and people wonder why....

[Racket_Man]

my pizza franchise no longer accepts checks.

[backgroung] when our phones are ringing off the hook and no one answers after 4 rings, the call gets rolled over to a national multi-company inbound call center. most times this is a good thing as in we do not loose a sale/customer to a endlessly ringing phone. the down side is that the callcenter is a multi-company inbound call center.

this means they are NOT familiar with our local area, policies, procedures, rules, blacklists, etc. sometimes they outright contradict our stated policies and rules.

the problems with the call center are not really the CSRs. they just have some script popup infront of them but it seems this script is just too generic and general. I may post my rant in MIM about us going TOTALLY callcenter as an experiment a couple of months ago. that was 6 week in HELL to be sure.

one of our rules is NO CHECKS. rule has been in place now for 4 1/2 years.
[end background]

went on a delivery last night. hustle up to the house and ring the doorbell. the customer answers the door, I read the order and give her the total. she hands me a check. I state our policy about no checks. I also look at the ticket to see who took the order (**%&*%^(*&*&*&&&&&$%$#$#&((&^ FRACKING CALL CENTER

C = customer
DD = your harried delivery driver

C - but the person I spoke with on the phone said I could.
DD - I do understand that. your order was taken by our overflow call center and sometimes they ignore our policies, but our policy for the last 4 years is that we no longer accept personal checks.
C - I specifically asked about checks and the person said I could use a local check
DD - (sensing she is going to be insistent upon using a check for payment). OK might you have a credit or debt care you can use???
C - I specifically asked if I could use a check for payment and they said YES.
DD -OK let me call my manager and get a ruling on this.

I whip out my cell phone and call the store. Talk to the MOD and explain the situation with the callcenter. The MOD approves me taking the check as payment

DD - OK my Manager has allowed me to accept a check this one time, but in the future we DO ask that you pay for your order with cash, or a credit or debt card.

(now up until this point I have no problem with the situation. the MOD approves me taking the check so I have no problem with that. NOW comes the suck).

C - OH that would not be a problem normally but I right now do not have any ready cash.
DD - well then you could just use a Credit or debt card
C - OH but I do not have any CASH HANDY

At this point I swear my jaw dropped to the gound and my brain went into reboot mode. the lady JUST TOLD me to my face that she was kiting a check and had basically no money in her account or was up to the limit on her credit card(s)

Yup the "pay for food now" and hope the check does not bounce routine.

and yes I DID tell the MOD this fact when I cashed out after my delivery.

[Bright_Star]

Couldn't you have just taken the pizza back, gave her back her check & gone back to the store? Because some call center said you guys take checks when you know you don't doesn't mean that you have to give in to some moron who is obviously gong to have a bounced check.

[eltf177]

Let us know the outcome of this, not that anybody needs a crystal ball to see what's coming...

[Racket_Man]

Couldn't you have just taken the pizza back, gave her back her check & gone back to the store? Because some call center said you guys take checks when you know you don't doesn't mean that you have to give in to some moron who is obviously gong to have a bounced check.

Becasue she was so insistent and refused to take NO for an answer, I just decided to call the MOD and let THEM approved/disapprove it. the company as a whole is just to sales driven they (like a lot of other companies we hear about here) will break their own stated rules and policies just for the sale/revenue or not to piss off a "customer".

Let us know the outcome of this, not that anybody needs a crystal ball to see what's coming...

most likely we will never find out the outcome. once the check gets deposited in the morning, it is out of our hands. after that it is up to the corp office to try and collect on a bounced check. we at the store level rarely get that information anymore.

[Legal Eagle]

I am on the customers side on this one. If i specifically asked if i could use a cheque and was told yes, then i would be very upset if the delivery person complained about taking them for whatever reason.

[HYHYBT]

Your company hired the call center; they need either to make sure the call center is telling customers they cannot pay by check, or to take the checks. When the pizza is at the door it's too late to change (from the customer's point of view) which forms of payment are acceptable.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I am on the customers side on this one. If i specifically asked if i could use a cheque and was told yes, then i would be very upset if the delivery person complained about taking them for whatever reason.

^^^What he said. It is not sucky to pay for the pizza using a check if you are told that's an acceptable payment method.

Check kiting on the other hand--that sucks immensely.

What needs to happen now is your franchise needs to drill it in the call center's head that NO CHECKS are allowed, and this needs to be put in the script somehow. Or they need to just drop the "no checks" policy. Otherwise, there will continue to be conflicts with the call center people telling customers that checks are allowed, and the delivery drivers having to try to explain that checks are not allowed.

