Non-technically knowledgable people should never try to fix their systems. One customer was sent a list of instructions to uninstall her software by one of our reps. She called us back because she was having difficulty following the directions.
Well, it took me ten minutes to convince her that she should not delete a specific DLL file just because it ended in 32.dll and one of our files which we had told her to delete ended in 32.dll! Thank goodness her network administrator had disabled access to the Registry Editor. I'm afraid what she would have deleted in there!
It boggles my mind that no one seems to have any shred of common sense these days. (Yeah, yeah, I know. "Common sense isn't common.")
A Customer called in wanting to know how he could get a list of numbers assigned to his account. Here's a brief idea of how the conversation went:
EW: Have you received your login information for the Administration website website yet?
HIM: (Dead Silence)
EW: A five digit ID number and password?
HIM: Oh! Yeah! I didn't think those were actually good for anything.
EW: (sigh)
Ah, the joys of customer service! Sometimes i really wonder whether the idiocy is more rampant amoung the customers or the reps!
Case in point:
A customer wrote in to tell us the billing system and our methods of reporting charges are confusing. Admittedly, having to triple check charges reported on the credit card statement, the billing summary we send via email at the end of each billing cycle, and the real-time updates on the website can be a real headache. Especially when you consider that one is real-time, once is on a monthly cycle based on the account creation date, and one is based on the credit card issuer's monthly cycle. But it should be common sense to think of this fact and realize a monthly summary is not a receipt and you won't get one after every charge.
The questions of who's the bigger idiot comes into play when our out sourced email response team replied with (of all things!) a summary of the charges on the account and advised the customer to forward us a copy of the credit card statement that shows the charges he was disputing.
The customer dutifully replied that he was not disputing charges, but is disputing our reporting methods. He copied out a listing of dates and charges as reported at each source and reasoned the dates don't match (difference between our processing date and the date the credit card posted the charge) and the summary is inomplete when compared to the credit card statement.
Enter the brilliant out sourced reps. Apparently unable or not knowledgable enough to explain the descrepancies I have previously described here, they forwarded the issue to us for second level support. The note they placed on the account read: "Customer has come back with the credit card statement."
When I read that, I had to push away from my desk and hang my head. Any reasonable person should be able to see that a type written list of dates and charges (no further information) is NOT a copy of the credit card statement.