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I spent several years working in a call center for a certain cell phone company. After I'd been working there for a few months, I got moved over to working in another department handing customer letters. I spent most of 2008 and 2009 answering letters the company received. Essentially, any mail the company received through any publicly available mailing address other than actual bill payments came to us.
That job helped you build a healthy contempt for customers. Reading what they wrote to us certainly was interesting.
A few of the "Greatest Hits". . .
1. Commentator's Fans
Back in Fall of '09 when controversial commentator/talk show host Glenn Beck was losing sponsors left and right, our company was one of the companies that refused to sponsor him. We got some hate mail for that. I don't know how much, we didn't track it, but we'd get letters that were filled with angry tirades calling our company "socialist" or "communist" or "traitor" for refusing to sponsor him, and we were robbing him of his 1st Amendment rights by not sponsoring his show, while saying that they are not a customer and never will be because of this, and always had lots of misspellings and extra exclamation marks.
Our superiors never knew about these letters, and the corporate higher-ups certainly didn't. You see, if we got a letter from a non-customer, our standard procedure given to us from corporate was to basically ignore it unless it was an actual legal paper (in which case we send it to legal). Somebody who is not a customer and says the never will be? Yeah, we just trashed them, but we got credit for it. We have to work 2.5 letters per hour (to account for ones where some research might be needed for a customer's issue or complaint). A thousand (wild-ass guess) complaint letters was nothing but a bonanza of easy letters for us all to fill up our quotas for most of the week and be able to take it easy for a few days since they are all "unidentifiable" since they don't tie to a customer account. I mentioned to our supervisor we had got a lot of mail about this issue, my supervisor said it didn't matter, our guidance from corporate was to ignore all mail from non-customers other than legal filings, and to forward legal filings to Legal department.
2. Sell your number back to you
We got a letter, filled with bad grammar and misspellings (a common theme) which rambled on and on.
It was an offer for a merger! This correspondent wanted our company to buy his wireless phone company for $50,000,000! He talked about how our company had a bad reputation and people refused to buy our phones, but if we bought his company we could use the name of his company to get around our bad reputation. He talked about how he had very loyal customers who loved the service he provided.
Well, this wasn't very likely. But, on a lark I decided to look up the phone number he put in his letter to contact him at into our computers.
It was one of our numbers, he was one of our customers! He had 5 lines of service on his account, and it was a personal (i.e. non-business) account but had the name of his "company" as an "ATTN:" in the mailing address. He was apparently subletting 4 phones to his friends and having them pay him for it. Well, besides being really against his service contract (as in we could probably get Legal to cancel his service for that), there was no way on God's Green Earth we were going to pay him $50 million dollars to have back 4 of our own phone lines and the name of the apparently non-incorporated "company" he ran.
Since he was one of our customers, I had to call him. It took every bit of composure I had to tell him that: "I am sorry, but at this time it is not in our business strategy to pursue a merger with XXXXXXX Wireless." I got a very stereotypical-sounding "Man. . . bummer" as a reply. The man sounded like every movie cliche of a stoner, I guess he was smoking something to think this was a good idea. We went nice on him and did NOT sic Legal on him.
3. You are being sued! Send checks made out to cash to. . .
This was one of the truly weird ones. We got what appeared to be a faded and distorted photocopy of some legal papers dated September, 1985 (this was in '09, remember) about a law firm in L.A. filing some motion against the city for something involving a building permit for a greenhouse. However, most of the letter was crossed out and had various things over it. The city of Los Angeles, as defendant, was crossed out with a pen and had the name of our company written on it. The plaintiffs address was crossed out and had "Address not available" written there. The letterhead for the Law Firm had the words "Lawyer for suing Cell Phone company!" written beside it. The body was crossed out and written in the margins beside it was: "You are being sued! You ripped us off! To settle this lawsuit send $500 a month in a check made out to cash to P.O. Box XXXX Los Angeles CA" There was no contact information other than a P.O. Box, not even a name of who was "suing" us since it demanded checks made out to cash to be sent to a PO Box. We decided to not forward it to legal and treat it as an unidentifiable crank letter.
