Call center worker takes revenge on rude customer
January 23, 2009 by Shane BorerPosted in: "Would you want this person in Finance?", Fighting off fraud, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest news & views, Tech failure
Another reason you shouldn’t take out your aggression on customer service: They have access to your identity.
After George Bates found the service he received from an Abbey National customer service operator lacking, he gave the employee a low rating during a post-call satisfaction survey.
But after the carpenter visited a brick-and-mortar branch of the bank, he found that he was unable to access his account because of “security reasons.” Some investigation by Bates and the bank’s employees found that the call center worker had changed Bates’ identity to that of a Ugandan divorcee.
Debits going into Bates’ account had also been cancelled, causing $100 in various bank charges.
Eventually, Bates’ account was straightened out and the charges were removed. An investigation into the incident was launched, but Abbey call center supervisors could not say whether any disciplinary action had been taken against the employee.
Have any call center horror stories? Share them in the comments section below.
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Tags: Bank charges, Call center, Customer service, Disciplinary action
January 30th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I had a telemarketer from Google call me on my cell phone telling me I had signed up to learn how to make money through Google. I had not, and my cell phone is on the do not call list. I told the woman caller that I was not interested and hung up. The only thing I can figure is that ‘someone’ entered my phone number into an auto dialer system. Everyday for over a week my cell phone would ring every hour on the hour from the same number. The first few I answered, and there was never any one on the line. It did not happen on weekends, and only in the evenings which I can only guess was this ‘someone’s’ shift schedule. I left a very angry message on the voice mail to the number….threatening a lawsuit of harrassment against both the company and the employee, and finally after a few days time the calls stopped coming.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I have one that’s on-going…not as bad in the above article, but very frustrating and stressful.
I have been an MSN customer for years and they have billed my credit card monthly for the privilege. My credit card information was stolen in November. The card was canceled quickly because I received a notice of a backordered item from a company I hadn’t ordered from, alerting me to the problem. A new card was issued. Should be a simple thing to update my card information with MSN, right? WRONG!!!!!! Oh, so very wrong.
I’m STILL trying to enter the new credit card information and they are now threatening to cancel my account. There is some glitch in their system and even though a Discover card representative spent almost 2 hours on the phone with them (and me) on my behalf, telling them each and every time that the charges were being authorized by Discover, MSN still claimed the charges were not being authorized. They did admit (finally, after treating me like a criminal) that there was a problem with their system and they elevated my issue to “the highest level of support.” This evidently means they throw you in the trash can because I’ve yet to hear from anyone, other than to receive e-mails telling me my account is going to be canceled. Each time I get an e-mail, I call, only to get “elevated” again. The last e-mail notice gave me 4 days. And they won’t allow you to pay by check…you MUST have a credit card on file…so I’m totally helpless to do anything to resolve this on my own. You can’t delete the old information either, and Discover thought the old card information in my account might be causing the problem. But since you can’t remove it until you enter a new card, there’s no way to know for certain. They have done absolutely NOTHING to help, haven’t called back, haven’t fixed the problem and I’m probably going to have to change my personal and business (I have a small internet business) e-mail address because they are completely non-responsive. I’ve been a stupidly paying customer since 2002. So much for customer loyalty.
All their “customer service” people do – when you finally find the number to contact them – is enter your credit card information and tell you it’s not being accepted by their system. They then send you to a “billing specialist” who does the same thing. I had to wait 5 days to talk to the billing specialist. After that, they “elevate” you to “the highest level of support” and the black hole experience begins in earnest. Short of getting some media attention to put some pressure on them, I doubt this will ever be resolved. I’m not the only one either…they did admit they have a wide-spread problem. You would think more people would be complaining. They have really put me through it and I have to say, when it comes to a total lack of customer service, they win the award in my experience.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
I was getting that same a message from MSN about my account being canceled also. I told them to cancel it. I no longer wanted it. I continued to receive the message for awhile but also still used my email address with them. That was years ago now.. Every once in a while I get a message that my email account is going to be canceled unless I contact them. I never contact them and still have full use of my email address. I don’t know if email addresses with them are now free but mine has been for years now.