Back in the day I was working for a large American corporation as a Customer Experience agent. I don’t know how many of you worked in a Call Center before, but let me tell you… boy you hear some stories in places like this. And this one stuck with me.
A good story always starts with „It was a warm summer day, when suddenly…” but in my situation it was something more like „It was a regular shift untill…”. Well, until I got a call from a a user saying that they need help immediately. Like a good agent that I was a followed protocol and authenticated the user ASAP so I can proceed to solve the issue at hand.
That specific user did not want help for themselves exactly. And this is where is gets tricky. The customer wanted to let us know that someone from her family is on a trip with a friend and they got drugged, mugged and there is no way of contacting the person who made the reservation. The customer wanted me to divulge the phone number of landlord to make sure that both guests are safe.
Needless to say I was in a bit of a pickle. The user actually told me the reservation code, of course I managed to see the reservation in the system, but the user was not a POC (point of contact) on that profile. So how I can help without breaking GDPR law and the company’s policy? Well there was no way.
I was not able to tell the user that I could see the profile of the main guest. And because I wanted to do some digging, I scrolled down and saw an email sent by the landlord where he opened a case asking for money from the guest. And why was he asking for money? Oh well, because while browsing through Tinder, the two guests found two distractions, they came to the listing, robbed them and drugged them. In the process, they broke something valuable in the listing and the landlord was not going to let that slide and wanted to get the money back. All this information was written by the owner of the apartment in an email.
The customer was crying, screaming and demanding at all cost to send them the phone number or else she will call the police and sue. In my mind I was like „Sue for what? Me respecting the rules?”. I remember asking the user to give me a minute while I speak with someone higher-up.
That higher-up department told me „This is a weird case”. When I read that I knew they were not actually gonna help because the user as I mentioned was not a Point of Contact.
The call got dropped by the user and the entire time of course I was apologizing and apologizing again for not being able to do more. That would have meant me risking by job and a potential lawsuit for the company.
I felt really bad and actually uncomfortable knowing the truth and not being able to tell the customer.
This case was one for the books for me.
I wonder, for those of you who worked in a Call Center, can you guys tell me some interesting stories? Comment down bellow.