Some People Suck

So...I don't typically like to use my blog to complain about work, because that's no fun to read. But every once in a while something will happen that I can't resist talking about. This is one of those things that makes me question the goodness of humanity. Ok, not really, but it was pretty sickening to me.

As you all know, since I'm the night supervisor at work, I get to take a lot of escalated calls. A good chunk of these involve customers wanting to cancel before the term of their contract is over--there's a pretty steep early termination fee which our sales reps never disclose (although it is on the contract...in the fine print) and people get really pissed about it.

Anyway, the other night I took an escalated call from a gentleman wanting to cancel. He had been speaking to another agent, and eventually got heated enough that he dropped the f-bomb. Now, company policy states if the customer is using profanity we can terminate the call, and that's exactly what the agent did. Once he was transferred to me, I explained the policy to him, and he understood but said he was also angry because he had told her he needed to cancel due to the fact that he and his wife would be serving an LDS mission and couldn't afford to keep the system while they were out...and when he dropped the f-bomb, the agent made a comment about how he's planning on serving a mission and talking like that and he felt judged. Ok, I guess I get that...although you'd think people preparing for a mission wouldn't speak like that.

However, as he continued to complain I read the notes on his account--apparently he'd been trying to cancel for quite a while and his story had changed a lot. First he said his contract was supposed to be for just one year, then two, then three (it was actually for five)...he had sent in a copy of the confirmation of installation document (NOT the contract, where the length is clearly listed in 2 places) on which he had clearly written in the contract length and forged the initials of our tech in an attempt to show he had documentation of his supposed contract length. He continued complaining, and I thought to myself, "Typically couple missionaries are older, and this guy does not sound elderly at all..." I didn't have the pleasure of hearing any curse words from him, but he certainly was not happy when I told him his situation had already been researched by our dispute resolution dept and they had determined he was properly informed of the terms of his contract and we would be holding him to it. At that point, he made a few more rude comments and then hung up on me.

I sent another e-mail to our dispute resolution department because in the course of his ranting, he threatened to call Get Gephardt (a common threat from our Utah customers) and whenever a customer threatens going to an outside agency to complain we're supposed to notify that department. The next day, the girl from dispute resolutions came to me and said to keep the situation from escalating they had decided to lower the contract length so the customer would be able to cancel before their mission...BUT, when she called the customer to discuss it, he had no idea what she was talking about. He said he thought our company had gone under and that we had been purchased by another alarm company. Red flags popping up, she pulled the call from the night before when I had supposedly talked to him, and the voice was not the same. So she typed in the phone # the guy had called from into our archives database. As it turns out, obviously the guy I was speaking with was not the customer--it was actually a sales rep from another company trying to steal our customer. And this wasn't the only account he had called in about--there were several others, including one on which he pretended to be the customer's son and said he needed to cancel the account because his mother had died. Yeah, she's alive and well.

I cannot believe someone would actually take that much time and effort to create elaborate lies in order to get a bigger paycheck. I bet if this jerk would have spent all the time he wasted verbally assaulting us actually out knocking doors selling instead, he probably would have made more commission than he would have had we not caught him. KILLS me. I guess it shows what money will motivate some people to do...and that's really sad.