Monday, April 23, 2012

You want to CHARGE me?

My department (really a separate company, Support.com, but we're not allowed to say so) does paid tech support, for a major ISP (Comcast) that treats its customers badly.

Comcast employees tend to clear their own phones and get rid of problem callers by shunting callers to us inappropriately: in the afternoon as each time zone closes offices, we get sudden spikes of folks who have no idea they need to pay... often they have no idea they've even been transferred.

"I was just talking to a nice young man named Steven, he said he'd check on something. Why am I talking to you?"

Then I have to look up their account (sometimes a time-consuming process), then explain that I can't help them without a paid support subscription, and transfer them to our sales department. At which point 75% or more of callers will, understandably, throw a fit and start shouting.

Yesterday was an especially bad day for this. I took 22 calls yesterday. About 15 of them were folks who shouldn't have been transferred to me at all. About 13 of them were very angry.

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