New First: Got called a Nazi today
I seldom write about the nice people I meet every day, partly because they're just not newsworthy. Nice, decent people call me about 25 times out of 30. The other 5 times, most of them are still decent people who are just very frustrated. Much though we try to downplay it, and much though we try not to let this happen, my cable company is a very large and complicated structure, and people's accounts get mangled in it all the time.
A common call is, "Hi, I had an appointment from 1-3 today, it's now 3:30, and the tech never showed." Some days I won't get one at all, but other days I'll get three or four. I'm actually surprised we're not getting more right now, because September is the busiest time for new installs. All the kids going back to school want their cable and internet hooked up.
About half the time the tech is running late, and we need to send a form over to dispatch to get them to call the customer with an ETA. The other half of the time the work order is cancelled and marked as "customer not home". That never makes people happy. "I've been here all day," they say. Nevertheless, whatever happened, we now have to go to plan B, because the tech has moved on to something else. Dealing with this with tact and compassion is what I get paid for.
Another example is the guy who called me last week, again waiting for a tech that was supposed to show up between 1-2. He was supposed to have phone installed soon, but when he called in to confirm the rep couldn't find any sign of an install work order on his account. The rep set up a dummy work order, and was going to call him back, but never did. So the customer called back and I got it.
I eventually figured out that the original salesperson had put the work order on the wrong account! Some complete stranger had an install scheduled for that phone number on that date. Whoopsie. I quickly cancelled that work order and rescheduled the customer for today. I also gave him my number, because after a couple people have not called you back, you lose some trust in the organization. At least this way he could contact someone and hold them responsible.
Today he calls me because the tech never showed up. I looked up his account. First, he'd decided since then to also buy a computer, so he called in to have the internet installed at the same time. I'm pretty sure I planted the seed for that by asking if he wanted the internet, and by saying that if he did decide to get a computer we could give him a good deal. Go me! But the stupid rep who took the call screwed up adding it to the work order.
First, if you have video _and_ internet with us, the phone is cheaper than if you had just one. The customer already had video, so I'd set him up with the higher price for phone. She didn't change it, so the customer would have been overcharged for phone, leading to an angry call to a billing rep in a month or two.
Second, when she added the internet install, it increased the amount of time the job would take. In those cases the system automatically reschedules the job for the first available timeslot with enough quota. I completely agree with this. We do not want to set our techs up to fail by overloading them with more work than they can do in the time allotted. However, the rep should have told the customer we'd have to reschedule the install. Some customers will go for it, so they get exactly what they want. Some customers will decide to stick with what they had. It should be the customer's decision. She didn't tell him it was rescheduled. So he ended up waiting all day today for an install that had been rescheduled for tomorrow.
Finally, to add insult to injury, he wanted to port over his existing number, and the port failed. The account was noted last Friday. Nobody called and told him.
So he called me today, and I had to give him all this bad news. He was a very unhappy customer, and I don't blame him a bit.
I think . . . I hope . . . I have him correctly set up this time. We're giving him a native number, so no porting issues. I've put him in a better promotion to thank him for giving us another chance. If they screw this one up, I'm going to raise cain.
I'm good at my job. I'm good at listening to the customer, at empathizing with their feelings of anger and frustration, and at getting them to feel that someone at this big faceless corporation cares about them and will go to bat to get them what they need. By the end of the call he had calmed down considerably, and was much warmer and friendlier in tone. If nobody else screws up, he will in the end stay a customer and be happy with our service. That's what I get paid the big bucks for.
Unfortunately, I also get paid to listen to assholes rant. My third call of the day was one such. He was spectaculary upset because he could not receive email from his girlfriend in Australia. She wanted to forward him jokes and such, and was getting bounce messages. Did he have a copy of the bounce messages? Of course not. Could he tell me anything about what they said? They accused her of sending spam. Of course he insisted she wasn't sending spam. They were just jokes. They were just sent out to a couple of people. We were terrible, awful people for blocking these emails, and he wanted us to stop blocking them immediately.
First of all, I'll bet those stupid jokes set off every spam filter between Australia and here. I'll bet they were sent to her entire address book, with all seventeen layers of forwarding headers still attached. I'll bet they had a virus embedded. And I'll bet they were lame-ass jokes that weren't funny in the Nixon administration when fluffy-minded typists were illicitly photocopying them.
Secondly, does Mr. Rantypants understand what gets a message tagged as spam? I started to explain it's based on formulas -- it's nothing personal. Spam tries very hard to disguise itself as normal harmless messages. Some harmless messages are going to get mistaken for spam, and these kinds of joke emails are the most likely. Some judicious editing to make them less likely to meet the profile would allow them to go through. I got as far as "formulas" -- "Well, your formula's broken. These messages aren't spam." Throughout the whole conversation, I did not get anywhere in trying to explain the technical theory of reducing spam. Some people are upset until they understand what's happening, and then they see the sense of it. He wasn't having any of it.
