Assorted Nuts

[Xieg]

Had a few good whackjobs these last couple of days. It figures the fun customers start showing up as I am on my way out. Let's get started shall we?

800 Number Please

This one just occured, and I was ready to have a blast with it. The lady in question called several times, and I was the first to get her. She wanted one of our competitor's phone numbers. Now, I'm all for screwing upper management over, but that's just a stupid question. Aside from policy stating I can't or else, I would never give out a competitor's phone number. I have some morals.

Anyway, I try to hammer into this woman that, no, we do not have our competitor's phone number (Well we do, but its for research purposes only) and even if we did we cannot give it out. Even gave her options to find it herself. Nope. Wanted it from me. Well, she hangs up frustrated, calls back immediately, gets another CSR. They say no. Wash, rinse, repeat.

On the last one she demanded a manager, and "did not want any man to tell her we didn't have it." I speak to the other manager on duty tonight and get her to let me take the call. Well, my CSR informs her that I am the only one on duty. She was not happy. I was looking forward to having fun with her a second time too. She has yet to call back though, which was the ultimate goal.


He Forgot The Zipcode

This was a doozy. This guy had been trying to place an order on the website for months. Judging from his account it may have been as long as a year. For some reason he could not add items to his cart, and was not getting an error message (Read, not noticing the obvious red text). So this guy is pissed. Some of the choice snippets from the conversation we had.

Me: Don't give a rats anymore, I'll be gone soon.
SC: Pack that computer up and send it back to the factory. Now.

Me: I do apologize, but I cannot figure out why this is happening. The only thing I can do is place this over the phone for you.
SC: But I surf the web and take my time doing this. I would be rushed!
Me: You can take your time and assemble an order, then call us. Anyone can place the order.
SC: I want to make the website work! I don't want to do it your way!

SC: I have been in contact with IT by email, and they are giving me the run around.
Me: If you have been in contact by email with our IT department, it means they have logged the problem and are trying to fix it. However, unless they can reproduce the problem, they cannot figure out why it's doing what it does.
SC: Well how do you know they have it logged if you are not IT.
Me: Have you been getting emails back?
SC: ... Yes.
Me: It's been logged.

SC: I want the president of the company.
Me: No can do. I can send you to the operator though, she will tell you the same thing. Can't even get his secretary.

SC: Why can't you go back to the old website?
Me: Well, we don't have it anymore. We have this website. If we had the old website, we wouldn't exactly be running this one now would we?
SC: Well I guess you don't want my business then if you won't switch the sites.
Me: Exactly. We only do the impossible for customers we like.

SC: Who do you answer to? I want someone higher. (This was during the later shift)
Me: The Call Center supervisor. However, I am the highest authority here right now. I'm all you got really. And there is still nothing I can do for you.

Eventually weaseled out of him that there was indeed an error message. And that it said "Please Enter Zipcode" in bright red letters. Yeah, he was none to happy when I spelled out exactly what that means. Was accused of giving him the run around because he cannot understand simple English.


Button McSmashy

Lady went to the website, made an order, and hit the release button several times, I mean 10+. So, most people would realise that means 10+ orders, assuming the website is in proper working order. Ours works, for the most part. This dandy escalated from one of my CSRs. We also make it known on the web we cannot adjust web orders AT ALL. This is because it goes straight to the warehouse. No middleman.

Snippets that were good

Me: See above.
SC: Ditto

SC: So you are telling me that if I hit that button 10 times, I am responsible for those 10 orders.
Me: Thats about the jist of it, yes.
SC: Well that doesn't make sense.
Me: Did you hit that button 10 times knowingly?
SC: Yes.
Me: Well then it makes perfect sense. You conciously hit that button 10 times.
SC: It was moving slow!
Me: The internet is not a car. Hitting it more does not make it go faster.

Me: I have explained we cannot see the orders. Even if we could, we cannot change them.
SC: I want them canceled now or I am going to the BBB about this! You have a broken website and it caused this.
Me: Go ahead. At this point, we have explained we cannot do the impossible, all I have said makes perfect sense.
SC: Maybe in a dream world. I will stay here in the real world.
Me: Most people in the real world expect that when you hit the button 10 times you get 10 results.

She hung up at that point. No BBB complaints yet.

[csever01]

I don't know about yours, but a lot of websites with an order button or a payment button or something similar will also have a statement there that says, "Do NOT click Button X more than once."

Oh wait, I forgot, even if it WAS there, an SC wouldn't have read it.

[calulu]

Sounds almost like you work for Flowers-O-Suck, exactly the same dealios except I had a few weirdo doozies this morning before management sent me home because my Multiple Chemical Sensitivity was making me wheeze so much I was useless on the phones.

Me: Filled with so many prescription pills I'm rattling while reaching for the Xanax post first call of the mogn. I got all customer service issues on my sales line and you cannot transfer the assclownage chunderheads, you have to write up their complaint in an official email. In the two hours I was there I encountered.


CS1: Lady that refuses to accept the fact that the florist in the area that did her Saturday morning delivery locked up at noon on Saturday so there was no way to be able to contact the florist till this morning to find out who signed for what and when it was delivered.

CS2: Lady refusing to believe that florist had funeral home director signature and time on delivery slip. Like the flower shop is going to fake a ticket or that the funeral director is going to sign for something that never showed up.

CS3: Trying to order huge funeral package and strung me along till we got to the payment info and then stated 'Pay we ain't got to stinkin' pay, we ain't got a credit card or a checking account, just add it to the funeral home bill.."

