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?
A few times. Usually, like many others, I let the rep know that it’s not their fault but I’m angry and try to escalate to someone who has the authority to assist. Three times I went over the line. I’m going to leave out a lot of details on the ISP ones because one would be far too long and the other could potentially out some of the parties involved. It helped in every case, and I genuinely feel bad about one because I could have gotten someone fired.
Once an HP rep stonewalled me for hours and I baited him into saying something fucked up on a recorded line. I hung up, called back, repeated what the rep said, informed them that it was recorded, and asked for a supervisor. I got one immediately and got my problem solved. I’m not proud of the way I handled it but I was young and not thinking about how my actions might affect others.
Another time was a national ISP. Every single time I called all the supervisors were in a meeting (yeah, right). My service worked almost 2 out of every 3 days and I wasn’t getting nearly the speeds I was paying for. I got on with a rep who told me about yet another supervisor meeting. So I said I’ll hold. I told him that I had vacation time and no Internet so I had nothing else to do but fuck up his call time statistics and tell dirty jokes. In those days at that call center they weren’t allowed to hang up unless you were straight up abusive. He blinked before I did because he was supposed to have already gotten off work and I was in the middle of telling bad limericks. So I got a supervisor and they actually got me fixed up the next day.
The last time was a different (local this time) ISP. I had requested specific times for repair because I was working nights and had been without Internet for weeks. I was told that was no problem. But they repeatedly showed up in the middle of the day (supposedly, I never heard from them so they weren’t ringing the doorbell but every time I called they claimed to have come out and no one was home) and telling me it’s my fault for being asleep and never letting me talk to anyone except for the receptionist. So I called one morning insisting I needed to talk to someone else because it had been weeks and she wouldn’t put me through so I let out a string of curse words and the supervisor interrupted me telling me not to talk to their employees like that. I told her about all the trouble I’ve had and that since she was there and had the receptionist lie to me about her being busy that I didn’t give the slightest shit what she thought. I told her that I was coming off nights and unless she wanted me up there every day I had off explaining to anyone in a suit walking in exactly how I was treated and that she was having her employees lie for her she’d have someone out that evening who would ring the doorbell and fix my shit.
It turned out that the issue was with their connection at the box on the outside of my apartment building so they should have been able to fix it without my input at all. No one bothered to fucking check. I seriously don’t think anyone came out but I can’t prove that.
One thing I hate is when I finally reach a human being and it’s clear that the rep is being forced to read a script. And that means they probably have little to no ability to solve my problem.
Management is wasting both our time with their CYA, boilerplate BS
I have, it didn’t help, I apologized right away.
I was the lowest rung CSR punching bag for many years, so no. I think that whole experience is what conditioned me to do what I’ve always done when I have bad service: cancel, chargeback (if necessary), move on. I’ve probably only left one or two bad reviews in my life, just to warn others of egregiously unsafe practices. One of those business reached out afterwards to “make it right”. Nope, no contact.
Those years also taught me that if you fill out a customer service survey and you give anything less than straight 10’s across the board then you are actively hurting the employee.
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.
In person at an apple store.
I bought an iphone used off a friend who stopped being my friend immediately after. I never wanted an apple product, but my phone broke, I was poor and he sold it to me for $50.
I didn’t know you needed the apple id and password to SIGN OUT of anything. I sent him messages, did the whole “click here to request a new password” thing so he would get an e-mail about it…to his apple e-mail which, let’s be honest, no one uses.
Not being able to use the full functionality sucked, but I could manage. What was worse was receiving pictures and messages intended for him.
I did what any sane person would do and brought it to the apple store. The first person who helped me repeated “Our security systems protect your privacy” so many times, no matter what I said, I lost my shit, shouted “I would like to sign out so I can stop seeing nudes of this guy’s girlfriend!”
They didn’t help and I bought an android.
iphones are decent devices from a security standpoint, but useless if someone is still signed in. Your former friend sold you a $50 brick
It still worked as a phone.
Calling features “Security” when they significantly reduce the secondary market is a convenient way to increase profits.
Its security because people can’t steal someone’s phone then reset it.
Because otherwise the thief would return the phone to it’s rightful owner?
Because people don’t steal phones anymore
Tell that to cycling phone snatchers in London
I had this issue with an Android recently - but it was my own phone, an old one I wanted to test a SIM on. I couldn’t remember the PIN, couldn’t even recall having a PIN for this phone. I had to dig deep through the tech forums to find a solution, but got there eventually. And yes, I read that over and over during my search, “it’s for your security”. Argh!
No, its a consequence of increased security and the inconvenience of have to sign out and create a new account when reselling the phone was an acceptable compromise, rather than an intended ‘bonus’ side effect. A lot of times companies do do that, but this wasn’t one off them.
This was your friend’s fault, and yours to trade cash before understanding how the system worked.
given Apple’s primary goal is “more things sold”, this is completely on-brand. Better, worse, secure, not; whatever the phones are or are not, every effort goes back to “more things sold”.
My dad always told me the squeaky hinge gets the grease. Generally I try to make it eady at first, but if nothing works, thats when its time to start getting angry.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease… until it gets replaced. Squeaking works in the short run.
There has been four times I remember where I’ve either lost my temper or just got really frustrated when contacting support teams. Sorry if this seems long winded, I like to vent every time I can about some of these.
The first time was when I tried to contact Samsung because I was having an issue with the Galaxy Store. At the time when I was trying to contact them they only had two contact methods, which were by phone and through some form of a support forum. As someone who hates talking to people through phone calls and prefers to just use emails, I opted into at least trying the support forum. As I expected, Samsung’s support team ignored my post and I only got replies from users who either had no idea what I was talking about or were just bots.
