Ah... my favorite calls!
The dumb bitch I just finished talking to has been getting charged by my company for the past 2+ years... And wants us to refund her in full PLUS interest (that part's new... people don't usually demand interest).
Now all of this time, the woman has assumed that charges from my company are part of her regular internet service subscription and has NEVER questioned them until now. So how is this OUR fault?
Come on, people! At some point, whether charges to YOUR credit card are approved by you or not is YOUR responsibility, not mine, not my company's. If YOU don't know what you're getting charged for, don't go threatening to give MY name to the FCC or the police department or your lawyer or whatever because it's not MY problem.
"I purchased the 98 Full Version of your software, a few years ago but did not try to install it until today."
Okay... that right there.... That alone disqualifies you from any help you would be able to get from me...
So... YOU signed up for an account that YOU didn't use for TWO YEARS and and suddenly it's US not practicing good business when WE won't refund YOU for six months of service? I'd love to see you try to use that logic on your cable company...
Same bitch as below...
When you call back, DON'T call me names and then go all psycho on me. It will only get your account canceled... (well, the last part I only wish right now... but I expect her to call back)
So... you wanna call up and be rude to my reps? You wanna demand to speak to a supervisor but NOT tell us what your problem is first? Well, then maybe you should stay on the fucking phone when you're actually transfered to me, huh?
So today's moron was having problems downloading some software from a link we sent him. Due to an error on the part of the last rep he spoke to, the link was broken up into two lines.Now... our moron WAS smart enough to figure out that he had to put the link back together himself... But he didn't think to remove the extra spaces in the link (he thought those were part of the link itself... have you ever seen a SPACE in a web link?)And then... in the midst of all this, he also asks me... You ready for this? If he has to CAPITALIZE NUMBERS... excuse me while I go attempt to jab sharp objects into my brain...
So the Brain Trust Award this evening goes to some dumb bitch who had to have it pointed out to her that the software she purchased from us... ONE YEAR AGO, which she's never used, will not work on her Mac.
This is why system requirements are listed on software sales web sites, people...
More idiocy today...
So this guy has been sending us nasty emails for about a week, complaining that the settings he sees when he logs into his account are not correct. We've been writing him back, saying that yes, his settings are correct, there must be something wrong with his computer's settings. As the screen shot the moron's sent us shows, HE'S BEEN STARING AT THE WRONG BLOODY SCREEN THIS WHOLE TIME!!!!!
Dude wanted to know how to get a tangible piece of paper into his computer...
...Without a scanner...
After we got him off the phone, we came up with the idea of telling Dude to fold up a piece of paper and push it into his A: drive really hard... LOL!!!
It's been been a while but I came across a GEM this afternoon.
One of the girls in the department comse up to me and informs me that this lady on the phone wants to know what happened to her payment.
Apparantly, this BRILLIANT woman, realized that since she used the same bank we did, it would be no problem to just get the bank to transfer money from HER account to OURS. But this, of course, leaves one small problem... We have no record of this because she didn't send us a payment by conventional means and she couldn't provide any account information with her payment because... well... who is she going to give this information to... at her bank?
So one of the reps here gets this call from a guy who's having trouble opening files he receives from us. But when the rep asks the guy to find the file he's having trouble with, the man draws a blank. Apparantly, the customer's never actually received a file from us yet... How does one open a file one has not yet received?
We received a letter from this customer demanding that we cancel his account. The customer did not send us any information we could use to look up the account. A rep called him to get the credit card number on file so we could close the account. The customer became very hostile and insisted that if we couldn't look up his account by name, he should speak to a supervisor.
After minutes of me convincing him that we weren't able to look up his account by name in our database (during which time he informed me repeatedly that if we couldn't cancel his account with his name, he would go to his attorney and the NYC attorney general), he finally relented and gave us his cc #. And guess what? The account I found wasn't even UNDER his name. When I informed the customer of this, he confirmed that the account was not, in fact set up under his name, but under a name that he has never once provided in ANY of the email communications, nor in his letter or phone conversations he's had... but a name that we should have known about, none the less.
