Customer Service Nightmares (Damn, Google, you scary)

I spent an hour and 45 minutes on hold with Google Customer Support before phoning their Cambridge location. Someone there told me that Google does not have a phone support line, and were blatantly lying through their teeth, because try googling "Google Customer Service," and it spits a phone number at you.

It's like, without using so many words, Google just says "smurf you, we have more money than god" to it's customers. :(

Anyway, I finally figured out how to do what I wanted to do. I had to figure out my phone's email address (apparently it has one) and forward mail to it, because Google stopped offering SMS Notifications.

Now every time you reply to a thread I'm subscribed to, my phone will ring. :)

Stupid Google.

Want to complain about troutty customer service? Go for it!

All my customer service nightmares are as the one doing the customer service to horrific customers :greenie:

My bank :stare: Or should I say ex-bank

I had x amount of dollars in checking and more amount of dollars in savings. When I signed up at the bank they asked me repeatedly if I wanted overdraft service and I repeatedly said "No. If the money isn't there, just don't let the transaction go through"

So a while goes by and sharky and I go to some restaurant called something like "Smokehouse" that serves smoked meats and stuff. I decided I would pay, but apparently I didn't have enough. So, as I discussed with the bank, the transaction should have been rejected.

What happened INSTEAD, was they overdrafted my account, charged me A LOT of money for doing that, and then took ALL of the money out of my savings and put it in my checking account. They told me NOTHING about this. Apparently they needed to take several hundred dollars from savings to checking because I was short like $15

So about a month goes by and I check on my bank stuff and as it turns out, they shut down my checking account because they said A) it was inactive (a month is not inactive btw) and B) there was suspicious activity. HOW COULD THERE HAVE BEEN SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY IF THERE WAS NO ACTIVITY? And OF COURSE they couldn't tell me what the suspicious activity was

But not to worry, they left my savings account open. You know, the one that they took ALL of the money out of, and put in to the checking account that they closed. Which meant I lost all of that money

And customer service could not believe that I was upset over losing all of my money for nonsense like that. There wasn't a lot in there, but it was a lot for me, close to $300 I think. And yeah the guy literally could not understand why I was upset about them doing this and not giving me my money back. Oh yeah, and the dude was totally judgmental of me going to a place called "Smokehouse" or whatever it was called because he thought it was some smoke shop where I was buying stuff to smoke pot. Like are you smurfing kidding me

Oh and it gets better. They apparently decided that wasn't enough and have blacklisted me from opening another bank account until I pay them MORE money because they had to do stuff like overdraft me and shut down my account

I hate them so much I can't even

Having worked a call center that served all of America and a few Canadian provinces, Customers suck too.

New York people are always rushing and rude. Very rarely did I get a nice New Yorker. Florida people are actually all old people and you have to explain things several times in different ways before they understand it. The worst customers were the angry old Tennessee men. All angry, all mad, all southern, all old, and all men. Most Canadians were nice except for the Asian Canadians, they were rude I didn't know Cantonese. Hawaii people forget timezones. California people want to sue everyone over anything (it was a legal program thing I was working for) Seriously. Everything. Like my neighbors dog barks too much. Neighbors hedge is 5 inches too high. Texas ladies were grumpy too. Washington/Oregon people had very complicated issues. Arkansas people always said "Have a blessed day" always.

In general though during my year there I took about 19,000 calls and about 16,000 of those were people yelling at me. That job crushes your soul. People forget it's a person on the other line and they take out their frustrations on them. I had to leave that job or I would have been a shell of a human.

Although, some call center people are just jerks. Usually the worst about it are phone/internet companies and banks.

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Originally Posted by Pike

All my customer service nightmares are as the one doing the customer service to horrific customers :greenie:

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This.

Ever since I've worked on the other side I've generally had nothing but perfectly fine customer service experiences when I've been the customer. But thankfully I've had very few situations thus far, touch wood, where I've actually had to contact customer service for any reason.

Sadly a lot of people these days seem to think that yelling down the phone will fix everything and that they are entitled to compensation over the most tiniest of things. Best customer service experience I ever had was with my current ISP, who for various reasons took a month to get my internet connection setup which was actually largely due to an issue out of their hands. Sure it was frustrating being without internet for that long though I never really pestered them, just called up arrange for a technician to come out as and when needed. Even though the issue was largely due to bad wiring in my apartment courtesy of a renovation the landlord had done, they extended my 50% off on the bill from 6 months to 12 months as a result and wrote off my 1st month where I barely had any service at all. I didn't once yell at them or even ask for compensation, they just did it.

I literally want to punch customers who pretty much immediately go "well how am I going to be compensated for this?"

Sure in any call center there will be jerks, but the majority of the people working there want to actually help you as best as they possibly can. Working in a call center kinda puts in perspective really, when you call another support center and you realise that you're just 1 of the 60-80+ people that person is expected to talk to, by quota, everyday - treating them like another human being will actually go a long way.

