What is Your Customer Service Horror Story?

Okay I've got a horror story from the other side.. I'm the tech support on the phone trying to help some guy who is having trouble sending email.

To give a little side info, our handle time is supposed to be 12 minutes.. that is we have 12 minutes to solve the problem and get the customer off the phone.

so in this case the customer is using Windows 98 and Outlook Express (this was about 9 years ago). He is trying to send emails, but OE is returning the error "The message could not be sent because the server rejected the sender's e-mail address." No I did not remember the specific error, I had to look it up. It was 9 years ago, okay? And I'm no longer in tech support. Anyway, it's an easy one to solve, the customer obviously typed his email incorrectly in his account settings. So I take the customer to tools -> accounts -> etc. He reads the correct email address to me. I get him to spell it out to me.. He spells it correctly. I get him to retype it and say each character aloud as he types. Okay, send the test message... same error.

Repeat... again... again.. What the hell is going on here?At least 25 minutes have gone by and I ask the customer to hold. I mute the mic and take off my head set. The dude next to me can see that I'm getting very frustrated and puts his customer on hold. "what's going on?" he asks.. I tell him the error that I've been unable to solve.

"Well he just typed in his email address wrong"

"I KNOW that!" I retort. wait a minute...wait a minute.. hold on... I say this aloud, and the dude next to me goes back to his customer.

I go back to my customer as well. "Sir.. could you read that address to me again, please?" He does. "Now sir," I begin calmly "When you are reading me the 'at' symbol, is it an @ symbol or the number 2?" The dude next to me is staring wide-eyed.

"It's the number 2" He says. I mute the mic and let out a looong sigh. 'Thank GOD' I'm saying to myself. "okay.. I want you to delete the number 2 and everything after it... now with your left hand hold the shift key, you'll find it on the lower left-hand side of your keyboard..." The dude next to me has put his customer on hold again and is doing his best, unsuccessfully, to stifle his laughter. "hold the shift key...man you opened up a whole new world for that guy!" and he laughed and laughed..

The call finished and I broke for lunch, which by that time was very, very late.

The call lasted close to 50 minutes.

And that's my customer service horror story.

Related Question > Prison Labor Used : Have you yelled at a Customer Support Rep?

Prison labor on the rise in US | I remember yelling at a Customer Support Rep in my younger days. The company shall go nameless, but they use Prison Labor. That means I yelled at a criminal!?!

Anything related to Sprint customer service would be a horror story. In my experience anyways, my list of "Worst customer experiences" ... basically everything is Sprint related.

Needless to say, my most fluffy daydreams of customer service were Apple related :)

T-Mobile. Trying to get a credit applied from an old (disconnected) account to a new account must take an act of congress. Their billing dept. continues to kick out bills on the old account. I have since kicked T-Mobile to the curb.

I suspect you have run into a cell of bad support. I've had some very good experiences with Toshiba support in the past. Escalate the issue and keep on doing so until you talk to someone who will address your problems. OTH, I recently had a small (very small) squabble with Asus support. My son's gaming notebook had a broken "D" keycap. Big stinking deal. Asus would ONLY address the issue by having him ship the thing in for a complete keyboard replacement. Because ONE of the clips on the keycap was broken. sheesh One to two weeks (ship it in, get it in the queue for a five minute repair, ship it back--probably a couple of weeks actual downtime.) I bought a replacement keycap elsewhere, popped it on and bob's your uncle.

If it were indeed the power connector, that's probably a $20 part if bought third party. A five (or ten, if your soldering skills were lacking) minute repair job. If it came to making the repair yourself, it's certainly doable.

But really, escalate the thing until you're talking to someone who can address the issue directly.

I had Time Warner Road Runner until about a month ago. My parents switched everything to Verizon about a month ago because the TV picture kept cutting out. It never affected our Internet connection though.

We have been having problems with our Internet since we switched to Verizon.

When they did the initial hookup they said that they just need to change some configuration in the office and our Internet should work by the end of the day. It took them 9 days with several daily calls for them to finally send out a tech. Every day they said someone would be there by 8pm but they never showed up. On day 8 we talked to the technician scheduling manager for southern CA and he made sure that someone got there and fixed the problem first thing the next day.

When the tech arrived he said it was the same problem that the tech that did the hookup said it was. But he personally went into the sub office and made the necessary changes.

7 days later we started periodically loosing DSL signal several times a day for about 1 minute at a time. We are still waiting for it to get fixed. If they don't do it soon were going to switch service providers again.