Just had one ranting at me for 15 minutes, completely unwilling to listen to any of the sound, logical reasons why we have taken the path that we have, and how he has left us no choice.

I’ve just been ‘ticked off’ for not telephoing him, only emailing him despite the fact that I’ve tried him twice a day, every day this week on the phone, and not received any response at all.

I was a whisker away from telling him to poke his pathetic contract up his arse. We don’t need his business, and he’s very small fry, but somehow I couldn’t be unprofessional.

Mini rantlet over.

Usually when customers have a rant it’s to cover their own incompetence and give their own boss the impression they are doing their job.

We get some ridiculously ill-informed requests for improved terms, discounts etc from Indian accountants employed by our African customers who are trying to justify their extravagant salaries and conditions. They usually have little commercial or technical understanding of the business.

http://notalwaysright.com/

One of our smallest customers kicks off with scary regularity, usually because he cant be arsed to follow correct procedure, (like submitting purchase orders for things he wants) and always threatens to take his business elsewhere yet steadfastly refuses to do so 😡

globalti – Member

Usually when customers have a rant it’s to cover their own incompetence and give their own boss the impression they are doing their job.

It’s funny you should say this, there is definitely an element of this. Our original contact has been fired for being shit, the work we were doing was asked for by him, and now it’s our fault.
It’s just so hard when you can’t get a word in edgeways, and you know that what you say will fall on deaf ears anyway, despite it’s potential to solve the situation.

Ahh yes. Customer is always right, and always an a-hole!

I always apply the PITA supplemental charge when quoting for work with clients I think might be ‘special’
For the ones that I find out are ‘special’ during the job I charge for every little bit of time possible, works for me 😀

I always apply the PITA supplemental charge when quoting for work with clients I think might be ‘special’
For the ones that I find out are ‘special’ during the job I charge for every little bit of time possible, works for me

If only i’d known what a complete ****wit this guy was, I’d have bled him dry, or better still told him to poke it from the off.

It’s always the smallest, shitiest customers who seem to be the hardest work as well….

I used to work in public technical support for people who, largely, had just bought their first computer.

By a country mile, the demographic that was the biggest arseache was “professional” people. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, people who are used to telling others what to do. Pain in the proverbial, they always know best and they always know nowt.

Friend of mine who works as a bar manager once had a customer complaining that the steak she ordered blue was cold and not cooked in the middle. My friend tried to explain what a blue steak was and that she could cook in medium rare (which seemingly is what she really wanted) but she insisted she wanted a blue one. Some folk.

A company I used to work for did tell one of their smaller, not worth the hassle type customers to go else where after they threatened to do just that. With some people you just can never win.

I’ve seen tiny customers flourish into enormous cash cows in he past, so I guess that stopped me from letting rip. You never know I suppose, and sometimes it’s a small world. I did the right thing, but it was a struggle.

I used to work in public technical support for people who, largely, had just bought their first computer.

For which I extend my heartfealt sympathy.

I always apply the PITA supplemental charge when quoting for work with clients I think might be ‘special’

just out of interest, how does that appear on the final bill?

I working until 2am this trying to get an urgent job out for a client. At 8am this morning I got a message outlining all the things I did wrong (basically a few pages were not in the order they wanted but didn’t brief) and no thanks for a 16 hours day.

…people who are used to telling others what to do. Pain in the proverbial, they always know best and they always know nowt.

This.

This guy is ‘the boss’ of his own little empire, and not used to people not bowing down before him.

It’s funny we work with some multi-nationals too, and liaise at board level, they’re generally nice as pie and you can have frank, sensible discussions with them. Probably why they’re where they are.

Got a customer wanting to take us to court over a dispute of the colour name of his running shoes. Despite our website showing an actual photo of the shoes and the name/description clearly stating the colours.

£60 FFS.

He has been offered a full refund and we’ll collect them. He can also keep the free t-shirt that came with them.

That’s not good enough apparently.

working until 2am this trying to get an urgent job out for a client. At 8am this morning I got a message outlining all the things I did wrong

Reminds me of:

At 3am, after finishing a website template for a client who had to have it “by 6am their time,” I sent an email letting her know that it was finished. The next day I get a call:

CLIENT: I don’t appreciate you staying out all night when you should be working on my project.

ME: I’m sorry? I was working all last night. As you can see, I sent you an e-mail –

CLIENT: I see that. At 3am. Do you think it’s okay to party all night and then work without sleep at 3am? It’s very unprofessional and morally reprehensible.

ME: What makes you think I was out partying?

CLIENT: Why else would you be up at 3am?

ME: You gave my 24 hours to do 18 hours of work. I had to stay up

CLIENT: Don’t try to use math on me!
http://clientsfromhell.net/clientstories

In my previous life as a sprayer my first garage was all very nice with flowers in the reception and dedicated staff to be courteous to the customers.
Fast forward to Australia and Wally Benson….
We had a guy moan about a job we did. Wally’s customer service was to say
“I don’t know what you’re worried about your car is a piece of shit anyway”

Were they ringing about a sofa?

