I refuse to be forced to agree with you

[Food Lady]

I got a call from someone trying to cancel a lease and it had already been handled, notes on the account stating why the contract was open: open invoices still, a lot of them. They were for a charge I didn't recognize, I think some kind of software. I honestly could not tell whether they were valid, but the admin. dept. had said they must be paid. I had to explain several times that that was why the contract was still open and billing. I think it was a husband/wife business owner team; I got the woman first and then the man came on and started blasting the company saying they had paid, etc. At that point I was unwilling to do any more research and let him rant. He said "You must hear this all day" to which I replied that in the case of the small percentage of unhappy customers yes, I do get the calls. (It's like 1% of our million+ customers worldwide.) He yelled that it was certainly NOT a small number, look at our facebook page, eleventy!1!

I have two thoughts about that:

1. Yes, it IS a small percentage. We freaking MEASURE that.
2. A facebook page is not representative of every single customer we have. He as a business owner should know that.

Add the fact that twice now he's threatened to dump off the government-owned equipment somewhere. He was already warned before that he'd be responsible for the replacement cost and fee for the organization that tracks them.

It doesn't really matter; they're in collections now.

[earl colby pottinger]

Receipts

And if they have already paid the bills they should have receipts.

[greyblade23]

And if they have already paid the bills they should have receipts.

Or cancelled checks, credit card statements...

Oh, who am I kidding. We all know they didn't pay.

[Slave to the Phone]

Of course they didn't pay, we all know that.

Of course every single other customer feels the same way, don't you agree?

Those are the ones I really hate. The "Wouldn't any reasonable person agree that...?" and demand a human response.

I have learned to just robot "due to policy, this is mandatory" because I already know that if I agree that the rules are not right and they should contact the people who make the rules, I will get yelled at because its not their responsibility.

[Food Lady]

They did actually pay; they paid the last quarter. The problem is that they don't recognize there's a second monthly charge for special software. Some of our customers don't have any idea what they are paying for every month and when they want to cancel it's a problem.

[wordgirl]

it's weird, some people just develop a mental blind spot about something and refuse to see it, no matter how many times you tell them.

I had a family member who had a situation like this - she was in an ongoing contract to use a particular city-owned facility and didn't need it any more. Everyone who used the facility was assessed a small monthly cleaning fee. All she needed to do to get out of the contract was make sure she was caught up on that fee (I think it was around $7) and then notify them that the contract was terminated. And she just would not pay that dang fee in a timely way! So the contract would not terminate. It dragged on for four months, with her paying hundreds of dollars in charges for access to a facility she didn't need and wasn't using, because she wouldn't make an effort to pay this tiny little scrap of a fee.

(Certainly, there's an argument to be made that at some point the facility should have just eaten the fee, but it was in the contract my cousin signed and nobody really had the authority to waive it.)