Quoth a customer I just finished speaking to: "I need to update the credit card on my account and the last 4 digits on the new card are XXXX. Do you need the whole card number?"
No... I'm just supposed to GUESS what other 12 numbers are! There's only several thousands of combinations I can pick from. Let's see how much time I'm going to spend finding the right one... Not a bloody moment.
Sometimes, I really wonder if people comprehend the questions we ask them. A customer who was having difficulty installing the software was asked what type of login she has. Three different options were provided to her. Her response was "Yes, that is what I have."
Hello? Not a yes or no question.
More on the sales debacle front. Not only is the sales department setting up accounts without credit cards, they are setting up accounts where people actually do send us a check. BUT because the sales department activated the account without posting a charge, the check payment sits on the account as a credit towards NEXT YEAR'S annual payment.
To make things even more fun, the customer I ran across today has 5 accounts that were pre-paid annually... and they were never told that they had to send us extra money for usage fees, which has now eaten up a size of their annual payment... which hasn't actually paid for anything else yet...
It's so fun when we screw over our customers.
I just spoke with a man who wrote us an email requesting assistance four times over the course of a Saturday and Sunday. (a couple weeks ago). He received no response. (I did find one response, but it was not written until that Monday.)
We generally do not respond to Corporate Account email from Friday night to sunday night, although the phone queues are open. Sunday night, the corporate rep comes in, downloads all four emails, deletes three of them as duplicates, and then sits on the fourth one until the end of her shift Monday morning. She then released that email back into the queue for one of the morning reps to respond to.
There are times I'd like to strangle some people.
Sales people, being what they are, will do just about anything to cut a deal, get a commision and generally go about screwing the customer.
But this is a first:
It seems our sales department has taken to intentionally setting up accounts without credit card information. The idea is that if there's no credit card, then the customer will be able to try our service for a month without having to worry about getting hit for money later, essentially making it the customer's responsibility to be honest and start paying for service in a month.
Now first of all, ANY time you sign up for a trial service, you're required to give someone a credit card.
And secondly, how many people do you know who are going to NOT try and milk this kinda deal for all it's worth?
Finally, think of all the backlash CS is going to get when we start trying to backcharge all these people.... Nevermind... let's not...