When I call up any company for a customer service issue I am always super nice and polite, even when they can't get something done or I'm on hold for ages. I've never had to work in customer service (thankfully), but I have a few friends that have worked in customer service call centres and they say it's the worst job ever.

When it all comes down to it they're just the bottom of the rung employee working for little pay, in a job they probably hate. They certainly don't need me shouting bloody murder down the phone because they can't send out a guy to fix my washing machine until next week.

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Originally Posted by Aulayna

Sadly a lot of people these days seem to think that yelling down the phone will fix everything and that they are entitled to compensation over the most tiniest of things.

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Either that or saying the magic words "I want to speak to your manager". In my experience, the customer believes that the threat of a complaint or speaking to someone higher up will somehow cause us to 180 on our stance, and suddenly we will be able to give them everything they want and more.

Oh those guys. :greenie:

I loved it when a customer was repeatedly abusive and you were allowed to hang up on them. Their file shows all these negative comments. It's satisfying when you're normally not allowed to hang up when they call you the c word.

I'm pretty sure the DMV still wins at worse customer service ever.

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Originally Posted by Shauna

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Originally Posted by Aulayna

Sadly a lot of people these days seem to think that yelling down the phone will fix everything and that they are entitled to compensation over the most tiniest of things.

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Either that or saying the magic words "I want to speak to your manager". In my experience, the customer believes that the threat of a complaint or speaking to someone higher up will somehow cause us to 180 on our stance, and suddenly we will be able to give them everything they want and more.

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My favorite part is when you get your manager and they back you up 100% and tell the customer everything you already did http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a1...ps3b660dd9.gif

As the assistant manager of my current job, I back up my coworkers almost every time. My other job I had, the managers would just come up and give the customer what they wanted despite the meetings and whatnot of store policy us employees were told to always follow. That's always fun.

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Originally Posted by Scotty_ffgamer

As the assistant manager of my current job, I back up my coworkers almost every time. My other job I had, the managers would just come up and give the customer what they wanted despite the meetings and whatnot of store policy us employees were told to always follow. That's always fun.

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Oh man I hate it when they can't decide between "FOLLOW COMPANY POLICY!!11!!" and "GIVE THE CUSTOMER WHAT THEY WANT!!111" Like, pick one and I can work with it.

I'm so glad I switched to the early morning shifts and usually don't have to deal with people anymore.

I dont call people.

Verizon and Time Warner were generally pretty bad, but I wouldn't call any of them nightmarish. They never really helped me with anything. Verizon accidently activated more than one line with my plan towards the end of the year and I didn't notice until the next year, and all they compensated me for was the months ranging from the beginning of the year forward. Even though their records showed that I had been charged needlessly the previous year as well. And Time Warner wanted to charge me about $300 for "not returning their router" when I had internet through them. I moved, and forgot about it, and returned it a month late. But they didn't want to take the status off, even though they did get their equipment. They ended up putting me in collection, and I have yet to pay it since I don't actually owe them anything

I'd heard way worse ones, for both companies. And am ever increasingly glad I cut ties with both companies

I had a small annoyance with Time Warner where they kept offering me TV plans when I wanted to outright cancel the TV. My inner thoughts at the time: "Time Warner person, are you okay? I just said I want to cancel it. I'm worried. Stay safe.":ohdear:

Besides that though, customer service and me generally get along quite well. I think I'd be a very angry person if I was on the other end of it, so I do my best to be polite and understanding. They're just trying to get through the work day, right? ^^;

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Originally Posted by Pike

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Originally Posted by Scotty_ffgamer

As the assistant manager of my current job, I back up my coworkers almost every time. My other job I had, the managers would just come up and give the customer what they wanted despite the meetings and whatnot of store policy us employees were told to always follow. That's always fun.

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Oh man I hate it when they can't decide between "FOLLOW COMPANY POLICY!!11!!" and "GIVE THE CUSTOMER WHAT THEY WANT!!111" Like, pick one and I can work with it.

I'm so glad I switched to the early morning shifts and usually don't have to deal with people anymore.

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It's because of this that I'm looking for a new job. I have this thing with the rules being the rules. I'm an assistant manager and I'm always being told "you should take care of the customer, customer satisfaction is key". I agree, I should take care of the customer, but only if doing so does not lead to me going against the SOP of the company.

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Originally Posted by Pike

Oh man I hate it when they can't decide between "FOLLOW COMPANY POLICY!!11!!" and "GIVE THE CUSTOMER WHAT THEY WANT!!111" Like, pick one and I can work with it.

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You're not supposed to pick one, you're supposed to be the scapegoat. If you don't break the policy, your customer gets mad and calls corporate and you and your boss and maybe some other people get yelled at. If you do break the policy, the customer is happy and the only one that takes the fall for it is you, everyone else is in the clear. :(

I guess I'm lucky in that my work does insist we follow policy at all times, so there is no giving the customer what they want if we are simply not within our remit to do so, and as we are on the front lines we often know more about what we're talking about than our managers. So on most cases, our managers will back us 100% if we explain the situation.