not like she didn't have warning. (And I'll be honest, my sympathy for her died a bit when she went "well, my phone switched over to mobile data when the wi-fi at the hotel for my yoga retreat flaked out". Lady, the solution there is to make sure your phone has mobile data turned off if you don't have a travel pack with data included.)
But hey, I offer what I can - she doesn't have a lot of discretionary credit available, only about $20, but I offer that and she screeches at me and starts yelling for my supervisor. Who happens to be standing nearby. I get permission to give her a one-time $200 adjustment - basically, taking off the data charges that the proper travel pack would've covered. This still would've left her with a chunk of overages to pay for, but - well. Those were legitimate charges, because she used the data and admitted that she'd used the data.
She refuses the adjustment and demands my supervisor again. So I alert the supervisor, put her on hold for the transfer, and open up a case file for this. And document the hell out of everything, including that 1) these are legitimate charges and she's aware of that, and 2) she's been offered two different discretionary credits and has refused both of them. I don't actually know how it ended, but the supervisor could see everything I could (plus my documentation) and had the ability to go "nope, you're going to have to pay that". (I think she was the lady who tried to pull "I'm a lawyer, this is illegal, you can't charge me for this" on me, too. But that may have been a different lady, idk.)

Also, the umpteen thousand people who wanted to change their plans when the iPhone 5S came out. (Which, uh, dates when I was working in the call center a bit, doesn't it?) We had a massive backlog of people who wanted that phone, like - so many that I was having to go "okay, if you can go into the store and they have it in stock, buying it there would honestly be faster for you, because the nearest estimate we currently have for when we'd be able to ship it to you is late November" in...I think late September, early October? "Yeah, that is a while to wait. If I could, I'd get it out to you faster, but we have to wait on Apple to ship the phones out to us first, and they just didn't manufacture enough of them."
The thing about the iPhones, though, was that we were offering massive discounts if you went on a 2-year plan to get them. But only specific plans - the Max plans. (I think they've changed the name to the Pulse plans now.) The reason for that was, the Max plans were the only ones where it'd be economical for the company to subsidize the cost of an $800 phone and offer it for $200. And it was really, really clearly stated in the terms that you had to be on the Max plan in order to get that discount. So if you wanted to change from a Max plan to one that was nearly the same (but less expensive)? You were going to have to pony up for whatever portion of the phone hadn't been paid off yet.
I had to explain that to way too many people, none of whom were happy about hearing it.

And I still feel bad about the old man who wanted a plan with more minutes and texts than his current plan gave him, but didn't want to pay more than his current plan cost. I think he was paying something like 25 or 30 bucks? And the least expensive plan we had was better than what he was getting...but it cost about 45 or 50 bucks. And there was just nothing that I could do that would make it possible for him to get a discount there - the most I could've done was bounce him over to retention, except he didn't want to cancel his plan either. He just...wanted something I couldn't give him.

 

@turtleDove man call center GIVE ME ACCESS TO THE ACCOUNT people. I only did the phones for a week before I broke b/c Can't Do It, but in that time I managed to shut up a guy who claimed (I think legitimately) that his daughter had stolen his info to get herself a phone by telling him that yes, he did have to go in to the store with picture ID if he didn't know the account PIN number, because did he want someone else calling up and getting his info out of us so easily and stealing his identity again? He stopped yelling at me for that one and hung up soon after.

 

@Starcrossedsky I made it about...four, five months? And then got shoved out the door because "your voice is too quiet, what do you mean we've never coached you on that". (I'm pretty sure they were trying to fire me before I could qualify for benefits, if I'd been there for another couple of weeks, I would've qualified for medical and I think pension, and all that good stuff.) It was exhausting as hell, though, and I was burning out by the end there; I was basically just keeping going on the promise to myself that I'd quit once I had enough hours to qualify for filing unemployment for the first time.
I did manage to pay off one of my student loans entirely with that job, though, which I'm still proud of myself for.

People trying to ask me what their unbilled usage annoyed me the most, though, I think. Because the customer can see that on their self-serve! I cannot see that on my system, the system's not even set up to display the unbilled usage.

