Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

This is from KarenNicole:

I got a call from a customer wanting to order some videos from a very famous national television channel.

The videos he was ordering all had something to do with Jesus.

As we were ordering he seemed to know exactly what he wanted. Meaning, I didn't have to do much searching by key words. He had the exact video names so the call was going smoothly.

Then after ordering more than $100 worth of videos about Jesus, he tells me that he called to order these same ones a few minutes before getting me and the last rep promised him a 15% discount.

I asked him what the discount was for since there was no promos running at the time. He told me it wasn't a promo, the rep just liked him and told him he could get 15% off of his total order.

I explained to him that it is impossible for agents to give out discounts because we do not have the authority and I can not just give him a discount just because he is nice. He then got angry and demanded to speak to my supervisor to get the discount the last agent promised him.

It didn't dawn on me to ask him why he was unable to place that order with that agent then. Why did he need to call back and order with me?

I placed customer on hold and then called my supervisor. I explained to him the whole story and told him that the customer wanted to speak to him. Instead of taking the call from me the supervisor told me to "treat the customer like family and give him anything he wants". I was shocked! I know good customer service, but that is ridiculous! I kept trying to explain that I know this customer is lying to me. No one promised him a discount. We shouldn't give him one just because. My super wouldn't hear of it. He kept repeating "treat him like you would your family, give him what he wants". So the super gave me the 15% discount code and I went back to the customer and had to bite my tongue as I told him I would give him the discount.

Then after I applied the discount and before I was able to ask him for his credit card number he then proceeded to ask me if the videos he was ordering were documentaries of Jesus or movies. I then had to go back and look up every single video and read the descriptions on each of them. They were ALL documentaries. The customer then got upset because he thought for sure they would be movies with actors and actresses. He asked if we had ANY items based on Jesus that were movies and not documentaries. I then spent another 10 minutes looking through our inventory for movies of Jesus. We had none.

Customer started thinking outloud and saying that he doesn't really want to spend this much money for documentaries. I was thinking, this guy is crazy! He came in the call with the titles of every video, that led me to believe he knew that these were all documentaries.

I was thisclose to losing the sale when I told him that documentaries can be very entertaining and informative and what better way to learn about Jesus and his life than to watch documentaries filled with information and "re-enactments".

After spending close to 5 minutes, I finally convinced him to continue with the order from hell. He gave me his credit card number and right before I submitted his order he decided he wanted to change the shipping to something faster than our regular method. So I had to go back and update his shipping which in turn raised the total cost of the order. At that point I thought I was going to lose it if this guy asked for anything else.

I rushed him back through the credit card screen before he could ask me for something else and I was able to submit his order without any more issues.

The call was 45 minutes long for a process that should have only taken 5-10 min at the most.