The time we almost had to go to Small Claims
I was reading an old entry about a company sued because the customer wanted a refund on a computer and refused to actually bring in the computer. It reminded me of one of the things that happened at my job (which I left over three years ago). This company no longer exists.
This is as much a company suck as it is a customer suck.
So, I don't know if you know about Partworks, but how this was set up was that people could subscribe to this particular partwork and they would get sent issues every month. The issues would have a part to a model, or various items relevant to the partwork.
Towards the end of my time there, we had one partwork which proved popular. I mean, we had over 5000 subscribers, which, in a small country like ours, was quite a lot. Before they launched this title, we changed the website, allowing subscribers to set up credit card payments and direct debits. There were a lot of issues with the website and some subscribers never got confirmation so ended up subscribing more than once.
This particular customer was one of those. Since we had at least 100-200 subscriptions a day on the website, and several over the phone, it became an impossible task keeping up with those duplicates. This is more of a company suck, but I was pretty much the only experienced contact centre person there. Before we launched this product, I was the only one doing the contact centre. I was training at least one other girl, but I was trying to handle training, emails, online subscriptions, letters to customers, subscriber enquiries for all the other partworks we had, banking, replacing broken items, post and calls on top. And that's not even half of what I had to do in my job, all for $18 an hour (then about $3 above minimum wage).
So, the customer emails saying she got two copies of a particular issue, but at that time she hadn't been charged for both. The payments were due to go out the next day. We were one of the only companies that actually sent stuff out before charging for them. Unfortunately, because she had actually received the goods, we couldn't stop the payment.
I replied to her saying she was welcome to send the issue back and we would refund her. A couple of months go by and my manager shows me a letter from the Small Claims Tribunal. In it, the woman had alleged that we 'refused' to refund her money and she wanted compensation. I was so angry. What made me more angry was that not only did the company refund her, without her sending the items back, they also gave her costs for filing, which was only about $20, and another $60 on top of it, because that was what she was claiming, even though she had no basis for it.
That was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back in that job.
This is as much a company suck as it is a customer suck.
So, I don't know if you know about Partworks, but how this was set up was that people could subscribe to this particular partwork and they would get sent issues every month. The issues would have a part to a model, or various items relevant to the partwork.
Towards the end of my time there, we had one partwork which proved popular. I mean, we had over 5000 subscribers, which, in a small country like ours, was quite a lot. Before they launched this title, we changed the website, allowing subscribers to set up credit card payments and direct debits. There were a lot of issues with the website and some subscribers never got confirmation so ended up subscribing more than once.
This particular customer was one of those. Since we had at least 100-200 subscriptions a day on the website, and several over the phone, it became an impossible task keeping up with those duplicates. This is more of a company suck, but I was pretty much the only experienced contact centre person there. Before we launched this product, I was the only one doing the contact centre. I was training at least one other girl, but I was trying to handle training, emails, online subscriptions, letters to customers, subscriber enquiries for all the other partworks we had, banking, replacing broken items, post and calls on top. And that's not even half of what I had to do in my job, all for $18 an hour (then about $3 above minimum wage).
So, the customer emails saying she got two copies of a particular issue, but at that time she hadn't been charged for both. The payments were due to go out the next day. We were one of the only companies that actually sent stuff out before charging for them. Unfortunately, because she had actually received the goods, we couldn't stop the payment.
I replied to her saying she was welcome to send the issue back and we would refund her. A couple of months go by and my manager shows me a letter from the Small Claims Tribunal. In it, the woman had alleged that we 'refused' to refund her money and she wanted compensation. I was so angry. What made me more angry was that not only did the company refund her, without her sending the items back, they also gave her costs for filing, which was only about $20, and another $60 on top of it, because that was what she was claiming, even though she had no basis for it.
That was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back in that job.