Was a supplier now a customer.
I always try to be resonable having been on the receiving end.
Things I’ve noticed:
English suppliers = flexible and generally try to help speed things along especially if your polite and stay calm.
German suppliers = “if we say three weeks, we mean three weeks not a day sooner (even if it’s on the shelf) or later”
American suppliers = “if we say three weeks, we mean three months”

Clients? Pfft!

welcome to my world

😆

For which I extend my heartfealt sympathy.

It was horrific. You know the “my PC doesn’t work” threads that crop up on STW occasionally? Imagine being pressured to take 50 a day of those, by telephone, with no remote access to anything. Often with very angry people.

You read stories on the Internet about tech support and think “that can’t possibly be real”, the cup holder story and such. They absolutely are. For a random example; I had one bloke ring up complaining we’d sold him faulty RAM. Long story short, we’d sent him 72-pin SIMMs when he needed 30-pin ones, so to get them to fit in the sockets he’d hacksawed an inch off the side of each one.

This guy is ‘the boss’ of his own little empire, and not used to people not bowing down before him.

I once overheard this exchange by a colleague.

Customer: “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!”

Tech: “Actually, do you know who I am?”

Customer: “Erm, no?”

Tech: “Good. Then go and **** yourself.” *click*

/applause/

I got a call out a few years ago to a fault myself and two other colleagues had been dealing with all day. My two colleagues have forgotten more about the piece of kit than I’ll ever know.

I explained to the first controller that we had been working on it all day and ran out of hours so we would be back on it first thing the next day. I explained all the testing we had done, the fact that I’d only be able to repeat what had been done already which would prove nothing and not resolve the fault.

It would also mean that if I was out on it all night I would not be there during the day to help my colleagues with the donkey work, whilst letting them think about the problem. He was not happy but went away.

An hour later phone rings:

“This is The Control Manager, I’m not happy with your response, what are you going to do about it”

Me (mustering as insolent tone as possible) “Wow, that’s an impressive title. Nothing”

CM “What!”

Me “Nothing, I’ve told your colleague everything, I won’t be able to do anything productive tonight on this fault, far better to use my Oncall time for something else if it comes up or for me to help my far more knowledgeable but not oncall colleagues tomorrow”

CM “That’s not good enough, I want you out there fixing it”

Me “I’m not going as I’ve already tried everything I know and my colleagues have spent 9 hrs looking at it today and are still no closer to a solution”

CM “What’s your Manager name”

Me “It’s so and so but he’ll give you the same answer”

Five minutes later my Oncall Manager rings me and tells me off for not saying “Fxxx xxf!” more rudely to the CM!

Great response.

I have given this client another chance. If he talks to me in the same way again, or proves totally irrational and inflexible again, he’s getting it. I’m kinda looking forward to it. Tit.

Five minutes later my Oncall Manager rings me and tells me off for not saying “Fxxx xxf!” more rudely to the CM!

Excellent result!

This guy is ‘the boss’ of his own little empire,

oooohhhh ffeekkkkin’ yeah

We provided a service. We host and the servers and the applications, all you do is use the system and phone me if it breaks or you have questions. Yet some clown had wormed his way in to one customer and charged them for “technical support” – which meant phoning me when it broke. One day he decided he wanted a detailed spec of “their” server, so I said I’d email a copy as I already had the spec and config sheets. Not good enough, he was coming to my office and wanted “the hard copy”. No sweat. printed the sheets, stuck them in an envelope and left them at reception so i didn’t have to talk to the tube. Later that day, I get a 15 minute rant that half the details were missing. No they’re not, I wrote those sheets and they’re complete. he then details the missing data which is on pages 2,4,6. Hmm, you do know that we use a duplex printer? I hear him not knowing what a duplex printer is and not wanting to ask. (yes, that’s how good his “tech support” was) Wait. Wait. Ok, can’t wait any more, the paper is printed on both sides, turn page 1 over and look at the other side.
rustle, rustle, pause, oh, click, line dropped.

Customer: “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!”

Tech: “Actually, do you know who I am?”

Customer: “Erm, no?”

Tech: “Good. Then go and **** yourself.” *click*

If I ever interview him, he’s got a job.

oh and, this one. customer advised that they didn’t have a backup of their server and we recommend that they get one. they ask for a price, we provide price (DAT drive, tapes, arcserve for netware) and don’t hear any more.
Some months later, they’ve lost some files and need them restored but it’s not happening. Well it is, they can see the restored files but not read them. Discussion and check of accounts shows that they never purchased a backup solution from us, so I get dispatched to find out what’s going on. It turns out that they baulked at the not inconsiderable cost of our solution but had worked out that they could back up then entire server onto a couple of floppy disks, by selecting the directories to be backed up, then dropping them onto the local floppy. Or more correctly, copying the shortcuts. Only took a couple of minutes as well.
And guess whose fault it was that they couldn’t recover those files?

