Stupidest Excuses Given to Customers

[that_chick_in_I.T.]

Our company outsources Tier 1 tech support to the Philippines. They're nice, intelligent people, but damn - I don't think they've ever actually seen a router. We routinely get frustrated customers who have heard something so mind-bogglingly stupid from Tier 1 that they get sent yelling up to our queue.

I just got off the phone with a customer who was hopping mad because two different reps had told him the reason the mailserver had been experiencing latency was "it's the holidays".
... apparently, Santa and the reindeer are sending a lot of e-cards this year.

Another gem was the ticket that had gotten escalated to us after a customer on a Linux hosting plan reported being unable to use PhP to initiate a cron job.
The rep had told him that we were unable to help him with this mysterious third party application called "cron".

I know you guys have stories to share. Go on - 'tis the season.

[Spankmonkey]

That's awesome... Should try that at my job. Unfortunately we don't farm over seas, so unfortunately we have to deal with the locals.

But I did work for a Cell phone carrier once, and we did tell a few customers who were complaining of dropped calls (yes this happens and there is technical reason behind it, it's called"Interference"... Lay terms.. too Many damn people yacking on the phone at the same time, overloading the system).

I Digress... A few of my colleagues mentioned that if you wrap yourself in Tin-Foil and spin around 3 times in a circle and shout "CLEAR THE SIGNAL, CLEAR THE SIGNAL".. Luckally the customers weren't ours, but we made it sound pretty convincing and said that it works for our customers in certain rural areas where there isn't good coverage... The worse part is the customers bought it and said "I'll give it a try"

Oh, and the best one, is when I was working for a Contracting firm, the instructor that was teaching our wiring class (for telephone and Ethernet) sent one of the recruiters over to Radio Shack to pick up a can of "Dial Tone" because we needed it for testing. The recruiter returned about 10 minutes later laughing, because the Rep at Radio Shack had explained it to her. Blinker Fluid anyone?

[IT Grunt]

Oh, and the best one, is when I was working for a Contracting firm, the instructor that was teaching our wiring class (for telephone and Ethernet) sent one of the recruiters over to Radio Shack to pick up a can of "Dial Tone" because we needed it for testing. The recruiter returned about 10 minutes later laughing, because the Rep at Radio Shack had explained it to her. Blinker Fluid anyone?

Reminds me of a trick we played on a co-worker when I worked for the bank. She worked at one of the other offices upstate, and was having trouble with a server. A note that some of the people in offices outside the main office were often handed IT responsibilities without having a full grasp of it. To mess with her a bit, we told her she needed to empty the bit bucket, as it was getting full from catching the overflow of bits from the errors she was getting. She bought it, and the search began. Another of my co-workers from the main office happened to be there that day (and was in on it.) After several minutes of this lady trying to find where the bit bucket was in the server (she actually had a cover off!), she revealed the joke and everyone had a good laugh.

On topic, I work for the outsourced firm in our situation. Our help desk is often similar. They have never worked with a manufacturing company before, and thus there are some humorous moments when they don't understand some of the terms the client uses, like 'slitter' or 'rolling mill'. There have been times they've been told it's not supported. The reality is, they're talking about where the PC I need to fix is located.

[sld72382]

Our company outsources the sales dept to a call center in Houston. Before then we had the sales dept and it was great. They are the ones responsible for selling the phone support that we handle. Only problem is, they are commissioned based so they often times sell bullshit that is not supported (they get a dollar every time they transfer to us and also get a cut of the sale). This creates a problem because the clients wait to speak to me and then I have to tell them that I can't help them and refund their money. Everyone is fine with the refund but some clients get pissed that they were told one thing and then I'm telling them another. To make matters worse, if I have to refund a sale due to it being unsupported their commission doesn't get taken away, so there's no incentive for them to do their jobs correctly.

We tried to get the sales dept back in our call center but the head honchos at corp actually said, "They made twice as many sales as you did in the same time frame so you're going to have to live with it." Never mind that half of those sales have to be refunded because they are out of scope of what we handle. Why is this? Because once a client gets charged by them, it gets counted as "a sale" even if it's refunded 10 minutes later.

As a matter of fact, in one year of us doing the sales we probably had about $20,000 in refunds for 3/4 of the year. When the other call center started doing the sales, it was only a short time later and we had to give $20,000 in refunds in ONE MONTH!

[Kilamon]

"Bastard Operator From Hell"-Style Excuses are at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl

Ive used the above link in a couple of my tickets. Here's one now....

