The Worst Customer I Ever Heard

In my recent position as manager of the Executive Customer Assistance Team at a large computer security company, one of my duties was to listen to and evaluate calls taken by my team and sometimes by members of the Tier III Customer Service Team with which my team was closely affiliated and from which it sprung... err... sprang... ummmm, came.  The idea was to identify areas where the agents could improve their performance, but also to identify issues that affected customers and behaviors that customers engaged in that might require additional training or coaching for the agents.

Jose Carreon (not his real name) was a bright young man on the Tier III team. I was listening to a few of his calls because an opening was coming up on my team, and I needed to evaluate the agents on his team to see if any of them might be an appropriate fit. I always preferred to choose my agents from among employees who already had a thorough grounding in the company's products, processes and procedures as well as the types of issues that were likely to result in an escalated customer contact.

This company sells a service that protects customers' computers, and the service is in the form of a yearly subscription, which is automatically renewed at the end of its term.  Actually, the renewal process begins a whole month before the expiration date. Many customers, if not most of them, either don't read the license agreement when they make their first purchase, or if they do, they manage to forget about the renewal by the time it rolls around. As you might imagine, this drives a great many calls from people who complain about an unauthorized charge to their credit or debit card or PayPal account.

This call was from a woman who was already crying and shrieking -- yes, shrieking! -- when the call was connected to Jose. It took a while to determine that the issue about which she was calling was that a payment had been taken from her checking account, and she did not expect it. As a result, her account was going to be overdrawn, and her account would be hit with overdraft fees from the bank.

Now, I'm not going to get into a discussion of the ethics or lack thereof of having a yearly service default to automatic renewal.  I've been having that discussion for a large chunk of the last seven years, and I'm grateful not to have to have it any longer. I will say that at least the company implemented a policy of allowing refunds of automatic renewal fees for sixty days after the charge had occurred, rather than the thirty day refund policy normally adhered to. In addition, when I left, it appeared that after many years of fruitless argument, they were actually going to start sending an email notice before the charge occurred, instead of the 'fait accompli' email that they had been sending out that announced (not in so many words), "Ha! Ha!  We got your money!" after the fact.

I digress.  That stuff is probably a whole different "My Job Stinks!" article.  LOL!

Anyway, this lady was very upset because she did not have a lot in the way of financial resources, and it took all Jose's considerable skill just to talk her down to the point where she was somewhat coherent.  Coherent, though, does not necessarily mean calm, and calm was not a state which our lady was going to achieve.

The thing that made her the worst customer I ever heard was the way she threatened poor Jose, who is young, Hispanic, very Catholic, and extremely superstitious. I daresay that had his background been different, the call might have been at least slightly less harrowing for him. He needed to confirm her billing address, both as a security measure and to ensure that she received her refund check in a timely manner.  Her response was to provide her address, which was located in a small community in New York state that you might be familiar with -- Amityville.  Every time she came to the name of her town, she would shout, "Yes!  THAT Amityville!"

Now, that was enough by itself to freak out young Jose, but that wasn't enough for our lady.  She began to string together a huge run of threats, all of the supernatural variety and all ending with the words, "and that I swear on the pentacle on my finger!"

The piece de resistance, though, was her request for a letter from the company stating that the renewal had been automatic, that the company had not notified her prior to charging her, and that the company had refunded the charge to her by check.  She requested that Jose sign the letter personally, in his blood!

The call took about an hour and forty-five minutes, if I remember correctly, and at the end I would estimate the size of Jose's eyes as about the same as your standard dinner plate. He later reported to me that he had nightmares for several days after this particular call.

When one deals with customers on the telephone, they can certainly be difficult to handle.  There are some who will scream, bully, lie, or ladle scorn over you like sauce on a sundae.  But this one was the only customer I ever heard who threatened to cast a curse upon the CSR and requested that he sign her letter in his blood.