He wanted his account to stop being blocked for spam. Then later he complained about the spam that did get through -- "Why don't you block _real_ spam?" Make up your mind, turkey. If you don't want us to block spam, be prepared to deal with the consequences.
He told us it was illegal to block his mail, and that this was just like blocking the US mail. He called us several names, including Nazi -- a personal first. He kept chewing the scenery and frothing at the mouth, and nothing I could say was good enough for him.
Of course, I wasn't going to tell him what he really wanted to hear, which was that we were going to do anything at all toward unblocking his girlfriend. This is not something that is handled on his end. His girlfriend needs to take the bounce message to her mail administrator and have him/her figure out what's going on. I told him this several times. He grew even more irate at the idea of asking his girlfriend and her isp to do anything.
I get calls once or twice a month from someone who can't receive email from certain domains. They never want to tell their correspondents to contact their mail admin. Their thinking is, since we're the ones who blocked them, we're the ones who should do something about it. However, if someone's on the blacklist, it's for a reason. There is something in the mail coming out of their system that triggers an alarm. We can't fix their system. They have to do that. Yelling at us does nothing to fix the issue. This is like yelling at your smoke alarm for making noise instead of turning off the burning pork chops in the oven.
Hell, I don't even know if we were blocking that isp. She might have been getting a bounce message from her isp, if her messages were sufficiently spam-like. That's another reason we're the wrong people to address this.
We tightened up our spam detection quite a lot not too long ago, and I wouldn't go back to the old way for anything. Lately, as I said, I get one or two calls a month from people who can't receive mail. Before, I got several calls a week from people complaining about the spam in their mailbox. And they had a point. My own personal address, on my home account, has never been given out to anyone. It still got 15 or more spam messages a day. Now it gets nothing.
Being a good citizen of the internet means not only not spamming yourself, but not allowing yourself to be used by other people to send spam. That means responsible isps have to secure themselves. If one doesn't, the others will simply cut it off until it fixes itself. Play nice or don't play. Reasonable people understand this. Reasonable people do not think they and their girlfriend are so special they should be exempt from things they find inconvenient. Reasonable people do not insult other people if they want those others to do something for them. Reasonable people allow the other person to get a sentence in edgewise without interrupting them three words in. Reasonable people listen to the advice they are given, even if they don't like it.
Personally, I hope Mr. McRantyPants moves to Australia to be with his girlfriend. And good riddance to him. And then I hope she dumps him and he gets eaten by a kangaroo.
A common call is, "Hi, I had an appointment from 1-3 today, it's now 3:30, and the tech never showed." Some days I won't get one at all, but other days I'll get three or four. I'm actually surprised we're not getting more right now, because September is the busiest time for new installs. All the kids going back to school want their cable and internet hooked up.
About half the time the tech is running late, and we need to send a form over to dispatch to get them to call the customer with an ETA. The other half of the time the work order is cancelled and marked as "customer not home". That never makes people happy. "I've been here all day," they say. Nevertheless, whatever happened, we now have to go to plan B, because the tech has moved on to something else. Dealing with this with tact and compassion is what I get paid for.
Another example is the guy who called me last week, again waiting for a tech that was supposed to show up between 1-2. He was supposed to have phone installed soon, but when he called in to confirm the rep couldn't find any sign of an install work order on his account. The rep set up a dummy work order, and was going to call him back, but never did. So the customer called back and I got it.
I eventually figured out that the original salesperson had put the work order on the wrong account! Some complete stranger had an install scheduled for that phone number on that date. Whoopsie. I quickly cancelled that work order and rescheduled the customer for today. I also gave him my number, because after a couple people have not called you back, you lose some trust in the organization. At least this way he could contact someone and hold them responsible.
Today he calls me because the tech never showed up. I looked up his account. First, he'd decided since then to also buy a computer, so he called in to have the internet installed at the same time. I'm pretty sure I planted the seed for that by asking if he wanted the internet, and by saying that if he did decide to get a computer we could give him a good deal. Go me! But the stupid rep who took the call screwed up adding it to the work order.
First, if you have video _and_ internet with us, the phone is cheaper than if you had just one. The customer already had video, so I'd set him up with the higher price for phone. She didn't change it, so the customer would have been overcharged for phone, leading to an angry call to a billing rep in a month or two.
Second, when she added the internet install, it increased the amount of time the job would take. In those cases the system automatically reschedules the job for the first available timeslot with enough quota. I completely agree with this. We do not want to set our techs up to fail by overloading them with more work than they can do in the time allotted. However, the rep should have told the customer we'd have to reschedule the install. Some customers will go for it, so they get exactly what they want. Some customers will decide to stick with what they had. It should be the customer's decision. She didn't tell him it was rescheduled. So he ended up waiting all day today for an install that had been rescheduled for tomorrow.
