They Did it Last Time!

This one will be a short one, but it still really got on my nerves.

So once again, I was working in the (Cell Phone) store, just another day, nothing particularly special going on. The day had been fairly slow, which was fairly odd because the weather wasn’t all that bad, and it was Thursday, which is usually a decently high traffic day.

So I’m sitting around, waiting for some customers to come in, when all of a sudden a vehicle pulls up to the front (And parks crooked, something that it seems like almost every terrible customer tends to do). Out of this vehicle steps a woman, probably around the age of 50 or possibly even 60. As she’s walking up to the front door I notice that she has a folder in her hand which is full of papers that look like bills…. Not a good sign…

She proceeds to Open the door. I will be ME, and the Woman will be OM.

ME : Hi there! How can I help you?

OM : I have some questions..

ME : Okay! *Politely smiling, waiting for said questions*

OM : I have some questions about my bill

ME : Yeah I should be able to help you out with that, let’s go --

OM : *Cuts me off* Here *Pushes bills into my hands*

ME : *Denying said bills* Actually we’ll end up taking some table space over to the side here, go ahead and follow me!

So I lead her over to the table and we take a seat. She lays her folder full of papers onto the table and starts pulling some of the bills out. At this point I start to notice that there are a LOT of bills in this folder, probably like 5 or 6, and I just assume that she keeps every single one of the bills she gets.

OM : So there’s a problem with the bills..

ME : *Looking at one of the bills* Oh yeah?

…

*silence*

…

ME : *Looks up, after her not elaborating on what the problem is* what um.. What seems to be the problem?

OM : Well look at this one *Puts other bill in front of me, on top of the one I was already looking at*

So I’m here looking at her bills, which, as anyone who has worked in one of these stores knows, isn’t exactly easy to navigate without knowing what you’re looking for. One thing that stands out to me though, is that the totals on the bills were pretty far apart from each other. After seeing that, I take the next logical step. I pull up my tablet and go to look up the account.

After typing in the account number that was on top of one of the bills, I get an error. No account found. Pretty weird error to get, but whatever, maybe I typed it in wrong, you know? So I type it in again, same error. At this point I flip over the bill to find one of the phone numbers on the account. Once I track one down, I put that one in. Same error. It’s at this point that I realize that the other bill that we were looking at had a different account number, so I try that. Once again I get the same problem. This is where I start asking some more questions.

ME : So, what kind of account is this

OM : It’s my account

ME : Yeah, but, what kind of services are associated with this account.

OM : We use it for our business

OH MY GOD JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!

ME : *getting irritated on the inside*, well let me ask this, is it cell phones? Internet? Television?

OM : We use them for making calls, but on one of the bills we got a long distance charge.

ME : *light bulb clicks on* Ohhh, so it’s a landline phone service?

OM : Yeah

Finally I had gotten to what I needed to know. This explained why I wasn’t able to pull up the account, because in our store (Which is a CELL PHONE store) we can only access Wireless Cell Phone accounts. In no way shape or form can we even see into Landline accounts, let alone a business account that has billing issues regarding them.

ME : That makes more sense. *Relieved that I don’t have to deal with this anymore* The thing is though, unfortunately our store is a customer facing Wireless Cell Phone store, and there isn’t really anything that I can do for you regarding your landline service, you’ll have to --

OM : *Condescending* Well then get me someone here who CAN *Looking at me with an incredibly red face*.

ME : If i’m being completely honest with you, none of us in store are going to be able to do that, we just don’t have access to the systems that involve your plan, you’ll have to call in to our customer support.

OM : *Grabs another paper out of her folder* Well see look at this, these are the prices that my plan is SUPPOSED to be at, but they’re too high!

ME : Yeah… Like I said, I wouldn’t know the first thing about the rates that you’re showing me here, We just aren’t trained to deal with that kind of thing.

OM : Call them for me then

ME : Unfortunately that’s something that I can’t do, if I were to call in, they’re just going to want to speak to you anyways in order to verify the account, and I honestly I don’t know anymore about this than you do.

OM : *Her red face staring me down* Well… They helped me last time I was in here!

ME : Yeah, I can’t speak to what reps have done or what they didn’t do in the past, all I know is that I’m not allowed to call customer service on a customer’s behalf.

OM : This is ridiculous!

It’s at this point that the manager walks up, who will be called M

M : Hey there, what seems to be going on over here, is [ME] getting everything taken care of for you?

OM : No, he is not, he is refusing to help me with my bill.

M : *looks at me* what’s the problem with it?

ME : Well, it looks like this is a landline bill, and I was letting [OL] know that we simply don’t have access to the systems that we need in order to look at something like this.

M : *Going into that typical retail manager “everyone must be happy” mode* Why don’t you just go ahead and call this one time and see if you can help her out.

ME : *Dieing inside* … alright, I can do that, let me gather some extra information.

I was incredibly frustrated at my manager when this happened. Usually my managers are pretty strict on us following the rules on this kind of thing, and will back us up, but in this case they sided with the customer. Of course after this the customer was giving me the most smug look she could muster as well while I’m on the phone trying to get HER account figured out. And the worst part? I had to constantly hand the phone off between me and the customer so that they could verify her over the phone, and ofcourse she knew none of her Passcodes.

In the end do you want to know what the issue was with her account? Her promotional period had ended. That’s all. She had a deal for being a new customer, and then it ended. Customer service ended up extending the period without any fuss, and the customer left and went on her way.

 Good.   Riddance.