Old Work Stories

Enough years have passed now that I can tell a few stories from when I worked at a call centre for cell phones.

Working customer service for inbound calls can really be irritating and stressful. Sometimes the calls were fine, just a quick payment on the account, maybe a change in plans, or ordering a new phone. Quick and simple calls. Then there were the other calls.

Most of the time it was about the bill. Cell phone bills aren't really that complicated but you do need to read through the entire bill to make sense of some of the charges. You should also know your plan, what sort of things you can be charged for, and the date your billing cycle changes.

Some of the calls I got were simple to figure out, a charge got applied on one bill and a credit was applied on another. This happened a lot when someone ordered a new phone. Any credits got applied immediately but it took a couple of days before charges for the phone got applied. So if the billing cycle changed during that time...credit on one bill, charge on the next.

Some customers caught on fast once it was explained but some of them...oh boy. We used to joke that if customers had to take an intelligence test first there wouldn't be very many cell phones sold. Because some people really did seem to be quite stupid. And I don't like saying people are stupid. Doing stupid things, yes, but being stupid, no.

So, customers calling in about their bills were either confused and pleasant or irritated, The irritated customers gave us some of our funniest calls too. Also some of the most frustrating. I had a customer call once who wanted us to remove a one cent charge from his credit card bill. Not give him a credit on his cell phone bill but to credit one cent off his credit card which had been charged. He didn't ask for a supervisor or manager and I was stuck trying to convince him that I couldn't touch his credit card account except by applying a credit to his cell phone bill which would then be paid by his credit card. Twenty minutes later he finally hung up on me without accepting any credit on his account. *rolls eyes* Honestly, one cent?

Another time I got a customer upset at being charged because a promotion had expired and she hadn't noticed the message on her previous three invoices telling her the promotion was about to expire. The promotion was also no longer available, having been replaced by another, similar promotion. She wanted her old promotion back, all charges credited to her and an apology. I advised her that she had been notified on the previous three invoices and she snapped "Who reads their entire bill like that?"  Foolishly, I answered that I read the entire bills I receive. Ooooooo, All of a sudden I was "Miss Angel, so perfect" and after a few more minutes she asked for a supervisor. I was willing to add on the new promotion, with the contract extension required at that time, and credit back the charges but wouldn't credit the other charges on the same bill.

In looking over her account I saw that she called in every two months to get credits for charges for going over her minutes or roaming. Customers were not supposed to be credited that often so I was refusing to credit back legitimate charges. She didn't want the contract extension and was obviously used to bullying other care reps into crediting the charges. When I wouldn't she wanted my supervisor. Now she had called on a weekend in the evening and we had one or two supervisors on duty to accept calls at that time. So there was a wait for one to get free. When I finally got Peter on the line, it was 5 minutes before his time on call duty was over. I knew she was going to take some time and offered to go back into queue to let another supervisor take the call but he knew his duty and said to bring her through. Now every time I spoke with her she called me "Miss Angel" in the most derisive voice she could manage. So when I went back and spoke her name she said "Yes, Miss Angel". Barely hanging on to my laughter I said "I have Peter on the line with us. He's one of the supervisors on duty tonight and will be taking over the call now." There was absolute silence from her because she hadn't wanted a supervisor to hear her like that.

An hour later Peter came by my desk and told me that he had just gotten off the phone *wince" and she had ended up calling him the Devil because he threatened to remove some of the credits previously applied for legitimate charges. We had a good laugh and for a few days afterward greeted one another as the devil and the angel.

Sometimes customers called in because they were having trouble with their phones and we had to troubleshoot them. I had one woman call in because her phone kept hanging up when she got a call. By that time I had gotten a few customers who simply had pressed the wrong button when making and receiving calls so I asked her to run me through what she did when the phone rang. So she told me that she would pick up the phone and push the press while ringing button to answer. This startled me and I asked "The press while ringing button?" and she said she had been told to press the PWR (Press While Ringing) button when the phone rang.  I had to take a minute to keep from breaking off in laughter and as gently as I could I told her "Ma'am, that's the power button." Silence for a moment then click as she hung up. Good thing I had set myself up in after call because I laughed for a couple of minutes.

One of the steps we took when troubleshooting was to have the customer turn off and then turn back on their phone to see if it simply needed to re-register with the cell towers. We could usually tell when a customer was calling in on their cell phones but for some reason when we asked if their were on a landline they would say yes. Even advising them that we needed to turn the phone off and then back on didn't seem to clue them in. So, for the particularly dense customers, we would proceed with troubleshooting and, sure enough, they would disconnect. For the ones that listened we sometimes either called them back on a landline or they called back when they got someplace that had one.

The group I worked with were Resolution Specialists. Officially our job was to de-escalate calls that regular care reps couldn't. We could offer a few more things and had a higher limit for crediting charges but we still weren't supervisors. Unofficially, we were to reduce the calls going to the supervisors as well as settle customer disputes. We did good, as a group we reduced call volume to the supervisors by over 80%.

We'd often compare notes on calls and sometimes asked for advice when a particularly complicated situation arose. Usually we handled our own calls. None of us spoke loudly so it was always fun when one of us stood up and raised our voices enough for everyone else to hear. One of us was so quiet and mild mannered that we never heard his calls. So we were all surprised one day to see him stand up then clearly say "Sir, I must advise you that putting Vaseline on your phone will void your warranty." We looked at each other then hastily tried to muffle our laughter as he continued with his call.

Dealing with cell phones as we did, it was amazing how little some customers knew about the devices. More than once we'd have a customer call in having trouble with their phone only to find out the battery was low or some other simple problem that a bit of common sense would have solved.  One customer called in because her phone never worked and in the process of troubleshooting the rep found out that the battery was not attached "because it made the phone too heavy."

One customer called in so irate at his phone not working that he said he had even gone to the roof of his building to see if he could get reception. The rep told him to "try another roof". Which was the wrong response but apparently the customer had been quite rude up to that point and the rep ran out of patience.

But I think the call that made me think there really were stupid people out there was the one I received when the area the customer was in was in the middle of a hurricane and cell towers were down as well as power being out and the area was being battered by heavy rain and winds. He wanted to know why his phone wasn't working and when I told him that the storm had brought down the cell towers demanded to know why there wasn't a crew out there working on it. Really?

Reminded me of the customer who called Tech Support because her computer wasn't working and when asked to check the power cord to make sure it was securely plugged in responded that she couldn't see to do that. The power was out.