But having to order phones for people was the most anxiety-inducing - something nearly always went a little bit wrong and then needed to be fixed, during the process.

 

So, my area has a p big Jewish population, and we end up framing a lot of ketubahs. (Marriage certificates)

Couple comes in today with theirs at around 6, we close at 7 on Sundays. They have completely opposite tastes so any suggestions I make that one of them likes, the other one hates. They argue in front of me the whole time and each keep trying to get me to side with them against the other person while I scream internally. They didn't leave until a few minutes after we closed and didn't end up buying anything. Meanwhile I noticed at least 2 customers come by, wait, then leave, because there was no one else available to help them. So this couple basically wasted my time AND cost me several sales as well.

Why do people get married if they can't agree on anything? It was seriously embarrassing to watch.

 

Word for word, something a customer said to my SO today.

"your appearance is unappealing, give me my merchandise back!"

and then she took her shit back and went to the next cashier down the row, and was rude to her too.

 

I would have gotten my hands over as much of her stuff as possible while handing it back. Being perfectly polite the entire time.

 

Manager: Alright Mouse, I'm going to cut you (from work) soon.

Me, understanding that sentence as 'Soon I will verbally give you permission to leave work': Alright, thank you sir!

Me: -returns to doing tasks until then-

Manager, 20 minutes later, very abruptly: So, uh, what are you waiting for?

Me:

Me: for the goddamn denotations of your sentences to match the goddamn connotations of your sentences I guess

 

This probably doesnt like, belong here, but i must scream.
Went to petsmart today- three extremely dead bettas on the shelf, three more alive with severe fungal infections, and many more with bloat or swim bladder issues. All of them clearly very stressed because of the cold air, since theyre like right in front of the door. This is why i hate when stores keep bettas in cups. Sure its the easiest, but I have seen many places now with barracks set up that are filtered and heated and they always have the most active, happy looking bettas, never a dead one in sight.

At least the people i talked to seemed nice enough about me pointing it out, and the three live ones were taken off to get treated... But leaving, i realized theyll probably just get treated with betta fix, which could potentially fuck them over even more.

 

Geez that's terrible :( poor fishies.

You know what else is terrible? Working drive thru. That's what I was doing most of today in pharmacy, and we were short-handed, and a big local pharmacy just shut down last week, so we have been super busy.

Toward the end of my shift, my coworker and I were trying to wrangle an insurance situation in drive thru. After trying to push a prescription through the insurance for like five minutes, the guy in line behind that customer got out of his car and came up to the window to complain. Then I had to fill his prescriptions. Two of them. And oh boy were those some big prescriptions. It took twenty minutes.

 

Sympathy liked, that sounds awful :c

 

"We cannot fix the problem if it can't be replicated here."
"Well right now it's useless to me =/"
"I understand that but as we can see the problem is not present here, which means it's a problem with something at your house not with the iPad"
"But it's useless to me I don't take it anywhere"
"It may be a problem with your router, try calling your ISP or we can schedule a house call for [our house call price]"
"No I can't sink anymore money into this so bye [leaves]"

lmfao how HARD is it to understand that we can't fix a problem that doesn't appear for us??? what??

 

"Hi, I have some prescriptions to pick up, my name is [name]."
"Okay, let me check... hmm, we don't have any prescriptions for [name]. Are you expecting something sent in from your doctor?"
"No, it's a refill, my family member called it in earlier."
"Huh. Well, i don't see anything here, we can get that ready for you in about 25 minutes."
"What?? But it should've been called in already."
"I'm sorry, either it got called in to another store or something went wrong, we don't have any refill requests in your profile for this store."
"I don't have time to wait! Can't you have it ready sooner? Even if it got called in to another store, it should be ready by now."

I don't understand... what do you expect me to do? We didn't have a request in for you here. Even if it IS ready somewhere else, it isn't ready HERE yet. I can't teleport to another store and get it for you. I can get it ready as fast as I tell you I can get it. I'm sorry.