techrecovery | Haven't posted in here in a while. (Reply)

Do you have banned users at your place of work? I mean specific people to whom you must outright deny any help whatsoever, as a result of verbal abuse or policy violations or whatnot?

We do. Over the summer this guy who's not affiliated with the university directly, but was in the habit of calling for inane, simple, Windows 98 help (something for which we massively stepped down support recently) every single day. On two occasions he got verbally abusive with some of our consultants and we have all heard him shreiking and throwing breakable things against the wall over the phone line and demanding we pay for his "$3,400" copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking (which he got FREE from his department and which we do not support at all)... anyway, as a result of such behavior, our boss's boss's boss's boss contacted him and informed him he was not allowed to call anymore, but he could email us for help for one month, and then we'd cut him off completely. The cutoff was at the end of August.

I answered my phone today to hear this user's familiar voice (our entire support center knows his name, voice, and loathes him) so I immediately put him on mute and announced loudly who I had on the line, and un-muted it so he could hear their screams of "Oh no! HIM! What is he doing calling here?"

It turns out he had e-mailed the big boss (a mistake ever letting him contact the boss directly) begging to be allowed to contact us for support, and got a flat response of "No. We told you once and are telling you again, we will refuse all future support requests from you!" ... and on the phone now he tells me that he was granted support privleges by that department head. I flatly told him that until we are notified of such a decision we have to hang up, just as not one but THREE supervisors rushed over to my cube to listen in along with the rest of the cube farm and to fill me in about the e-mail to the boss which I wasn't aware of before he called.

Now the supervisors are accessing the ticket I logged for him and gossiping up and down and bitching and grumbling. This guy's name alone can ruin our day. And we were already really loud and riled up since a few other customers today were being much more difficult than usual (I can hear one customer yelling through a co-workers headset all the way across the room)...

Fun. This story's not terribly related to technology, but it's about the support environment. POINT of POST: I'd love to hear your stories along these lines.