What Not to Say While on Hold

[TelephoneAngel]

Customer rings shouting that his service has been out for two days, and he has had a home visit today and nothing was found wrong, it started working again overnight, but this is the fourth time he has had this inconvenience, and what am I going to do about it?

I check the computer notes, and this has happened every so often for about four months, he rings and complains of no service for a day or two but when the home agent goes to see what is wrong, service has been resumed again that morning.

I say to the customer "as this is the fourth time, I will see about an upgrade for you so that this does not happen again" (although he has been paid an authorisation for the inconvenience on each of the other occassions).

An upgrade takes a while to input to the system so I say I will put himon hold for a couple of minutes while I do it.

While a customer is on hold they cannot hear me, but I can hear them, and I hear this customer telling his friend -

"yeah, so they can't check if you've really had no service if you say you haven't and then you just tell the home agent it came back that morning, and then if you do it enough they'll upgrade it free for you, and that's what the woman is doing now for me, you should try it"

I return to the customer and tell him I have heard every word, and trust that he will have no more problems in future,then I hang up, and make a report to our head office to see what they can do about this blatant scam.

[Mystic]

Haha caller should win dumbass of the year award for that one. Bravo for confronting him.

[jjllbb]

i HATE people like that. They scream at us and make our lives hell because they're greedy and selfish.

[underemployeed]

i HATE people like that. They scream at us and make our lives hell because they're greedy and selfish.

Yes but sadly most people have been trained the squeaky wheel gets the grease and in my experience my manager is more willing to pay off a scammer that is making a huge scene than a customer who has patience and understands that things happen.

Or some people are just sucky customers. haha, actually a friend of mine got nice deal from cable company because it legitimately went out bunch of times and once they came to apartment and disconnected wrong person and he had a online test due. granted he had other means to go online but when you pay for a service you have expectation of using it especially when it costs over 100$ a month.

[Mr Hero]

Hopefully if there are any problems you can play back the call and it's recorded nice and clear.

[AriRashkae]

I felt bad the time(s) I had to call in about our phone service. Sometimes they'd run the test and it'd be fine, but send a tech (who couldn't find anything), other times they'd test the connection, fail, and send a tech (who still couldn't find anything). After a month of this, the guy finally figured out that it was the wire for our room, which had been run up there along the pipe for our radiator up there , of course resulting in melted plastic and a short. So basically, the cats would kill the phone every time they brushed up against the wire when they jumped on the windowsill. Disconnect that line, and all was good.

I never demanded anything though, just asked that they please find the problem and fix it!

[fma_fanatic]

My ex always said watch out what you say when you're on hold. This is why..what an idiot.

[Green_Fairy]

this is why i either sing along to the hold music...or start making up my own lyrics.

[SG15Z]

This is why when my dad was on hold with a call center recently and he started to bad mouth the CSR I told him they can probably hear him. He didn't believe me.