Ever have to call a place to get answers and it takes about 8 times talking to multiple reps to finally get an answer?
I swear I’ve gotten the run around so many times just in the past few days. For example, I received a “final notice” in the mail about a payment for an OB visit threatening to send me to collections essentially if I didn’t pay it. Funny thing is, I paid it 2 months ago. Have a receipt to prove it and even faxed my receipt proof over to the hospital, again, 2 months ago. So the woman goes to look, checks, sees that I did that, and goes, oh well there’s a new balance on your account. Do you want to pay that now?
Um… why would I pay the next bill when they can’t even get the past bill sorted out?? I don’t know if it’s just hospitals in America but if you overpay on a hospital bill or like a student loan bill, they’ll keep your money. They won’t say oopsie, you paid too much, no. They’ll just keep the difference.
Speaking of student loans, that’s another one I recently called about. Called looking to get my monthly payment lowered cause bills are kicking my butt and I want to get caught up. So I call and a woman tells me exactly what to do in order to get my payments lowered to as little as $0 a month for a year. I do that and my April autopay payment went away. I’m thinking, yay! this is great! I have a break to spend money where I want to right? Wrong. They only postponed them for 2 months and then they resume. So I call the woman back and tell her, listen, either I get a lower payment or I don’t pay. They’re student loans. I don’t care about them. Well the last thing they want you to do is stop paying so she tries to get me to go all these other options and I had to keep reiterate what the other rep told me.
Well this pretty much led to her being nasty because I wouldn’t do what she said and she was telling me stuff that was frankly untrue. So I had to get off the phone with her ASAP before I said some things she wouldn’t like. I let that stew for about an hour and then called back and got a helpful woman who apologized for the viscious one.
I don’t get why customer service reps feel the need to get nasty with you. I get their job is to take your money most of the time but do you honestly think I’m going to want to give you my money when you give me attitude over the phone especially considering I didn’t raise my tone of voice or anything and struggled to be as polite as possible throughout my frustration? I love when reps also feel the need to spout how long they’ve been with the company and they know everything when they’re still wrong. It’s truly okay to admit when you’re wrong and put me on hold to get the right answer.
I worked customer service for many years; face to face at that! I don’t think people realize how hard it is to do everything possible almost to the point of getting on your knees and licking the customer’s boots in order to make sure they get off the phone or leave your store happy. It’s a struggle. But to be the customer and get the attitude just for pointing out that someone is feeding you misinformation?? That’s just rude and it’s sad you have to go through about 10 people to find that 1.
But at the end of the day, thank goodness for that 1.
Have you ever had bad customer rep issues? How do you normally handle it? Are you like me and keep calling back to you get the competent one? Let me know in the comments below!