Things you hate about working in the mobile phone industry.

Garth

Krudler, the shop I worked in was in a very posh area and I had tonnes of these poshies with poxy prepay phones. Drove me bonkers because they were used to people doing everything for them, and expected the kind of service they'd only get with a bill (and insurance).

I started saying things like, "OH... Pay as you go, really?" in a really shocked way and then making sure I work in later that Pay as you go phones are ideal for the elderly, children and (very discreetly) people who can't pass a credit check.

That got all the poshies on contract swiftly enough. Hilarious.

Edited to say, it wasn't really dishonest. In the end, they were far happier with the level of service they received and got a much better product too. It just takes different ways to get through to different people.

theteal

Sigma

Ah-Watch

theteal wrote: »

Sigma

Sure about that??!!! haha

Keith186

My workmates!

Only kidding but it's the same as all retail jobs really, you hate the customers.

theteal

Ah-Watch wrote: »

Sure about that??!!! haha

if i wrote any more i wouldn't be able to stop myself and would, without question, get banned

drunkmonkey

theteal wrote: »

Sigma

Let's have a little game, who can spot the man from 20/20:D

Ah-Watch

drunkmonkey wrote: »

Let's have a little game, who can spot the man from 20/20:D

You'd be looking in the wrong direction!:p:p:p:p Throwing people off a scent is exciting!

chrislad

theteal wrote: »

Sigma

HA! They've gotten better though! Though, they couldn't have gotten much worse.

redmosquito

krudler wrote: »

me: (failing to stay came and taking the bait with gusto) "well I'm sorry but nobody here will offer you a replacement phone for accidental damage, if you bought a car, drove it off the lot and into a wall damaging it irreperably would they replace it if you werent insured?"

I have used that line, nearly identical word for word on a couple of occasions! Woman on other end of the line one time got actually fairly annoyed at this cheeky me that she arrived into the shop to have a go at me, I actually smiled in her face when I looked at the phone and the screen was mangled and there was, what I presume was chocolate, in around the battery.
In the end she stormed out of the store saying she was moving to another network. She actually came over to me the following weekend when I was out and told me that she had moved and tell me how rude I was!

Which is another thing I hate, you're on a night out and somebody sees you and recognises you from the store and comes up with a query :mad:

Sam Vimes

metalfest wrote: »

hmmm...did you ever think this thread is a ploy to find out who's on the inside with the operators...muhaha prepare to be spammed by ppl :P

i want to make this absolutely clear. At no point did i ever work for cpw. And i never worked for 3g even more than i never worked for cpw.

Ah-Watch

redmosquito wrote: »

Which is another thing I hate, you're on a night out and somebody sees you and recognises you from the store and comes up with a query :mad:

oh man i hear u!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Doctor DooM

ignorant customer walks into shop of doom.

Doom himself is working away with another customer.

Ignorant customer strides up to counter, complaining to work mate about his phone not working, its a disgrace, blah blah blah

doomcolleague asks to see phone.

Ignorant customer, far too indignant to actually hand the phone over, slides it along the counter.

Unfortu ately a bit to forcfully, it glides off the other side of the desk and shatters into many pieces.

Doom makes his excuses and runs out back to burst out laughing!

The customer actually tried to make out like it was my colleagues fault.

krudler

Heres one for ye, one time a guy couldnt recieve mms so i stupidly sent one to him from my own phone, got it working and about 2 weeks later got a call from a number i didnt know while on a night out, thinking it was one of my friends who ran out of credit using someone elses phone i answered and this assclown starts rambling on about his bill! never did that again....

swingking

this thread is brilliant. Had me laughing so many time

keep the stories coming. :pac::pac:

Sam Vimes

a woman came in saying her phone had turned off and i was going through the normal troubleshooting testing procedures. I plugged it in to charge and it turned on so i asked her if she'd kept it charged. She looked confused. Turns out she had the phone 6 months but only turned it on a few minutes a day and didn't know what the 'plug in the box' was for. more funny than annoying

some 60 year old guy made one of the girls cry. We never quite figured out what he wanted but we think he wanted us to sell him a polish sim card

there were of course the group of romas who thought that we wouldn't recognise them from the previous 10 weeks when they tried to sign up with dodgy id. One of them came in with a bank statement with the date written in pen ffs!