4. Handwritten on motel stationery
On a couple of sheets of stationery for some motel in New Mexico was a handwritten angry tirade, basically two sheets of insulting us, saying we ruined his life, profanities and insults blaming him for everything wrong in his life. In the end, it was signed with an illegible squiggle. It got filed as unidentifiable since there was no customer name, no contact information other than the motel (which didn't tie to an account, and there wasn't even a room number), but just something about somebody writing us from a motel out in the desert saying that our cell phone company was what completely ruined his life seemed hard to believe. I always kind of wondered why he thought that. Was it insane ranting of a crazy person, or some incredibly convoluted routine where he was blaming everything on a high phone bill or a missed call or something?
5. Boldfaced rant wherein one does not understand the term "temporary"
This was a one-page letter in small print, which every other word it seemed was in boldface, italic, underlined, or in bright red. Combine that with profanities, demeaning suggestions of sexual acts, and graphic insults to our mothers.
He apparently was a customer at the time. Sorting through the R-rated parts of the letter and the text being formatted like a bad late-90's webpage, we took his complaints about his service plan being changed "without his consent" and did some research.
Apparently he got a special temporary two-year discount for renewing his service a little over two years prior. He got $10 off per month for 24 months for agreeing to renew his service for two years, instead of a phone upgrade. It was a decent deal. He was on some antiquated price plan where he was paying about $35 a month before anything else, for a pretty limited amount of minutes and no nights/weekends, no roaming, nothing extra. Looking at his use, he almost never used the phone. We guessed he kept it for emergencies or something like that, and with the $10/month off he was paying maybe $30/month after taxes and fees. Apparently he paid the exact same amount those two years
When those two years ran out, the discount ran out too, and his rate went up by $10/month. He was livid, as in furious, that we "changed" his contract without his consent. He demanded, in a list of bullet points, that we restore the discount, give a written apology where we acknowledge fault that we changed his service contract without permission, provide him with a written promise that we will never again change his terms of service, price plan, or phone service for any reason, and he said he would refuse to ever pay more than the discounted price, and that's all he would send in, ever, and he said he would sue us if we took any collection action or terminated his account saying he hadn't paid the full bill. He had also interspersed this letter with requests to perform various obscene acts upon him.
Of course, all that had happened was his finite-term discount had run out. He peppered all this through the incredibly hostile words of his letter. We looked at loyalty/renewal options to see if we could get the discount back on his account if he would renew his account. . .no dice. They didn't offer fixed per-month discounts anymore. We could get him a phone upgrade, or a smaller one-time credit to his bill, about half the total credit he would have gotten earlier.
Well, he's a customer, we've got to call him, and it won't be pretty. We got ahold of him, it wasn't pretty. We tried to explain all the above about limited term discounts to him, but he wouldn't hear it. Anything other than saying we were giving him a PERMANENT discount and a formal written apology and written promise and so on was met with profanity and screaming and yelling. Well, we followed the script for this, and after several warnings escalated him to the supervisor queue (who, as usual, chided us for not "de-escalating" the call. But when we told supervisor queue he wanted a formal written apology while acknowledging fault, for his complaint, on top of a customer retention offer we were not authorized to give, that changed the higher-tier's opinion). I checked the account notes a few minutes later. Apparently the supervisor hung up on him for being abusive, with notes that the account was being forwarded to Legal for possible termination for abusive conduct towards employees.
I checked back on that account a few months later, it was suspended for nonpayment (i.e. the $10/month he wasn't paying was becoming past-due) and the notes indicated several more heated exchanges, with the account having been forwarded to Legal for review towards possible termination for abusive behavior towards our employees.
6. "Talk to my agent!"
We got a payment stub from an account in the name of a minor celebrity. It was somebody I'd heard of, a B-list TV star who had been the leading man in a couple of long-running hit TV shows. I'll be nice and not name-names, but you've probably heard of him. It was simply a handwritten note with the payment to cancel service. Well, the payment had already been taken and processed, but we got the slip saying to cancel service.
