Complaints

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Have you ever had a luser complain about you? Did your manager have your back?

I worked helpdesk for a few months for a major UK bank's software package since I was in need of some quick cash to move to the US, and I had a call from this one woman who was just awful. See, as part of the package we supplied a card reader which connected to the serial port, since this software was used to make payments directly out of customer accounts (and if you're a company, you don't want your computer to be stolen and have some miscreant plug it in and start sending payments to all his buddies). Well, these card readers were absolute pieces of crap. We charged 500 pounds EACH for them, which was daylight robbery considering the fact that the build quality of these things was akin to that of balsa wood. They broke all the time.

So anyway, this woman called in complaining that the card reader was not working. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with this woman who was rude and churlish from the get-go, going through troubleshooting, asking her to go to the back of the machine and make sure it's plugged in properly (she actually refused to do this twice before I got annoyed and said, "We're not going to send you a replacement if you won't verify that the cause of the issue isn't the fact that you haven't plugged it in properly"), but in general I was my usual self - articulate, charming with just a dash of ironic humour.

After I ascertained that the card reader was indeed FUBAR, she flipped out on me and demanded I send one to her right away and have it there by COB (it was already 4pm, so there was no way in hell THAT was happening). I said that we could send it overnight and have it there by 9am in the morning but noooooo, this wasn't good enough. She demanded to complain about the "awful service" we'd given her. I told her in no uncertain terms that we were support for the software and if she wanted to complain, the business manager at her bank would be the person to complain to. She SLAMMED the phone down and I went for a cup of tea and some lunch.

Well, a couple of hours later my manager calls me into his office. Apparently this woman called back saying that I was the rudest person she'd ever spoken to and she was so angry that she was going to close all her accounts with [Major Bank] and that I should be fired. Thankfully, we recorded all our calls (something I am in favour of for this very reason) and he took a listen and he said to me, "You speak to everyone this way. You definitely weren't rude to her."

I said, "I know!", smiled and went back to work. My manager called her back and politely told her to stop being a whiny bitch and to expect a replacement card reader in the morning.

Fin.

Comments

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

Yes, my absolutely 'most challenging customer' probably deserves a post of his own, but on one occasion he swore at me over something that was not my fault at all. He liked to think he was in with all the senior management and emailed them all to complain about me and they replied that I wasn't to be spoken to like that by him.

On another occasion, same customer, I went into the datacentre at 3am on a Saturday morning to help him fix his server when one of my engineers who was on call (I was not on call) phoned me in exasperation because he was demanding we 'give' him one of our servers. I then got in a taxi from my house, fetched a spare server from another office, took it across town, bought him coffee and when I didn't know something about Solaris, I looked it up online. He complained about me looking stuff up online. My manager backed me up then too.

[amblinwiseass.livejournal.com]

And he's still walking around alive? You're a better person than I.

[byh.livejournal.com]

They do it all the time.

If you read any form of documentation in front of them 99% of customers are sure to consider your skills to be very low.

It is especially annoying when the customer could avoid/resolve the situation by looking into manuals himself.

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

I had something awful happen when I did help desk. The sales drone in Boston (I am in California) couldn't get on the network and wanted to speak to a man. Well I was the only one supporting east coast time and obviously a woman so... that wasn't going to happen. He then threatened to come to california and shoot me. (5 hour flight with a gun? Not) I documented everything. When my boss came in, he not only went to bat for me, he made sure that when the sales drone came in to our office, he appologise. I found out the drone loaded aol on his laptop and it fubared all our settings. I met said sales drone and all I can say is napolean syndrome. I was taller than him at 5'4.

[trazan.livejournal.com]

> I met said sales drone and all I can say is napolean syndrome. I was taller than him at 5'4.

When I read that, I got an image of a psychotic, angry Joe Pesci. ;)
Wombat

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

Yeah but blonde and whiney.

[aznpersephony.livejournal.com]

lmfao crazieness

People were surprised to hear me on the phones cause I'm a girl. And I'm 5'2'' too. :p

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

I love it when they get shocked because I say no to them. Like them being all flirty is going to make me say yes to something. Please!

[annamaryse.livejournal.com]

When they heard my female voice, I would sometimes get "Um, could you connect me with one of the techs please?" And then I'd say, "I'd be happy to, I am the senior tech here, would you like to talk to one of the juniors instead?" Always a pleasure to connect them with someone less experienced....

[taleya.livejournal.com]

oh! Those are the BEST. Demand to talk to a man, then think they can come over and bully me. OR try and chat me up because I have a deep voice over the phone.

Problem is, I'm not a small woman (five foot 8). And I'm not also using that as euphemism for big boned, I just carry a fair amount of muscle and I've been told that apparently it's evident from the way I move that I know how to use it (see icon).

It's so much FUN to end up facing down complete penis heads like that. If you can manage the "mummy" voice, you can pretty much reduce any man psychologially to a five year old. *FUN!* :D

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

I don't have the height, I have the muscle. I pick up 21 inch crts like it is nothing. They think twice before messing with me. If that doesn't work (becuase obviously there aren't that many to haul around anymore) I have the stink eye. I believe I have perfected my mothers stink eye. It will shrivel parts of their bodies up so fast their voices get higher and they get surprised by it.

Picture of me and my honey in my icon. I work with tons of asians and they are pushy buttheads. Thanks to my husband, I can say no and smile really nice and they know I am not going anywhere and it will not get done until I am damn good and ready.

Mummy voice, I love it!