3 were giving away an electric skooter with contracts and we had a dummy one in the shop. One busy day some scumbag skooted out past all of us and we didn't see a thing. We only noticed it was gone a few days later and checked the cameras to see him hovering out past us

the woman who picked something up off a hook at the front of the shop and tried to get a refund for it with a story about buying it for a friend in hospital who'd just died

the guy who'd been paying insurance of e10 a month for 7 years on a phone he hadn't had for 6 years. I wish i had so much money i wouldn't notice something like that

the woman who said 'you shouldn't be selling things that can break'

the woman who had her phone around her neck on a lanyard. She said it had stopped working so i asked if she'd had it round her neck like that while walking in from the current extremely heavy rain storm. Her response: "is that bad for it?"

Tarakiwa

swingking wrote: »

this thread is brilliant. Had me laughing so many time

keep the stories coming. :pac::pac:

+1! Great stuff!!!

Gillo

Sam Vimes wrote: »

you feel like saying "but do you have the ability to read the instructions that are written on the piece of paper I just handed you? Or when you say technology, do you mean anything invented in the past 1000 years?

Had a similiar one years ago in "Let's Talk Phones", youngish guy mid twenties, well dressed
Dude- I want to return this for a refund
Me- No problem, so what's the issue with it
Dude- I can't work it
Me- ok, how do you mean I can't work it
Dude- I won't work for me

This goes back and forth a bit, until the penny drops it's not that it won't work it's that this guy hasn't a clue how to use it

Me- So basically you don't know how to use it? how were the instructions when you read them
Dude- Sure why would I bother reading them


I had a guy in last year, bit of a regular customer he's a director with a very large Irish electrical retailer, complaining his phone wasn't working, I checked it and turned out it was liquid damaged, pointed this out and he replies (very thoughtfully) "yeah, I suppose I shouldn't really use it in the bath". I mean off all people you'd think this guy would know.


Another day, one of my colleagues was getting his ear bent by a customer who's daughter's phone had gotten liquid damage, he was getting nowhere so he again used the car line, "It's like if you drove your car into a wall", your one shouted back "now you're saying I crashed my phone"

And yeah I've been stopped in a pub once or twice, or worst still taxi's, at this stage if I let it slip where I work, I then back track and say "Yeah, I'm with X, but work in accounts, I can sort your books out for you, do a good price and all. But haven't a clue about the phones". Usually works.

The funniest I can remember was another girl in the store serving this lady, basically she thought her phone wasn't sending text messages but when we tried in store, it was grand. The girl serving her tried different things and asked a lot of questions, it turned out the lady had had a argument with her boyfriend and now he wasn't replying to her messages, so she assumed the phone was broke. In the end we had to send a message to the boyfriend, basically saying, sorry, I love you blah blah. Your one then ask's and will he write back this time? What can you say to a customer at that stage.

In fairness though, there are some really sound customers also and it's like any other industry out there you get a few nut jobs.

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

drunkmonkey

Solitaryman666 wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

I'm just back from lunch, my regular drunken retard customer was in while I was gone, he left a message with one of the girls that he can't call Sky from his phone cause he's got insufficent credit, he's calling back in a while for me to fix it.....he wouldn't deal with the girl in the store.....can't wait for him to arrive:o
I'm really surprised and how ofter people surprise me:)

cgarvey

/me looks forward to the follow up thread on the things you hate about those working in the mobile phone industry!

Walkman

Ladies and gents, this is by far the best thread i have read here in a very long time. Very funny stories, im laughing out loud reading some of them. Keep them coming.:D

krudler

Me: "hello mobile phone company i work for, how can i help you"

customer "what day is it today?"

me:"friday...?"

customer "ok thanks"

me "......anything else i can help you with?"