Now, to explain, the ONLY departments that could cancel service would be Legal and "Retention". . .and Legal would only do it if a customer was being highly abusive or as the result of litigation. For 99.9% of cancellations, they would have to speak with Retention, which was very good at avoiding cancelling accounts. Under no circumstance would they cancel an account unless the customer was on the line with them, told them they wanted to cancel, then told them they wanted to cancel again after they Retention agent made some kind of retention offer. Since one obscure passage of the standard service contract said that to cancel a customer must call in to state this, that was the legal ground they were working with in refusing to cancel in writing (unless Legal got involved).
Well, we got letters like this pretty often, cancellation requests. We have a pretty standard procedure, we'd call the customer, tell them they had to speak with our cancellation department to verbally confirm the request, and we'd make that happen. Sometimes they would be upset at this, saying that's why they wrote the letter is so they wouldn't have to talk to anybody, but most of the time they'd just go along with it.
In this case I get the celebrity in question. He sounded just like he does on TV, and it's a fairly distinctive and pretty friendly-sounding voice. I introduce myself as to what company I am calling from, verify that I am speaking to the customer, and explain why I am calling, that's when the call became less nice. He insisted that I speak to his agent, that's why he has him handle things like his cell phone bill.
I, as politely as I could, explained that since the account was in his name, he personally would have to speak with the cancellation department. Unless he or his agent sent in a proper power-of-attorney for his agent to conduct his affairs, we would have to speak with him. He said again to contact his agent to get the power of attorney sent, but he wasn't going to talk to us, since that's why he had an agent.
He then hung up abruptly after saying he was done talking to us and repeating that we would have to go to his agent, he did not give us the contact information for his agent. I guess he was just used to everybody in Hollywood knowing how to get ahold of people's agents or something like that. We tried to call him back, he ignored the call. I checked back on the account a few months later, the account was never cancelled, but he had stopped all usage of it, but it was still being paid. Notes on the account indicated that they had gotten other written notes asking to cancel, which was followed by an attempt to contact the customer, but now the phone always went to voice mail (presumably turned off or disposed of as he thinks it's cancelled, and apparently his agent is still paying the bill).
That job helped you build a healthy contempt for customers. Reading what they wrote to us certainly was interesting.
A few of the "Greatest Hits". . .
1. Commentator's Fans
Back in Fall of '09 when controversial commentator/talk show host Glenn Beck was losing sponsors left and right, our company was one of the companies that refused to sponsor him. We got some hate mail for that. I don't know how much, we didn't track it, but we'd get letters that were filled with angry tirades calling our company "socialist" or "communist" or "traitor" for refusing to sponsor him, and we were robbing him of his 1st Amendment rights by not sponsoring his show, while saying that they are not a customer and never will be because of this, and always had lots of misspellings and extra exclamation marks.
Our superiors never knew about these letters, and the corporate higher-ups certainly didn't. You see, if we got a letter from a non-customer, our standard procedure given to us from corporate was to basically ignore it unless it was an actual legal paper (in which case we send it to legal). Somebody who is not a customer and says the never will be? Yeah, we just trashed them, but we got credit for it. We have to work 2.5 letters per hour (to account for ones where some research might be needed for a customer's issue or complaint). A thousand (wild-ass guess) complaint letters was nothing but a bonanza of easy letters for us all to fill up our quotas for most of the week and be able to take it easy for a few days since they are all "unidentifiable" since they don't tie to a customer account. I mentioned to our supervisor we had got a lot of mail about this issue, my supervisor said it didn't matter, our guidance from corporate was to ignore all mail from non-customers other than legal filings, and to forward legal filings to Legal department.
2. Sell your number back to you
We got a letter, filled with bad grammar and misspellings (a common theme) which rambled on and on.
It was an offer for a merger! This correspondent wanted our company to buy his wireless phone company for $50,000,000! He talked about how our company had a bad reputation and people refused to buy our phones, but if we bought his company we could use the name of his company to get around our bad reputation. He talked about how he had very loyal customers who loved the service he provided.
