An SC Redeemed

[Getoutofmylobby]

For the past two weeks i've been plagued by this certain SC who somehow always manages to void his room key card. Like credit cards, they're magnetically encoded--but unlike credit cards any magnet can easily erase them and lock the customer out of their room. And it always pisses the customer off.

The Key Card guy has been staying here solid for two weeks and every night he comes up to the desk complaining that he is locked out. And every time i warn him not to put his card near anything magnetic. He swears he doesn't, gets offended that I am lecturing him and storms off to his room.

Tonight, he came up, and as usual wordlessly tossed his card on the desk. I wordlessly remade it for him and this time he took out his wallet, undid the magnetic money clip and slipped his key card in with his cash.

Me: Ah ha! Sir, you do know your money clip is magnetic.
KCG: Now listen! it.. oh...
Me: Here, let me redo your key...
KCG: I guess i should keep it away from my wallet.
Me: It would be a good idea.

So he leaves me in my smug satisfaction and the night continues. Two hours later he comes back and hands me a salad and a cheeseburger from the Ruby Tuesdays up the street.

KCG: Hey, i'm sorry for being a dick. I thouight you were screwing my key up on purpose.
Me: Ah its ok, you were frustrated, and i can be a dick sometimes too.

Wow, someone actually admitting they were wrong and apologising??? What is the world coming to?

Anyone else have any SC redemption stories?

[BusBus]

What a happy ending! It probably took that guy some guts to say 'sorry' after all that.


Apparently, a colleague of mine and I look identical (from a customer's POV anyways). I am always getting "Oh! You helped me last time!" and it's always her. Always. Anyways, one day, I was just starting and a customer comes up to me and says, "Sorry I yelled at you earlier." Seeing as I had only been there for three minutes...you guessed it....he had yelled at my colleague earlier. I passed the message along.

[crazydaisy]

It's always really gratifying when an SC returns to apologise, isn't it? Nice to know that they have realised that they CAN be wrong and that the 'dumb assistant' has actually been correct all along.
Also, it's very gratifying purely because so many SC's don't bother to apologise, even when they know they really should.

[Fraggle]

Nice story, I've worked the phones for 2 years and have yet to get an apology for being yelled at over a SC own stupidity

[Jewels]

I once had a woman call me upset over a coupon she had received in the mail for a free something or another. She wanted me to redeem it for her, but the problem is, the coupon wasn't ours. I tell her this, and that she would need to call the company listed on the coupon, and this just set her off. She called my company a monoply (we get that one a lot), ridiculous, stupid. She threatened to go and get herself a new provider for television (nevermind the fact that her building has agreed to let us be the only provider there--thats where the monoply thing comes in). She also called my a Communist...which was a new one on me.

So she hangs up, and I laugh and go to lunch. I come back and I have a message to call this crazy lady back. I sign, grit my teeth, and dial. I get her VM (which ended with her wishing me a blessed day).

She calls back and is transferred to me. Why? Because she wanted to apologize! I guess after she called me a commie she decided to actually look at her coupon, and noticed that it was for a different company all together.

After some similar incidents with her, I come to find out that she is on some serious meds, and when she goes off them, she just goes off.

[Mongo Skruddgemire]

Guy comes into my shop with a computer that his son was playing with some commands that he shouldn't have and managed to format the guy's second hard drive losing him all of his data.

I take a look at it and turns out that the kid didn't just format the disk, but ran fdisk and tore down the partition.

Fdisk (for non-techies) is the command used to define the partitions on a hard drive. This is the very first step one has to do even before doing a format. One step worse even than just wiping the sucker.

I informed him that there was no guarantee that I could recover anything but that I was willing to try. At this point he went ape-[censored] crazy on me. Waxing poetic about all of his maps (he was a cartographer who didn't back up his data), his MP3 collection and 40 years of family photos that he scanned from negatives, slides, and processed photos.

I finally manage to get him out of the shop and start researching ways to undo a partitionless hard drive. As luck would have it, two months prior a new software package had come out and was highly rated by PC Magazine and several other publications so I purchased a copy for the shop and started the recovery process.

Sure enough it's finding everything and is backing it all up to a new hard drive for me (so I could re-partition the original hard drive and copy the data back) and I'm thinking of calling up the guy.

About that time the phone rings and it's the guy calling me. Shields up! Red Alert! I'm expecting yet another round of abuse to the effect of "What did you find? Can you fix it? Or are you too goddamn stupid to fix it?"

Nope, he apologized for his outburst, made the excuse that he was pissed at his kid and took it out on me because I was there and the bearer of bad news. He also asked me to suggest some sort of backup solution.

Calmed down to my normal cheerful self by his admission of suckiness I inform him of his options of a backup system and gave him the good news that the program was recovering the data and while I couldn't guarantee recovery of all his data, it looked that we would get most of it.

Every one was happy and the SC redeemed himself

[RecoveringKinkoid]

I posted this story a long time ago, so I won't go into all of it again, but the short, simple version is that I had a pain in the neck lawyer types's car towed, and he went balistic, cussing and insulting us, cussing the tow driver, and ultimately calling the cops (who said the classic line to him "Sir, the only car in this lot these people CAN'T tow is mine." before driving off in disgust. ).