Account is now canceled.
Customer sends us an email... ONE email, as far as our records can see....
I answer her question...
Here is the response I receive:
"i want the name of the president and contact information on your company and
if you cannot supply it, i will ask our attorney generals office to assist
in this matter, Adrianne V try reading all the emails sent to your company if
you need assistance in learning how to read try obtaining hooked on phonics"
Excuse me while I try very hard to come up with a CIVIL response to this...
So there's this big long thread from a guy who's been getting some sort of registry error when trying to run the software as a regular user on XP. I was actually starting to get somewhere with this guy but, unfortunately, his reply to my email and the subsequent email exchange seems to have only made things worse...
My email: Please do the following ___.
Customer: That didn't work. Here are some screen shots of the error. (We didn't get them)
Not so stupid rep: We didn't get the files. Please resend them.
Customer: Okay. Here they are again. (We get them this time)
Stupid rep: We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. To resolve your issue you will need to contact your software vendor.
Customer: You have to be kidding me? If this software is manufactured and distributed by you, wouldn't that make you my software vendor? ::continues rant::
In the words of Scar, "I'm surrounded by idiots."
I love how people just don't pay attention.
Guy writes in because he's having a problem importing his files into our software.
The error he receives is a printer error and it's a fairly common one so I send him the instructions on how to fix the printer error...
I receive an email yesterday from Guy who is now ranting that his issue has nothing to do with his printer because he is trying to print from one program to another.
I explain to Guy that printing from his program to our program requires the driver installed with our program and that if he's having a problem doing this, he should fix the error, as I previously told him how to do...
This morning, I receive an email from Guy... asking how he goes about fixing the problem.
::bangs head on desk::
Ever notice how Common Sense seems to be a general theme here? Or, rather, the lack of it?
For some of our services, we require, as part of our fraud prevention procedures, users fill out an authorization form and send in a copy of their credit card statement (all transactions may be blacked out, we just need to verify the account info). Understandably, there are some people who feel uncomfortable doing this. That's fine. Don't sign up for the service.
If you do sign up for the service, and then try to use a credit card that you have not autorized, and then get insulted at our authorization request, and then request to cancel the account, I have one request. PLEASE understand that if we do not accept your credit card, we cannot charge you. If we cannot charge you, there is no balance on your account. Finally, if there is no balance in your account, it is not possible to issue you a refund for the account.
Why do some people call customer service for technical support when it's obvious they think they know more about it than the support people do?
An account administrator called this afternoon to get help logging into the website. We have several bugs right now involving the login, so I tried to get more information from her regarding what she was seeing. I *think* she was clicking back and forth between the corporate site and the company site. Eventually, she froze up her system and I advised her to close the browser window and try again. Before doing so, I tried to walk her through how to clear the cookies and cache. I explained that as she doesn't save her account and login information when she visits websites, it wouldn't hurt her to do this.
"Well, I don't need to do that, so I'll just open up a new window here."
Fine. If that's how she wants to be. While she's logging into the site I asked for her ID number so that I could log the call under the right account. (Well, she had rambled right over me and into her woes when the call started.) She gave me the number with a "not everyone on the floor will have that you know."
This is the point at which I would just like to throttle her. I know this. But, she's the administrator. She's the one that's supposed to have the ID number. That's why I asked her for it. We have other ways of logging calls from users who aren't account administrators.
Finally, she wass able to login to the account. She clicked on "preferences" and said"It's blank." I asked her if it looked like it was stil loading (status bar moving, explorer icon spinning). "No. It's frozen up. Oh, wait here it is. Well, thanks anyway."
GRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!! How are reps supposed to do their job if callers talk right over them half the time? We can't help you if you don't let us speak and explain.
Even in the culinary world, one can come across random acts of stupidity.
I had been sent back to the production kitchen the other night to check on the other students. One of the chefs was keeping the girl who was plating desserts with me company when they get this ticket requesting one order of Creme Brule... to go...