Well, this wasn't very likely. But, on a lark I decided to look up the phone number he put in his letter to contact him at into our computers.
It was one of our numbers, he was one of our customers! He had 5 lines of service on his account, and it was a personal (i.e. non-business) account but had the name of his "company" as an "ATTN:" in the mailing address. He was apparently subletting 4 phones to his friends and having them pay him for it. Well, besides being really against his service contract (as in we could probably get Legal to cancel his service for that), there was no way on God's Green Earth we were going to pay him $50 million dollars to have back 4 of our own phone lines and the name of the apparently non-incorporated "company" he ran.
Since he was one of our customers, I had to call him. It took every bit of composure I had to tell him that: "I am sorry, but at this time it is not in our business strategy to pursue a merger with XXXXXXX Wireless." I got a very stereotypical-sounding "Man. . . bummer" as a reply. The man sounded like every movie cliche of a stoner, I guess he was smoking something to think this was a good idea. We went nice on him and did NOT sic Legal on him.
3. You are being sued! Send checks made out to cash to. . .
This was one of the truly weird ones. We got what appeared to be a faded and distorted photocopy of some legal papers dated September, 1985 (this was in '09, remember) about a law firm in L.A. filing some motion against the city for something involving a building permit for a greenhouse. However, most of the letter was crossed out and had various things over it. The city of Los Angeles, as defendant, was crossed out with a pen and had the name of our company written on it. The plaintiffs address was crossed out and had "Address not available" written there. The letterhead for the Law Firm had the words "Lawyer for suing Cell Phone company!" written beside it. The body was crossed out and written in the margins beside it was: "You are being sued! You ripped us off! To settle this lawsuit send $500 a month in a check made out to cash to P.O. Box XXXX Los Angeles CA" There was no contact information other than a P.O. Box, not even a name of who was "suing" us since it demanded checks made out to cash to be sent to a PO Box. We decided to not forward it to legal and treat it as an unidentifiable crank letter.
4. Handwritten on motel stationery
On a couple of sheets of stationery for some motel in New Mexico was a handwritten angry tirade, basically two sheets of insulting us, saying we ruined his life, profanities and insults blaming him for everything wrong in his life. In the end, it was signed with an illegible squiggle. It got filed as unidentifiable since there was no customer name, no contact information other than the motel (which didn't tie to an account, and there wasn't even a room number), but just something about somebody writing us from a motel out in the desert saying that our cell phone company was what completely ruined his life seemed hard to believe. I always kind of wondered why he thought that. Was it insane ranting of a crazy person, or some incredibly convoluted routine where he was blaming everything on a high phone bill or a missed call or something?
5. Boldfaced rant wherein one does not understand the term "temporary"
This was a one-page letter in small print, which every other word it seemed was in boldface, italic, underlined, or in bright red. Combine that with profanities, demeaning suggestions of sexual acts, and graphic insults to our mothers.
He apparently was a customer at the time. Sorting through the R-rated parts of the letter and the text being formatted like a bad late-90's webpage, we took his complaints about his service plan being changed "without his consent" and did some research.
Apparently he got a special temporary two-year discount for renewing his service a little over two years prior. He got $10 off per month for 24 months for agreeing to renew his service for two years, instead of a phone upgrade. It was a decent deal. He was on some antiquated price plan where he was paying about $35 a month before anything else, for a pretty limited amount of minutes and no nights/weekends, no roaming, nothing extra. Looking at his use, he almost never used the phone. We guessed he kept it for emergencies or something like that, and with the $10/month off he was paying maybe $30/month after taxes and fees. Apparently he paid the exact same amount those two years
When those two years ran out, the discount ran out too, and his rate went up by $10/month. He was livid, as in furious, that we "changed" his contract without his consent. He demanded, in a list of bullet points, that we restore the discount, give a written apology where we acknowledge fault that we changed his service contract without permission, provide him with a written promise that we will never again change his terms of service, price plan, or phone service for any reason, and he said he would refuse to ever pay more than the discounted price, and that's all he would send in, ever, and he said he would sue us if we took any collection action or terminated his account saying he hadn't paid the full bill. He had also interspersed this letter with requests to perform various obscene acts upon him.