I just gave up trying to contact them after that and I haven’t used the Galaxy Store very much. If you’re interested in knowing what the issue is, basically, the “recommended for you” section keeps recommending me apps that I’ve already rating, even if I gave them a low rating.
The second was when I tried to contact the support team for Hideout because I couldn’t get videos on their website to work in any web browser on my tablet. I did everything I could to provide as much information as I could, even providing screenshots whenever I thought it would be helpful. After a few days of doing everything they asked me to and continuing to provide as much information and as many screenshots as I could, the CEO of Hideout came into the conversation and proceeded ignore everything I stated up to that point and insinuated that I wasn’t being cooperative because one of the browsers I was using “looked outdated” and that the issue would have been fixed if I just updated that browser.
I don’t remember exactly how I responded but I remember calling them incompetent because YouTube working perfectly fine on my tablet but Hideout didn’t and reminding them that I stated multiple times that the browsers I tested were reinstalled before testing to make sure that my settings wasn’t causing any conflicts, so none of the browsers could have been outdated. They never responded after that and eventually marked the ticket as being solved when it very clearly wasn’t. I stopped using Hideout after this but I probably still wouldn’t be using it because sometime after that I heard that they stopped paying their users or something like that.
The third time was when I contacted Discord’s support team because I had an issue where email notifications just randomly stopped working for me. They had me try all sorts of things, like contacting the admins of the servers I joined and making sure that my Discord inbox was cleared regularly. This also included changing my email address on Discord, which caused them to temporarily refuse helping me for reasons that I don’t understand. After I asked them why they were punishing me after doing what they requested of me, they claimed that there was a miscommunication on their end and continued trying to help me.
Eventually, they determined that my issue needed to be looked at by the dev team and sent the information to them. I was expecting them to either fix the issue or at least tell me how to fix it on my end but when they responded about a week later, they gave me some bogus answer, stating that “email notifications don’t work for servers with more than 5000 users”. I know for sure that this was a lie because I was told by the admins for some servers that the email notifications are working for other users but the rep kept ignoring what I was saying and refused to fix the issue. I just gave up trying to reason with them and filled out the survey they gave me, even though I’d imagine that no one at Discord actually read it.
The fourth time was when I contacted Google because I was having an issue with the Play Store. The issue was that there was an app that I wasn’t able to review because when I tried to review it the first time, it glitched out and only used half of my review so I deleted it but I kept getting error messages every time I tried reviewing it again. I was using Firefox in Ubuntu at the time and I figured that the issue was something on their end and that contacting them would be quick and easy but I was wrong.
I was emailing them about and fourth for a little over a month because they kept giving me suggestions that were irrelevant to my issue, requesting that I use features that didn’t exist on any of my android devices (which still don’t as far as I’m aware) and forgetting everything relevant to my issue, even what my issue was in the first place. At one point, I thought that they just gave up and redirected me to a bot that ghosted me because all of the emails they sent prior had the name of the rep I was talking to and a message about some survey they’d have me fill out when the conversation was done. I received about three emails that didn’t contain either of those before they just stopped emailing me entirely.
Given that I thought that they wouldn’t respond, I decided to reply to the last email they sent with an angry email. I have once again forgotten my exact words but I remember expressing how I felt and that if they’re not willing to help me with my issue, that I’d want them to just give me the survey they mentioned in previous emails. They did respond after about a week but I really just wanted the conversation to end, so I repeatedly told them that I didn’t want to talk to them anymore and after a few emails they ended the conversation and gave me the survey. While I have no idea if they actually did anything directly but the issue seemed to be fixed about 6 months after that.
Yes, although for a good reason.
I ate at a fairly well-known cafe where I live, and had a sandwich and side salad. I finished the salad, and near the end I felt a weird crunch in my mouth. Suddenly I could taste blood near my gums, and when I looked at what was left of the salad I could see broken glass.
Obviously, I was a little panicked, and my wife quickly called someone over to say that there was glass in my food. One person stayed with me while the manager went to the back, and found out that one of the chefs had broken a glass on the table, but had just washed the salad clean rather than throwing it. By this point I was really embarrassed because around 30 people were staring to see what was happening, given that I had blood coming out of my mouth
I said that this was probably in other people’s food, so they should probably tell others, but instead of responding they handed me cash to cover our meal, apologised, and walked away. I shouted at them to say that they shouldn’t ignore it because others were eating the same salad. My wife chimed in and told everyone that we had found glass in the salad and that they shouldn’t eat it.
I’ve never gone back, but a few years later I had told someone that story and they said that they’d heard a rumour about it from locals, so it seems that people remembered that story and stayed away.
When I’m dealing with ISP or phone customer service, I always ask for the cancelation department. They are motivated to keep customers so sometimes they’ll throw in a coupon, especially if you treat them like a human.
Yes. There was a new streaming service that I signed up for. I used an email alias and the confirmation email never arrived. They had no way to change my email address or activate my account except for me clicking the link in my email.
After a month my free trial expired (without me ever being able to log in), they added a second month of free trial while trying to activate my account. This went on for 5 months, finally the 6th month they did not give me another free month and I was charged. Still no solution for the situation. 7th month arrives and I get charged again. The 8th month I lost it. I knew most of the support and customer service reps at this point as I had talked with also all of them multiple times a week for months. But with no solution in sight and being charged for multiple times months I finally lost it on one of the CSRs. Surprisingly while I was on the phone with them they were able to cancel my account and issue a refund.
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.
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.
Honestly yeah not blow up levels of anger more passive aggressive with a hint of sarcasm when I was talking to them instead. It happened when I tried getting help at an at&t store to port out my number from at&t prepaid. Yes I know now its not the same branch or something but damn they were rude and at least could’ve told me who to call. Iirc they were watching a sports game so they probably just wanted to rush me out. At&t prepaid’s reps were nice though just thick accents.