Customer "nope, cheers"

now this is funny but even funnier is the fact that it was insanely busy at the time and this guy queued for over 20 minutes to get through to me!

failsafe

From back in my call centre days, the most regular one I got that let you know it was going to be "one of those calls":

customer : "I can't make calls/some other handset problem"

me : "ok, what make of phone is it?"

customer: "it's a voda-fone"

me "oy"

The other favourite:

customer " I can't make any calls, the phone is completely broken"

me "[troubleshoot a few things]... could you try turn your phone off and back on again to see if it can make calls now"

.........beeeeeeeep..... [line goes dead as customer was calling me from the 'broken' phone]

Used to happen (and I'm sure it still does) a crazy amount of times.

failsafe

Edit: Damn, duplicate post. Might as well add another one so!

Like krudler I had a fair few customers thinking that it was the number for the talking clock. Had 2 customers convinced I was an automated machine. One thing I certainly don't miss is that feeling of despair when you can tell it's going to be a long and painful call, like one customer who couldn't install his modem, so when I said "can you click on the start button" and he asked "where is that?" I knew it was going to be a long one!

120_Minutes

Customer: "hi, i'd like to sign up for a billphone/ get an upgrade for my bill phone"

Me: very good sir, i'll need a proof of i.d. and a proof of adress

customer: why? sure dont you have them from when i got my phone the last time? last year, in a different shop, AND POSSIBLY IN A DIFFERENT PART OF THE COUNTRY!!!!

or, if he's local:

"ah sure, why do you need that, sure you know me"

maybe i do, but vodafone DONT and i wish i DIDNT.


or a better one.

"what do i need to get a bill phone"

..current i.d. and adress proof no older than 3 months.

"ok i'll come back"

...einstein comes back with out of date passport or last years bank statement expecting it to be "grand"


or the guy that traded in a 6233 to get 40 off a 49 euro 2600....i told him:

"mate, you're trading in a better phone, keep it!"

"no, its ok"

"you sure?"

"yeah"

24 hours later, he's back....."i want my old phone back"

TOUGH **** PAL!!!!

Gillo

Ha, reminds me of the time some guy lost the plot because I wouldn't take a post card his mate sent him the previous summer as proof of address.

Some of the dodgy id's you get are hilarious also, pain in the a$$ though when you have genuine customers waiting to be served.

I remember serving a stuck up cow a whole ago, middle aged (well the higher end of the scale) yummy mummy sort she was using her upgrade to get her daughter a speakeasy upgrade, so I brought and asked her for her number and date of birth, she refused to give the date of birth but demanded I process the upgrade, in the end I had to turn the monitor around to show her the screen and what happens when you don't put in the DOB (nothing as it won't go any further), if the end she turned to her daughter and told her to stand at the door (it's a larger shop) while she gave her DOB. Chirst if she'd just given it in the first place the daughter wouldn't have noticed she was lying about her age.

Teferi

cgarvey wrote: »

/me looks forward to the follow up thread on the things you hate about those working in the mobile phone industry!

+1.

Some of the lads and lasses that serve you in these shops are just as bad as the complaints that some are giving about the customers

Gillo

Teferi wrote: »

+1.

Some of the lads and lasses that serve you in these shops are just as bad as the complaints that some are giving about the customers

Very true, but the majority do genuinely true to help customers, it can be hard at times though when you have people coming in who don't want to be helped, it's even harder when you spend hour's helping people like these and see sales walking out the door. While it's part of the service spending thirty minutes helping some old dear put numbers in a phone book, or tune in RTE1 on someone's radio (they also never know the frequency) and debating why guarantee's don't cover dropping your phone down the toilet, none of that goes against target's.

TBH, you could change the title of this thread to any other industry and get some class stories, I'm sure the hospitality industry would produce some great tales.

godskitchen

Its not just the mobile retail side of things, its all electrical retail.....

i am sure you all know the one about the women who got herself a laptop, returned it to the store because the cup holder snapped off......turns out to be the optical drive.....

tony1kenobi

coreilly1 wrote: »

Why should your customer not be offered the service of their contacts being copied over,no matter what the price of their phone is?

Fair point that. Next time I buy a house I'll get the auctioneer to move all my **** instead of renting a van.