[Racket_Man]

I am on the customers side on this one. If i specifically asked if i could use a cheque and was told yes, then i would be very upset if the delivery person complained about taking them for whatever reason.

Your company hired the call center; they need either to make sure the call center is telling customers they cannot pay by check, or to take the checks. When the pizza is at the door it's too late to change (from the customer's point of view) which forms of payment are acceptable.

and I do not disagree with any of you. if the CSR said we take checks OK I will take it IF a Manager approves. short phone call is all it takes. the fact she was paying with a check I hd no problem with.

and Legal_Eagle I did not complain to the customer as you assumed I did, I EXPLAINED our policy to her in a calm and polite manner.

what I did not and will not LIKE is that the customer basically stated she did not have money in her account.

again you have to understand that the call center we are hooked into is a MULTI-COMPANY inbound center meaning that we are NOT the sole focus of their efforts nor do we have a dedicated group that just answers calls from my (national) pizza chain. they (I assume) service PH's (and many other companies) from all over the country where policies, procedures and rules vary from area to area and franchise to franchise.

and there is a WHOLE list that we came up concerning the huge amount of problems with us utilizing a non dedicated call center. with such a "spread out" setup it is VERY hard to "drill" into the CSR's heads certain rules only apply to certain places.

Yes I fault the scripts and yes the customer have complained LOUDLY about the use of a call center.

we as a group have complained very LOUDLY about all of the call center problems we have had over the last couple of months but that has fallen on the deaf ears of upper management. they think it is such a GREAT idea, and LOVE ignoring all of the problems and complaints and are making sure it is here to stay

[Sliceanddice]

Your company hired the call center; they need either to make sure the call center is telling customers they cannot pay by check, or to take the checks. When the pizza is at the door it's too late to change (from the customer's point of view) which forms of payment are acceptable.

oh no they dont care i use to work for dominoes, they made the multi national corporation sign a contract hat said they have the right to sell their service to another company and if they do they are still bound by the origanal time frame of the contract so when about 2 years ago they sold the call center calls went down hill fast. they dont care about confirming info or payments.

[Teysa]

I remember when the corporate Pizza Hut I worked for went to a call-center system. At first we thought it would be pretty nice but the suck started early. The only time we'd get a call was if something was wrong. That got to be a major headache real quick. Having the call center put deliveries through to places out of our delivery area was real fun too. I don't think any of us were all that heart-broken when they scrapped the whole system.

[South Texan]

Geez. Talk about putting you in a bad situation that neither you nor the customer created. I am glad you thought to call your manager and the manager rectified the problem. That call center stinks.

[Racket_Man]

one other thing some of you fail to see or understand is that this situation was created by that mysterious "somebody else". Ya know that "mysterious person" every SC talks about or talks to but no one seems to be able to identify and we as group complain about all the TIME.

I do not have any idea if the woman in my OP was telling the truth or not. given the track record of our "call center" there is a ring of truth to it but we will never know the truth.

some of the replies posted on this thread seem to reflect a total contradiction to many of the stories related on this board ie. that "mysterious other person" telling a customer something that is totally outside of procedure or policy or rules and the customer accepting this as God has spoken to thee Gospel. then the customer tries to do what this "other person" said they could do and is met with a blank stare for such an outragious demand. the customer then goes into fiery SC mode, yelling and swearing, threatening and finally demanding a MANAGER. the spineless manager just gives into said SC and all is well for the SC.

How many stories/replies have I read on this board railing against that "mysterious other person" who the customer spoke with who told the customer there are no rules or procedures or policies that apply to them?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

But you yourself told us that this call center doesn't know exactly what your policies are, so I think it is plausible that the customer actually was told that they could pay by check by somebody at that call center.

At least in a retail setting, you can tell if the "other person" is a lie because you know how everybody looks, how everybody sounds when you talk to them, and who's working on a certain day.. It's a lot harder to do that when the "other person" is some third party in a call center that could be several states away.

[BaristaTrav]

When I worked for a sub delivery place in the 90s, for whatever g- d- reason, we took checks.. that was until about the 50th bad check out of oh.. 55.

[Flying Grype]

Document and report all of the call center fail. I do tech support and am constantly having to deal with customers who get incorrect information from our customer service department (in another office in another country, and dealing with many more products than the one I support). The people who work there have a high turnover so it doesn't do any good to educate each individual rep.

The best result in my situation would be that my company stops dealing with that call center and does all of its own customer service.