Chef B tried explaining to the waitress (who was going along with this request - I hate this girl) that we... don't... do... this... But the customer "just wanted the flavor" so we were pressed into going along with the order, which basically involved burning the dessert, as usual, and then unceremoniously dumping it out into a to go box and tossing some berries on top.
This was the point where Chef B lost it and ordered me back to the restaurant so I could deal with the stupid stuff, while the executive chef, once again explained to the waitress that she should never send us stupid orders like that again.
It's really just a question of paying attention to what we tell you and paying us the common courtesy afforded to all people. That's it. That's the secret to successfully dealing with Customer Service.
My first call of the day was from a customer who had changed his email address, but had not updated his account information. No biggie. I updated the information and advised him that all new messages would be sent there.
"Well, can you resend the ones sent yesterday?"
"No sir. Unforunately, we do not store a copy of the message after it's been delivered to the registered email address. That being the case, there is no way for us to retrieve the message. Your email server may have the misdirected copy stored somewhere in a cache file, if you wish to contact your email administrator."
"Well, how do I view it online then?"
"There is no stored copy of the message sir. So, there's no way to view it."
"I can't get it online?"
"No sir. Since we do not store a copy of the message, it's not possible to pull it up for viewing online."
It doesn't improve with my next call.
Common courtesy is a thing of the past. You know, common courtesy, the procedure telling you that it's generally a good idea to at least start off the call in a pleasant manner. Opening a conversation, as my next caller did, by exploding into the phone "Why can't I send anything? Your system sucks." is not a good way to get the CS rep on your side. Especially if you haven't even bothered to state your name or company beforehand. While you may think it should be obvious who you are and what your problem is, all the CS rep knows is that some rude bastard is on the other other end of the phone bitching loudly about a problem we can't even verify yet.
Here endeth the lesson.
Okay... so I just overheard one of our reps have to explain to a customer where the Question Mark key was... On a keyboard...
I fear for the continued existence of the human race...
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.
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.
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!
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.
Guy called up today... expecting us to refund charges made to his credit card between May 2001 and November 2001... because he didn't think to look at his credit card statements until January 2002. - I just love it when people assume that it's MY responsiblility to take care of their shit...
So... The guy I was just talking to has been trying to cancel his acct since June right? There's no record of a request anywhere. It turns out that the guy's been trying to remove the credit card details from his account since June ASSUMING that we would know that he wanted to cancel his account. - Mind reading... apparantly a required trait in customer service reps....
Guy wanted to speak to a supervisor (me) because he JUST realized he had two accounts with us... FOR THE LAST 8 (E-I-G-H-T) MONTHS. And just because he's too fucking lazy to check his credit card statements every month, he wants a full refund on his second account. I'm only giving him 4 months. He didn't like that answer.... He'll be calling back to talk to the boss tomorrow.... Of course, if he doesn't get his refund, he says he'll give us bad press... Like I haven't heard THAT one before. GRRR
Received this email from a guy who said that he would charge us $1500 for each spam email we sent him... Got news for you pal! Free service equals spam! Deal with it.
Tossed myself on the phones for a couple of days only to remind myself just how dumb humanity is. I swear I told at least 5 people in as many days that downloading software does not automatically install it....
This isn't really a quote of the day, but my last duty tonight was to respond to a customer's (supposedly third) hand scribbled cancellation request. I got this Monday. Didn't get to it until today. All the usual threats, of course... Attorney General, BBB, LA District Attorney, blah, blah blah... One tiny problem: None of the information he gave me lead me to an account. Lucky me... I got to write (although I at least typed my response) him back and tell him so. Kept the letter... If we get subpoenaed it might come in handy...
A call log from today:
"whoknows.whereever.wc.com is the email she's trying to add. Seems to be unaware that she needs it formatted as whoknows@whereever.wc.com. sent a test email to whoknows@whereever.wc.com. Went through." - ..............
Anyone who called in to bitch about why service in New York and New Jersey hasn't been restored. I'll tell you what! You want your service restored? Go dig the cut fiber optics out from under 110 floors of rubble! You may even find a survivor or two! - Sorry... I didn't think I was loud enough yesterday...