[taleya.livejournal.com]

It's also damned useful to pull on idiot customers...I actually had a supervisor pass a 14 year old know-it-all on to me - fuck, that one was funny. He was listening in, tears in his eyes from laughing so hard as I made that kid completely my bitch.

"What are you clicking on? Stop. Clicking. I did not tell you to click on any thing. This is not going to work unless you do EXACTLY WHAT I TELL YOU, do you understand?"

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

BWAHAHAHA, I love it.

Yep I had to pull that voice with one of my guys. He disconnected his laptop from the network and went home after asking me to pull data from his totally fried hard drive to his loaner laptop. He went home and didn't even talk to me. So I totally chewed him out today when he came crawling for the rest of his data.

"Isn't it on the server?"
"yes the data is on the server"
"why can't I have it?"
"because it is my server and you don't have access to it."
"Can I get access to it?"
"No!"
"Why?"
"Because it is our server you can't play with it."
"How do I get my data then."
"That was the part where you don't take the laptop off the network. Remember our talk yesterday about that?"
"Oh yeah"
"yeah. It is going to take 2 hours to copy it down to your pc due to wan saturation. These guys are pushing data around in prep for a project."

BWAHAHAHAHA

[taleya.livejournal.com]

"say it.... SAY IT!"

"I'm your biatch..."

[byh.livejournal.com]

IT-world is full of strong women.

I remember one girl who was a system administrator and liked throwing heavy objects at people. Never hit me though.

[taleya.livejournal.com]

:D I throw things at my co-workers all the time.

Mind you, i work graveyard, there's a max of five of us on at any given time and they're free to throw them back...

[annamaryse.livejournal.com]

When I was supporting software, the most stellar case in memory was a truly stupid woman (she was a very nasty lawyer, a real pit bull) who gave so much grief to our team (over the course of multiple issues) that the company eventually told her to send the software back for a refund (a definite departure from our usual policy!) and informed her that our team was instructed not to have any further contact with her.

The company's position was that there was no reason for us to endure her personal level of abuse!

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Oooooooh, lawyers are the worst people to deal with.

Which is funny, because everytime I've spoken with a lawyer with regards to policy, I've always won. It's nice to know that five years of law school doesn't actually make you any smarter.

[taleya.livejournal.com]

Here's a great one to pull on lawyers.

Every time they say they're a lawyer and threaten legal action, and being deliberately bullying - ask them if they're familiar with Law of Tort. And watch them back right the fuck down.

(If they're bullying, you can get them on intentional infliction of emotional distress. If they're slagging off your company, you have them on dignitary torts :D)

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Or you can just say, "I'm sorry you feel that way. You may direct all further communications to our legal department. Goodbye."

:D

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

I loved being able to do that, the contract I'm on now is all about being uber spineless. Last contract any mention of sueing and we were to redflag them and disconnect the call after giving the legal dept's info.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Heh. My position is that I will decide my own policies, including whether or not any given caller from the CEO on down is allowed to talk to me or not.

We have so much red tape going on that no-one can do anything retaliatory in any timeframe under a year-plus, so there will never be any consequences.

It's quite liberating, and in practical terms it keeps me calm enough to deal with pretty much any call. In fact, I think that in the past six years, I've only had one caller who was enough of a dick for me to hang up on. And he was some high-level I.T. manager in our department who apparently thought I was going to be his personal telepathic, technomantic lackey. Yeah... let me transfer you to our specialist, Mr Dial Tone.

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

I had one guy bitch me out over an ongoing problem that I'd not had any involvement in. He also yelled at me because I asked him to contact the guy we'd sent equipment to, to see if he had it - apparently it was my fault that the guy went on holidays to somewhere with no mobile coverage.

He asked to speak to a manager, who happened to be sitting next to me listening to the whole call, and knows I've got good customer service skills anyway. My manager told him off for yelling at me :D

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

We have one whiny bitch of a teacher in our school who thinks we should a) be psychic and b) drop everything for her. She recently memo'd our department head complaining about a number of issues that varied between: things fixed two months ago, things affecting the whole school, non-existant problems, and the replacement for the printer that SHE vandalised. That was the best bit - she (in front of some of the worst students we have) deliberately broke the network card in an old HP4050 printer. Those cards don't come cheap, as the printer is so old. At the same time, the motor died in another HP4050, so we combined the two printers into one working one, put that in her classroom and got a shiny new one for the classroom next to my office (i.e. where I can keep an eye on it, and know that she'll never touch it). Quite aside from her actions making the students think it's acceptable to deliberately break the IT equipment, that ensured that we were unable to replace all of the PCs we wanted during the summer break - we no longer had enough money to do it, thanks to her. She complained about that, too. Then she had the cheek to stop me in the corridor the day after she'd sent the memo and expect me to be all sweetness and light with her. I soon put her straight on that one.

Luckily, our department head rocks, and knew the whole story behind the printer anyway. She also backed us up fully on all the other points, and showed the memo (and our response) to the Deputy Headteacher, who also fully supported us - and had previously agreed with me when I'd told her that there was no way in hell that the new printer was going in that classroom.

The teacher concerned is now fully back in "ignore the entire IT support team whenever you see them" mode. Which suits us just fine.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

We often get customer feed back and if it's bad we're forced to eat it if we haven't got everything perfect.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

One time I shut down a guy's freemail account because he had been using it to send death threats to someone (this was policy for us).

He complained.

My manager gave me a written reprimand.

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

NICE.

You should have used a freemail account to send anonymous death threats to your manager. :D

Oh, and...

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

The obvious response to the guy is: what a complete smegging smeghead. :D

Re: Oh, and...

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Absolument!