Hot Potato
There was a call I took yesterday that took the hot potato method of customer service to the extreme. This call was transferred to me from the billing department. We had placed a repair ticket for the customer earlier that day, but the customer received a phone call that he didn't have service and "had not been paying for it" so the repair ticket was canceled. The customer was rather upset at being told this when he had, in fact, been paying for the service since 2002 and so he called the billing department who confirmed that he did have service and then transferred the customer to me. Unfortunately, the customer needed to go to the Line Repair department that had canceled the ticket and I suppose I could have transferred him there and been done with the call. However, these sort of calls usually take about 30 to 45 minutes to straighten things out and this customer was definitely ready to cancel service so I decided to make the call myself and call the customer back with the results. It took me TWO HOURS on the phone before I had a new repair ticket issued. The initial call to Line Repair resulted in an emphatic "there is no service on this line and so there will be no ticket" and a transfer back to billing. Billing insisted there was service on the line and transferred me back to Line Repair. Line Repair said billing needed to do something and transferred me back to billing. Billing said they couldn't do anything and Line Repair needed to do something and transferred me back to Line Repair. Line Repair repeated that billing had to do something and transferred me back to billing. Billing this time agreed with Line Repair and suddenly the customer didn't have service. When I point out that billing reps A & B had found service on the line, billing rep C talked to billing rep A and decided that yes, he did have service, but there was still nothing they could do and transferred me back to Line Repair. This Line Repair rep was quite possibly the rudest rep I have ever dealt with and flat out refused to get me to a supervisor stating no supervisors were available. I explained to her that I didn't need a supervisor to make a complaint, but simply needed someone higher up that could take a deeper look at the database to see why the records between the two departments did not agree and perhaps do manual ticket or flag the account or otherwise figure out how to get a repair tech out to the customer's location. Eventually I got a supervisor who did figure out how to place a ticket for a customer that simultaneously had service, but did not have service. I don't know what she did, but I hope it worked. And quite frankly, if I had been a customer, I'm pretty sure I would have canceled service somewhere around the second transfer to billing and not put up with any of it.