Believe it or not, that guy came back and apologized to us for acting so badly.

Hard to believe, but it does happen. In this case, I suspect that being given a lift to the garage by the rough but good-hearted tow driver and having to be reliant on the good will of a guy he'd just cussed out humbled him a bit.

[Boozy]

I called my bank a few months ago, and although I didn't yell or curse or anything, I would definitely have considered myself to be a "difficult" customer. Worse, I later found out that I was completely in the wrong (my husband had moved some money around and had forgotten to tell me). I felt really bad, so I called back to apologize...but it was a call centre, so of course I didn't get the original service rep. The new person thanked me for calling, and said he would put a note on the account, but I still feel really bad that the original guy will never know how sorry I am for making him deal with my stupidity.
I've never had a customer apologize to me. Not once. Even if things reach the point where they realize they're wrong, they just slink out without a word.

[ShortTemperHatesStupidity]

Wow. Awesome story! He even bought you dinner-how nice!

It's rare that a customer would go so far out of the way to make it up to you. What a great ending.

::somewhere an angel gets its wings::

[BookstoreEscapee]

The only customers I've had apologize were the ones who weren't being sucky, just didn't know what the policy was, and after I explained, they would apologize even though it wasn't really necessary, like "I'm sorry. I didn't realize blah..."

Those and the ones who accidently threw their credit card at me because it slipped out of their hand as they pulled it from the wallet, or their little one knocked over the little Godiva chocolate bar rack on the counter (which is easy to do and happens all the time), or one of the several other peices of "stuff" they make us put on the counter.

Don't think a sucky customer has ever really apologized, only the nonsucky ones.

[trunks2k]

My favorite apology was from a woman who wasn't really an SC.

Years ago I used to work in the bakery at the grocery store. I' m totally unable to decorate cakes, and I just did the menial labor; cleaning, packaging, baking cookies, etc. Nothing skilled.

A woman comes in when I'm all alone and asks for the cake she ordered. I go into the fridge and it's not there. Uh-oh. I go to the order sheets to see if maybe somebody missed it. Not there either. Double uh-oh. I search high and low and can't even find the sheet. I tell the woman that I can't find her order, and that it might have been misplaced or something. I apologize for the mistake profusely and offer to throw a cake toegether quickly. It might not be the best looking cake in the world, but it'll be better than nothing, and I get the OK from the store manager to give it to her half off. Woman is obviously miffed at the whole thing and not totally satisfied with the cake I put together. But she leaves without saying anything particularly mean to me; she at least realized that I wasn't at fault and tried to fix the situation.

Next day I'm working and I see her heading straight for the bakery, like she's on a mission from god. Now I'm a bit worried because I figure she was back to complain and I was the only person there again, so I'd have to take the brunt of it. Instead she comes up to me, and tells me that it was all a misunderstanding. When she placed the order over the phone, she'd called directory service to get our number, and directory service had transferred her call to a store in a different town. So she never realized that she was ordering from the wrong store. She tells me that I deserve praise for how I handled it all and that she came to the store specifically to apologize and offer me a hug.

[ominousoat]

I've had some apologies that seem to lack in sincerity, you know the "I'm sorry, I'm not angry at you, BUT!" and then continue yelling. Not the definition of acquiescence. (yes, I used Microsoft Word to help me with that one)

Anyhow, once I did have a very sincere and heartening reformed SC. Anyhow, this lady called, furious that she though we made two electronic deposits from her account (just a strange ARC quirk) and was very, very livid.

She started with guns a'blazin' and I told her to contact her bank to see what she could find. Naturally this made her even more furious, you know the "why should I have to help you fix YOUR mistake!" kind of thing. Well after several minutes of back and forth I had explained the process, advised her to keep an eye on her bank account, and then call us back later.

Well, about an hour or so later she called back, insisted to talk to my supervisor, and then told my supe about how patient I was with her, and she wanted to tell my supervisor what a great CSR I was.

Neat!

[Getoutofmylobby]

Along the same lines, I had one pissed off SC who was CERTAIN she made her reservation at our hotel and not one of the 10 other locations in town. We were full, i didn't have room for her and yet she refused to acknowledge she had made a mistake. That is, until I picked up the desk computer monitor out of its little hole, put it on the desk and showed to her her confirmation number and the address of her real hotel on the same screen. I didn't make a big show of it or anything its just that this was the only thing I could do. Our conversation had degraded into a "yes it is!, No its not!" kind of thing.

It was like someone waved a magic wand over her. "Oh i'm SOOOO sorry!!" She smiled and left.

And later on i found out that she had singled me out on a customer survey as someone who was "extremely friendly and helpful."

[myswtghst]

We get the occasional customer/tech who calls back in to apologize, we're a small enough group (around 35 CSRs) and we keep good enough call records that we can usually figure out who they were abusing.

Recently, one of our supervisors more or less shamed one of our cranky techs into apologizing, as he nearly made a girl cry. I was proud of our sup.

[ominousoat]

Recently, one of our supervisors more or less shamed one of our cranky techs into apologizing, as he nearly made a girl cry. I was proud of our sup.

Oh God, techs can be the worst. I pity our dispatch team.