Finally, to add insult to injury, he wanted to port over his existing number, and the port failed. The account was noted last Friday. Nobody called and told him.
So he called me today, and I had to give him all this bad news. He was a very unhappy customer, and I don't blame him a bit.
I think . . . I hope . . . I have him correctly set up this time. We're giving him a native number, so no porting issues. I've put him in a better promotion to thank him for giving us another chance. If they screw this one up, I'm going to raise cain.
I'm good at my job. I'm good at listening to the customer, at empathizing with their feelings of anger and frustration, and at getting them to feel that someone at this big faceless corporation cares about them and will go to bat to get them what they need. By the end of the call he had calmed down considerably, and was much warmer and friendlier in tone. If nobody else screws up, he will in the end stay a customer and be happy with our service. That's what I get paid the big bucks for.
Unfortunately, I also get paid to listen to assholes rant. My third call of the day was one such. He was spectaculary upset because he could not receive email from his girlfriend in Australia. She wanted to forward him jokes and such, and was getting bounce messages. Did he have a copy of the bounce messages? Of course not. Could he tell me anything about what they said? They accused her of sending spam. Of course he insisted she wasn't sending spam. They were just jokes. They were just sent out to a couple of people. We were terrible, awful people for blocking these emails, and he wanted us to stop blocking them immediately.
First of all, I'll bet those stupid jokes set off every spam filter between Australia and here. I'll bet they were sent to her entire address book, with all seventeen layers of forwarding headers still attached. I'll bet they had a virus embedded. And I'll bet they were lame-ass jokes that weren't funny in the Nixon administration when fluffy-minded typists were illicitly photocopying them.
Secondly, does Mr. Rantypants understand what gets a message tagged as spam? I started to explain it's based on formulas -- it's nothing personal. Spam tries very hard to disguise itself as normal harmless messages. Some harmless messages are going to get mistaken for spam, and these kinds of joke emails are the most likely. Some judicious editing to make them less likely to meet the profile would allow them to go through. I got as far as "formulas" -- "Well, your formula's broken. These messages aren't spam." Throughout the whole conversation, I did not get anywhere in trying to explain the technical theory of reducing spam. Some people are upset until they understand what's happening, and then they see the sense of it. He wasn't having any of it.
He wanted his account to stop being blocked for spam. Then later he complained about the spam that did get through -- "Why don't you block _real_ spam?" Make up your mind, turkey. If you don't want us to block spam, be prepared to deal with the consequences.
He told us it was illegal to block his mail, and that this was just like blocking the US mail. He called us several names, including Nazi -- a personal first. He kept chewing the scenery and frothing at the mouth, and nothing I could say was good enough for him.
Of course, I wasn't going to tell him what he really wanted to hear, which was that we were going to do anything at all toward unblocking his girlfriend. This is not something that is handled on his end. His girlfriend needs to take the bounce message to her mail administrator and have him/her figure out what's going on. I told him this several times. He grew even more irate at the idea of asking his girlfriend and her isp to do anything.
I get calls once or twice a month from someone who can't receive email from certain domains. They never want to tell their correspondents to contact their mail admin. Their thinking is, since we're the ones who blocked them, we're the ones who should do something about it. However, if someone's on the blacklist, it's for a reason. There is something in the mail coming out of their system that triggers an alarm. We can't fix their system. They have to do that. Yelling at us does nothing to fix the issue. This is like yelling at your smoke alarm for making noise instead of turning off the burning pork chops in the oven.
Hell, I don't even know if we were blocking that isp. She might have been getting a bounce message from her isp, if her messages were sufficiently spam-like. That's another reason we're the wrong people to address this.
We tightened up our spam detection quite a lot not too long ago, and I wouldn't go back to the old way for anything. Lately, as I said, I get one or two calls a month from people who can't receive mail. Before, I got several calls a week from people complaining about the spam in their mailbox. And they had a point. My own personal address, on my home account, has never been given out to anyone. It still got 15 or more spam messages a day. Now it gets nothing.
Being a good citizen of the internet means not only not spamming yourself, but not allowing yourself to be used by other people to send spam. That means responsible isps have to secure themselves. If one doesn't, the others will simply cut it off until it fixes itself. Play nice or don't play. Reasonable people understand this. Reasonable people do not think they and their girlfriend are so special they should be exempt from things they find inconvenient. Reasonable people do not insult other people if they want those others to do something for them. Reasonable people allow the other person to get a sentence in edgewise without interrupting them three words in. Reasonable people listen to the advice they are given, even if they don't like it.
Personally, I hope Mr. McRantyPants moves to Australia to be with his girlfriend. And good riddance to him. And then I hope she dumps him and he gets eaten by a kangaroo.