Working as a back up to the sales team (I’m an ecommerce developer) over the christmas rush we had a woman phone up about a week before christmas very upset that her package hadn’t turned up on time. I went and checked our returns and sure enough it had been returned to us by royal mail as having an invalid postcode.

I asked the customer her address and she repeated it back to me exactly as it was on the package. I told her she’d got the postcode wrong and would she like me to look up the postcode for that address, cue her shouting that she knew her address and I should just send the **** parcel again.

Fast forward to about 3.15 on christmas eve – two hours after our last collection, just as we’re packing up to go.

The woman phones back in a complete state and screams down the phone at me that I’ve ruined christmas. I ask what the problem is and she says that the parcel still hasn’t turned up – I apologise but there’s nothing I can do but can I just confirm the address – reading back to her the exact same address as we’d discussed previously. At this point she lost it and started screaming that she’d never heard that postcode before and that it wasn’t even in her town.

At this point I mentioned that it was the postcode that she’d put on her order when she entered it online and that she’d subsequently sworn blind was correct for her address. She screams that I’m lying and that I must have manually changed her order to a different postcode to ruin christmas for her son.

After 10-15 minutes of this I apologised again but said there was still nothing I can do – so she went and got her husband to scream down the phone at me some more and then threaten to take out adverts in the newspapers telling the world that we ruined christmas. At this point my boss pulled the phone out of the wall and we all went off for a very pleasant christmas break.

Slightly lower down the food chain perhaps, but I used to temp for n agency (while at uni) that supplied steward staff to football matches, cricket, horse racing etc. We also used to man the ticket booths at Farnborough air show. Having been pleased with my work at one Farnborough air show, I was asked to supervise an entrance at the next one.
We used to get so many managers turning up with their trail of flunkies who would ask for 10 tickets and throw a company provided credit card to you, that had obviously only just been issued and not been signed.
We’d refuse to accept it, so they’d get a pen out and sign it. I’d have to refuse that as well, stating that anyone could have signed that; how do I know that you are the person named on the card? Cue lots of shouting and swearing, resulting in “I want to speak to your supervisor” who i would phone and they would tell them I had done the right thing and was only looking out for the best interests of their company. They would then admit defeat and get one of the minions to buy the tickets on their personal credit cards.

On the flip side, I explained to a bloke who wanted to buy a large amount of tickets that I would have to call for authorisation and did he mind speaking to the person at the credit card company. He was polite as anything and handled it very graciously. Turns out he was the head honcho of Agusta helicoptors.

I once stewarded at White Hart Lane and at the end of the match had to direct people towards the nearest exit. One of the usual exits was closed for some reason, and the doors padlocked shut.
Cue loud mouthed bloke showing off to his mates when I asked him to go in a certain direction. He barged me out of the way, loudly telling his mates that he always uses this exit, so was going to go this way and beat the crowds. Him and his mates came back up the 2 flights of stairs a couple of minutes later and joined the throng of people leaving by the correct exit. I didn’t bother saying anything, as his mates were giving him plenty of stick for not listening to me. 😀

Mrmonkfinger the PITA supplement is applied to the quote i.e.I think they’re going to be special to deal with after just the first meeting. So the supplement is applied so the fee to justify the joy of dealing with them.

I had a client who booked a venue in the shadow of Edinburgh castle in late July, then complained about the tourists outside in the street.
I’ve had customers who complained that the golf course at the hotel was closed due to frost we were 600-700ft above sea level in the middle of Perthshire, in February. His problem was that Troon his home club, at sea level,on the coast was open that day.

Had a customer return something earlier, and asked me to chuck something in for free with the transaction.

She didn’t get it….

re: PITA supplement, I know builders who genuinely put sums in their invoices titled GFA – general ******* about.

had worked out that they could back up then entire server onto a couple of floppy disks,

A variation on this, I once went to a site with issues restoring from a backup. Transpires that they had a system which backed up across multiple floppies, and they’d “streamlined” the backup procedure by realising that they didn’t need to sit there swapping twenty disks after all, they could just hit “ok” when it asked for the next disk in the set and it’d carry on using the same disk…

Had one right pita this week company use to hire lots of forklifts from us but now only has two(all his other sites have closed down)anyway calls in a breakdown on the 6 jan colleuage attends orders part I return 3 days later fit said part truck still not working no one on site know nothing,connect up laptop to discover customer has been running truck since crimbo eve with coolant warning error on dash,tell customer he has damaged engine in truck and he’s got to pay for it(vw diesel ouch)cue customer ranting it’s all my fault and how he’s not paying etc etc sometimes you have to just walk away ether that or I was give him a slap 👿

Almost the entire of my last job in the bank was telling customers they were wrong, and exactly why they were wrong, and how to be less wrong, and if that didn’t work punishing them for their wrongness. If the customer was right, they had no use for my services 😉 But still people would say “the customer is always right”.

I had a student (aged about 40) ring me up to complain that her friend had got a better grade in GCSE science than she had.