Of course, all that had happened was his finite-term discount had run out. He peppered all this through the incredibly hostile words of his letter. We looked at loyalty/renewal options to see if we could get the discount back on his account if he would renew his account. . .no dice. They didn't offer fixed per-month discounts anymore. We could get him a phone upgrade, or a smaller one-time credit to his bill, about half the total credit he would have gotten earlier.
Well, he's a customer, we've got to call him, and it won't be pretty. We got ahold of him, it wasn't pretty. We tried to explain all the above about limited term discounts to him, but he wouldn't hear it. Anything other than saying we were giving him a PERMANENT discount and a formal written apology and written promise and so on was met with profanity and screaming and yelling. Well, we followed the script for this, and after several warnings escalated him to the supervisor queue (who, as usual, chided us for not "de-escalating" the call. But when we told supervisor queue he wanted a formal written apology while acknowledging fault, for his complaint, on top of a customer retention offer we were not authorized to give, that changed the higher-tier's opinion). I checked the account notes a few minutes later. Apparently the supervisor hung up on him for being abusive, with notes that the account was being forwarded to Legal for possible termination for abusive conduct towards employees.
I checked back on that account a few months later, it was suspended for nonpayment (i.e. the $10/month he wasn't paying was becoming past-due) and the notes indicated several more heated exchanges, with the account having been forwarded to Legal for review towards possible termination for abusive behavior towards our employees.
6. "Talk to my agent!"
We got a payment stub from an account in the name of a minor celebrity. It was somebody I'd heard of, a B-list TV star who had been the leading man in a couple of long-running hit TV shows. I'll be nice and not name-names, but you've probably heard of him. It was simply a handwritten note with the payment to cancel service. Well, the payment had already been taken and processed, but we got the slip saying to cancel service.
Now, to explain, the ONLY departments that could cancel service would be Legal and "Retention". . .and Legal would only do it if a customer was being highly abusive or as the result of litigation. For 99.9% of cancellations, they would have to speak with Retention, which was very good at avoiding cancelling accounts. Under no circumstance would they cancel an account unless the customer was on the line with them, told them they wanted to cancel, then told them they wanted to cancel again after they Retention agent made some kind of retention offer. Since one obscure passage of the standard service contract said that to cancel a customer must call in to state this, that was the legal ground they were working with in refusing to cancel in writing (unless Legal got involved).
Well, we got letters like this pretty often, cancellation requests. We have a pretty standard procedure, we'd call the customer, tell them they had to speak with our cancellation department to verbally confirm the request, and we'd make that happen. Sometimes they would be upset at this, saying that's why they wrote the letter is so they wouldn't have to talk to anybody, but most of the time they'd just go along with it.
In this case I get the celebrity in question. He sounded just like he does on TV, and it's a fairly distinctive and pretty friendly-sounding voice. I introduce myself as to what company I am calling from, verify that I am speaking to the customer, and explain why I am calling, that's when the call became less nice. He insisted that I speak to his agent, that's why he has him handle things like his cell phone bill.
I, as politely as I could, explained that since the account was in his name, he personally would have to speak with the cancellation department. Unless he or his agent sent in a proper power-of-attorney for his agent to conduct his affairs, we would have to speak with him. He said again to contact his agent to get the power of attorney sent, but he wasn't going to talk to us, since that's why he had an agent.
He then hung up abruptly after saying he was done talking to us and repeating that we would have to go to his agent, he did not give us the contact information for his agent. I guess he was just used to everybody in Hollywood knowing how to get ahold of people's agents or something like that. We tried to call him back, he ignored the call. I checked back on the account a few months later, the account was never cancelled, but he had stopped all usage of it, but it was still being paid. Notes on the account indicated that they had gotten other written notes asking to cancel, which was followed by an attempt to contact the customer, but now the phone always went to voice mail (presumably turned off or disposed of as he thinks it's cancelled, and apparently his agent is still paying the bill).
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