Question: By Smith, Jane on 17 November, 2006 - 11:00:04 AM
John Doe and I cannot remotely access critical folders today. I can be reached at 303-555-1212 today.

I worked on the issue here and fixed it as there was a genuine problem on the server caused by one of my coworkers.

Question: By Smith, Jane on 17 November, 2006 - 12:03:00 PM
Never mind...I am able to access now.

CLOSED/Reply: By Kilamon on 17 November, 2006 - 3:11:05 PM
There was a recursive traversal of loopback mount points causing a delay in the restoration of the S: drive on the server. Apologies for any outage.

Question: By Smith, Jane on 17 November, 2006 - 3:12:48 PM
Ah...you know it's funny...that's EXACTLY what I thought it was that causing the problem! Have a great weekend.

[Bliss]

When anything major goes ooops at the ISP and the customers start calling we tend to tell them the "satellite is having problems", they hear satellite and go "oops, big stuff me can't argue" (well some still do "but I need my internet!!" "No shit??? and we disconnected the internet thinking nobody was using it...") anyhow, it might be "lame" but at least we're not denying we have troubles, and it's much much much easier to tell that to a person to whom the RAS, Radius, Mail server, Web server and routers are all "the server" ("I can't connect to the server!") than telling them "Sorry but our friggin NOC team has broken the BGP table on the backbone 7200s again and we need to wait until they fix things up"

[TNT]

Once upon a time, we were having troubles with a PPV wrestling event. We were joking around about what to tell customers. I came up with, "too many people in your neighborhood are watching the event on multiple boxes and there's not enough signal for all of you. I suggest you go to the neighbor's house and either watch with them, or make them turn off some of their boxes so there's enough left over for you."

I never actually said that to a customer, of course.

But, a few minutes later, I heard one of the reps who sat a few aisles over say to a customer, "Apparently, the people in your neighborhood are watching the event on multiple boxes. We only put enough signal in the cable for one box per household..."

I got out of my chair and practically leaped across the desk, shouting, "I didn't mean it....."

"Oh," she said. "Well, it made sense to me."

Rumor has it she's going to named supervisor in the next few days. For real.

[Kilamon]

Rumor has it she's going to named supervisor in the next few days. For real.

I hate it when stupidity wins.

[yahurd]

Rumor has it she's going to named supervisor in the next few days. For real.

so next time you come up with something tell a customer
youll be ceo in a week

[pbmods]

I got out of my chair and practically leaped across the desk, shouting, "I didn't mean it....."

Heh. That must've been pretty funny on the customer's end. Not from his perspective, I'm sure, but on his end, certainly.

[Hicksey]

I once politely told a customer that had just old me he was computer illiterate that a computer was only as good as its user, which wasn't an insult at him, but once he got more experience the problems he was having would just cease to occur.

At the time I had been on the phone with him for a half hour and was about to start making my hairline recede by pulling it out. This guy was so disfunctional that I couldn't get him to do simple things like clicking Start-> Control Panel -> Dbl Click Network. I kind of felt guilty for not really helping him out, but I had no doubt I was right. He wasn't useful enough to make a computer useful to him.

[thewhatnow]

I do tech support for an American company outsourced to Argentina.

I know the excuses seem (are) really lame, but we always get told to say certain things. It's all in the scripts. We know it's complete bullsh*t, yet we MUST say it, or else we'll be penalized for it. You know, no bonuses, etc etc.

And trust me, we NEED the money!

Just my two cents.

[myswtghst]

Eargh. They outsource a lot to other countries (primarily Latin America) from our call centers. I always feel so bad when someone finally gets through to me and are excited to have a native English speaker who can understand them, only to find out that I don't deal with cell phones, only infrastructure and radios. I'd like to help them out, but usually I don't know anymore about their phone than they do, unless they have the same phone I do.

The thing that really bugs me, though, is that the agents don't seem to be so bad primarily due to language barriers, but more due to the fact that they seem unwilling to deviate AT ALL from script, and don't tend to listen to the customer's actual problems before proceeding down a predetermined path. Not necessarily their fault, but still.

[Kilamon]

The thing that really bugs me, though, is that the agents don't seem to be so bad primarily due to language barriers, but more due to the fact that they seem unwilling to deviate AT ALL from script, and don't tend to listen to the customer's actual problems before proceeding down a predetermined path. Not necessarily their fault, but still.

Prime example: A netcom rep tried to resell me on the service when I called to cancel. Problem: The service I was attempting to cancel belonged to my father who had passed away.