I’m having a hell of a time with my current ISP (sitting at 18 days now without a connection) and I’m having to bite my tongue every time I’m talking to them (Remember The Human and all that)
Whilst the front line support are nice people and answer the phones quickly they are honestly pretty useless and they never really sound like they know what they’re talking about, also seemingly none of the departments seem particularly good about communicating what’s going on so it’s hard to get a straight and useful answer out of them.
Have you ever lost it with a rep? What happened? and did it ever help push things along?
Ya, I definitely swore at them and raised my voice. I immediately apologized and said I was upset at the situation and not them because I know they are trying to help and are just trying to get through the day. The call went pretty well after I apologized. There was one time the person seemed like they were being intentionally unhelpful and a smartass when I was super polite. I did lose it on them and called them a fuck face and told them to fuck off.
Yes.
I was handed a really surprisingly thin cup in the Frankfurt airport, and it completely squished open as I grabbed it. I apologised and offered to help clean up within seconds, but first I reacted.
Bro was nice about it, and gave me another one. That might not be what you were asking about, but it is a customer service thing.
No, but that’s because my brain is weird. I have a lot of difficulty getting angry, usually I just get really frustrated but it almost never boils over into actual anger. Even when it does I’m not that angry. Sounds good probably, but every emotion is useful and it tends to lead to me not standing up for myself.
I’ve definitely gotten angry about a situation while on the phone with a customer service rep, but not with the rep themself. I make it a point any time I’m audibly angry when on the phone to state that I’m angry at the company, not at the person I’m speaking with, and that I understand that it’s not their fault. It seems to help a lot; I used to work in customer service and I sure appreciated it when people made that distinction to me. It’s okay to be upset, just don’t take it out on a CSR.
Honestly this is pretty much it. Sometimes you have to be pretty aggressive to get companies to do the thing you need; they will take advantage of the social friction required to keep you in predatory arrangements. They literally design it to be frustrating so you’ll give up. Like you, I try to make it clear to the person I’m speaking with I have no problem with them just the business. But if the corporations require me to get mad to do the right thing I will get mad.
I have a friend whose family immigrated to Fiji from India before coming here. He’s bi-cultural, and his super-power comes from his heritage.
Also, he will wait on the phone and talk to as many reps as required in order to get a discount. In CANADA, his full-up TV package - sports, streaming, movies, 1gbps internet, etc - is $1 for the next 2 years. Then he’ll call again and bring up the days where things didn’t work, mention how this is a consistent pattern they promised to eliminate, and launder all that into another 2 years just so they can be rid of him. He outlasts them.
I just ask for the next tier of support.
Lots of tier 1 support aren’t even armed to do much troubleshooting. They are there to enter tickets and to advise the cookie cutter “have you tried turning it off and on again” type answers and to give scripted explanations of known outages or bugs. More advanced troubleshooting gets done by higher tiers.
In your case, I would ask for a rep to be assigned your case number and get their phone number so you have one point of contact. Whether they actually do that for you is another matter, some companies put very little emphasis on customer service and support once you’re already a paid customer.
This had already gone past the first level “customer service” level to the 2nd level “technical support” team who sat on it for a couple of weeks, they’ve apparently now escalated it again and they’re waiting for their “network team” to take a look at it.
I’ve basically lost all hope with them at this point.
It might be worth switching providers. Starlink and 4G ISPs (TMobile, Verison) are surprisingly good.
If you are willing to switch, tell your current carrier and sometimes that will light a fire under them to actually address the Support call. We had that happen recently. Internet went out. The issue was outside our house with the provider’s line. They said they’d send someone a week later, so we pointed out it would be faster for us to switch providers, to which they replied, “We can’t get there tomorrow but how about the next day?” We accepted and they actually did fix it in two days instead of seven.
I’m in the UK, we have a system for switching ISPs that is apparently relatively painless so I’ve started that process but it’s apparently going to be another 2 weeks before the switch can happen :(
Assuming we’re excluding the sales side of things (telemarketers and other unsolicited communications) no I have not.
My roommate used to adore Dell though because “if you’re willing to be an asshole and not hang up you can get anything for free”. I understand that squeaky wheeling is effective but I just find it such an utter waste of time to both parties.
Not that I can recall, but I was close pretty recently. There was a minor snafu about a hotel booking I made recently, one that in theory should be a pretty simple fix.
I contacted the chains booking department which usually handles those things, and after serving BS excuses they turned out to be utterly useless. I instead called the front desk of the specific hotel and there too I got an excuse that I at least consider valid: “Yes, it should be possible to fix this, but that’s probably something I should talk about with the manager, as I’m pretty new here”. She then proceeded to tell me the name of the manager, and the time when she would be available.