CS4: Screeching because I refused to allow her to place an order for something we don't even remotely carry.

CS5: Demanding competitors phone number because they cannot find it in the yellow pages.

CS6, 7, 8 and 9: All calling back with erroneous info given to them by the huge influx of temps helping out with the suckfest that is Mothers Day Week. One of these boobs tried to tell me he'd been offered two dozen premium long stemmed roses with a pound of Godiva and a balloon bouquet for 59 bucks as our premium package for Mothers Day. He actually thought we were going to sell him a two hundred buck package for 60 bucks!

CS10: Insisted that we honor competitors radio ad of a dozen roses for 20 bucks. Tried to explain that those 20 dollar roses will run a 35 buck shipping fee, come without a vase in UPS drop ship box and that they are substandard short stems.

And a whole lot of other numbnuts insisting they got ripped off on our frequent buyer program online because they neglected to actually read any of the information provided online when they signed up, that they actually clicked the "I Accept The Terms & Conditions" three times and that the monthly fee was listed just below ALL THREE TIMES in BOLD print.

Add in the cheapskates without credit cards who are 'price shopping' and think they can dictate the terms of payments and a zillion temps asking me sales questions and I was happy to be sick as a dog.

[hawkchick11]

I don't know about yours, but a lot of websites with an order button or a payment button or something similar will also have a statement there that says, "Do NOT click Button X more than once."

Oh wait, I forgot, even if it WAS there, an SC wouldn't have read it.

Our website has that.. and of course they still click it multiple times. Even our employees at the stores do it

[wraiths_crono]

Granted I didn't read all the comments but here is what I love: The BBB is a reporting agency NOT an enforcement agency. All they can do is say '999great reviews 1 bad review'

[friendofjimmyk]

Button McSmashy

Lady went to the website, made an order, and hit the release button several times, I mean 10+.

.

Every time someone posts something about a SC going button happy on the computer, Special Ed comes to mind!

"I made order! I made order! yaaaaaayyyyyyy!"

[LifeCarnie]

800 Number Please

This one just occured, and I was ready to have a blast with it. The lady in question called several times, and I was the first to get her. She wanted one of our competitor's phone numbers. Now, I'm all for screwing upper management over, but that's just a stupid question. Aside from policy stating I can't or else, I would never give out a competitor's phone number. I have some morals.

This happens where I work too. I don't get it. Google/dogpile/jeeves are my friends in research. Why can't these people do the same thing?

These people waste an hour on the phone trying to get information that would take two seconds to find on the internet.

[Xieg]

I suggested the same. Even went so far as to spell out the website name.

The woman had a horrible phone voice too. Kept slurring the last word of every sentence, which more often than not was the name of the business she wanted. It would have made more sense to check the internets before calling someone who was not going to give out a competitors phone number. Kind of wanted her to call back so I could give her the number to 411.

As far as Flowers-O-Suck, I would imagine phone customers are much the same wherever you go, excluding the great white northern parts of Canada anyway. GraveKeeper's customers scare me.

[smileyeagle1021]

ok, for the idiot hitting 10 times... sounds like my SCs that despite there being 3 places before they click "submit" and 2 after (one immediate, one in email) telling them that if they book an advance purchase it cannot be cancelled... yet every single farking day I get someone who claims that it doesn't say anywhere on the website that it can't be cancelled... or the people who are really bad who admit to reading and understanding it but thought there was no way we would enforce it...

for the competitors, I'll be more than happy to give you the number of our competitors if we are sold out and there is no sister hotel that is close enough... but I'll be damned if i'll give you a competitors phone number just because you don't like our rates...

[earl colby pottinger]

Radio ads?

I know people price match printed ads and flyers.

I know that online ads are often matched if they are storefront prices, and even some internet warehouse prices will be price matched sometimes.

But I have never heard of price matching a radio ad! How do you prove the offered price?

[edible_hat]

Me: The internet is not a car.

It's not a truck either. It's a series of tubes.

[calulu]

The price matching on the radio ad is a tricky thing. Usually it means main competitor is swamped with some substandard roses/flowers from a supplier and they have to move them like tomorrow. We don't match stuff like that.

Or like yesterday, someone called in with a competitors coupon requesting a competitors arrangement. That happened twice. Once I was able to match the coupon and the arrangement because I had a handful of discount options and the item wasn't specific to the other florist. But the last one the woman got very hot with me because I refused to take the order at all. She was requesting an arrangement of specific tea roses in specific colors that our competitor sells in a Martha Stewart brand teapot. There was just no way to get the exact same item. Yeah, I could have ordered her tea roses in a fancy teapot but not the exact one and there's nothing more furious, unreasonable and insane than a 45 to 70 year old upper middle class lady calling back days later to bitch that the roses weren't pink enough and the florist used the wrong pot. We would have had to have eaten the cost of that order had I taken the order.

Anyone else have to carefully tiptoe around competitors ads?

[Xieg]

I had a post earlier somewhere out there about a lady who called in about pricematching. It is something we do, as long as we have physical ad. She wanted to pricematch a price she was quoted by a competitors CSR, over the phone, that was obviously a special discount, and was an item that wasn't even similar to what she wanted from us.

Long story short, I told her hell no.

[edible_hat]

I saw a TV ad recently for a hardware store that said "We'll beat any competitor's price by 10%. All you have to do is show us their ad! aslongasitisn'tasaleortradeprice"

Since most hardware stores around here only advertise when they've got a sale on, those poor CSRs are going to be stuck with SCs yelling at them because they didn't hear the deliberatly mumbled fine print on the ad.