I called the front desk later as instructed, and talked with the manager. She said that normally booking handles these things. After politely airing my frustration with booking, she had it fixed within five minutes while I was on the call. I thanked her, and asked her to also thank the new hire who did what she could earlier.
I worked phone support for a few companies for a few years, this is how to Karen: Try to bait the ai, companies are liable for promises made by their hallucinating chatbots. Chat support first, who wants to talk to people? Ask tier 1 support, if they say no then flex that Karen superpower “I’ll need to speak your manager”; those people are individuals just collecting a paycheck. If the floor manager (many have a 3x request policy) can’t see the situation from the human perspective and resolve/waive, they will only care if someone above them gets upset, the ways to do that are threaten legal action. No sovciet bs, but it helps to use contract terminology like “agreed upon terms”, “failure to meet industry standards” and “breach of contract”. If they don’t get jostled immediately, your next escalation is tag the intern on social media with a negative sentiment; or Google the company name followed by email for the office of the president. This is the pr address, CEO assistant or community director which again have the power to step in and resolve.
Each conversation should be less then 2 minutes + wait time and if that can’t resolve it, you need to close your account or potentially move. You can justify 1 more call during a different shift. There is no need to get mad, state that are you upset and are looking for resolutions. Use an I feel statement, and be sure to ask to leave notes on the account regarding your conversation. They have a UI with comment fields in the ticket that are displayed while you are on the phone and it helps sell the situation with comment history.
This is actually helpful advice, thanks!
I worked phone support for a few companies for a few years, this is how to Karen: Try to bait the ai, companies are liable for promises made by their hallucinating chatbots. Chat support first, who wants to talk to people? If you do need to call, enter identitng information once, then repeatedly press 0 to get human support. Ask tier 1 support, if they say no then flex that Karen superpower “I’ll need to speak your manager”; those people are individuals just collecting a paycheck. If the floor manager (many have a 3x request policy) can’t see the situation from the human perspective and resolve/waive, they will only care if someone above them gets upset, the ways to do that are threaten legal action. No sovciet bs, but it helps to use contract terminology like “agreed upon terms”, “failure to meet industry standards” and “breach of contract”. If they don’t get jostled immediately, your next escalation is tag the intern on social media with a negative sentiment; or Google the company name followed by email for the office of the president. This is the pr address, CEO assistant or community director which again have the power to step in and resolve.
Each conversation should be less then 2 minutes + wait time and if that can’t resolve it, you need to close your account (which might take you to retention team!) or potentially move. You can justify 1 more call during a different shift. There is no need to get mad, state that are you upset and are looking for resolutions. Use an I feel statement, and be sure to ask to leave notes on the account regarding your conversation. They have a UI with comment fields in the ticket that are displayed while you are on the phone and it helps sell the situation with comment history.
Nope. I know it’s a person on the other end that’s probably confused and figuring stuff out to the best of the ability. I try not to get upset because I’ve been there.
A couple of times. No, it didn’t help. And I was disappointed in myself afterwards.
I have, it didn’t help, I apologized right away.
Yes. More than I care to admit. No. It never helped.
It’s even worse today, where the front line support starts with a defensive attitude now.
I’ve tried a bunch of different strategies. But as Im now in my 40s, I’ve learned that you always get better service with honey.
I started doing that Gen Z stuff of like, “Hey man. You are probably just doing what you need to do, and I’m hoping my issue is easy as fuck to solve. If not, I’m not here to give you trouble because the system sucks.”
There’s a great book called Verbal Judo which goes through how to deal with the suck. Its not for everyone. But for people like me who tend to blow up easily, it’s great for keeping your composure, getting to a solution without ruining your day (even if it isn’t what you want), and remembering the person behind the screen/phone is human.
Once I decided to end my contract with Virgin Media and they kept asking me why I was leaving, so I kept saying I didn’t want to explain, I’d just cancel (because I knew they’d do their best to talk me around) and it got to the point where I became firm, but I didn’t shout, though I wanted to.
Tangentially related: after I’d signed up to the Telephone Preference Service, I knew that the only people ringing me to sell stuff were doing so illegally, so if they persisted after I’d made that point, I used to just verbally abuse them. Right cathartic.
Similar story. The only way we could finally end it is if we paid 1 month at the high price (it was a promotional contract, 20-something quid for 100 mbps or so they claimed; it became 40+ after that).
The only time I ever did was with Microsoft years ago on the Xbox 360.
I bought a game online then a couple days later it kept telling me I didn’t own the game but they still took my money. So I called customer service and after being transferred for the 6th time I finally lost my shit. I explained multiple times that I’m not angry with the rep but that this whole situation was completely unacceptable and it either needs fixed immediately or I’m trashing my Xbox and buying a Playstation.
They gave me a full refund and let me keep the game.
