Prepayment woes.

Like I said, Fridays are the carnival of the weird. This customer one one of the entitled people who thinks the world should bow down to them.

"Good morning and welcome to PowerCorp, drone speaking, can i take your account number."

"Uh, sure, it's 12345678"

"Thank you. Right, I'm showing an outstanding balance of £234.56, how can I help?"

"Um, yeah, I wanted to know where it came from because i have a prepay meter."

"OK, i see you've left supply with us and moved to another company right?"

"yeah"

"OK, prepay meters are programmed with the cost of a unit of electricity, if the prices change the meter isn't updated, costs have risen so they've calculated how much you've under-paid and have now charged you for that."

" You can't do that! It's illegal!"

This is something we get a lot, I'll never understand why people think that something which is clearly stated in their contract which is issued by one of the largest power companies in the UK can be illegal.

"I'm afraid it isn't sir."

"Well I'm not paying it! I don't owe that!"

"I'm afraid you do sir."

"But how did i get a debt when I'm on a prepay meter?"

Huh? I honestly thought he'd grasped it the first time round.

"Well sir, prepay meters aren't updated automatically so wh...."

"That's not my fault! I'm not paying!"

"But sir..."

"I'm not paying what i don't owe!"

"But sir, if you'll let me explain..."

"You're not explaining anything all you're doing is lying! I'll sue you all!" BANG....

Well I hope he broke his phone hanging up like that...he certainly broke my hearing for a few seconds.

Account number?....no, that's your postcode.

It would seem that Fridays are the carnival of the weird around here.

"Good afternoon and welcome to PowerCorp can i take your account number please."

"Yeah, i got this letter saying i owe you some money?"

"I see, well if i can take your account number we'll get it checked out"

"But i don't think I owe anything."

"OK, that's fine, if I can take your account number we'll find out."

"Oh, sorry. LTRDC09..."

"No sir, your electricity or gas account number, it's eight digits long, probably begins with 027."

"Oh that! OK, it's 589746891547"

"No sir, the eight digit number"

"Oh, 220408"

"No sir, that's the date the letter was printed."

"Well you are no help at all! Obviously my account number isn't on here or I'd have found it by now."

Sigh "OK sir, can i take your postcode, we'll do a search for your house instead."

"Oh wait, 'Electricity account number' is that what you wanted before?"

Groan "Yes sir."

"Well you should have said so."

Footballers and dopeheads.

Two strange ones today.

I spent a while listneing in again, didn't take any calls as we were strapped for time. However we had a minor server outage and ended up getting calls for our higher value debt department as well as our own. No difference in procedures, splitting them just makes it easier to gather statistics.

Let's begin.

"Good afternoon, can i take an account number please."

"Yup, it's 12345678"

"Excellent, and now can I take your name."

"Sure, it's Mr Jones calling on behalf of XXX Football Club"

"That's fine, how can I help?"

Hang on....back up there, which club was he calling from? I stare at the screen and sure enough, he's caling on the behalf of a 2nd division football club....a multi million pound team! Wow...

The call ends and we wait for another one to come in when I hear another trainee next to me exclaim. "Oh my god!"

I look over to ask what's up and see the debt on their account, over £9000, used in only 3 months.

"How in the world did they get that much?"

The advisr taking the call grinned and called up a note on the account.

"Customer has been arrested after meter reader called and found a marijuana farm in the property, customer had over 50 600 watt lamps, fans and timers running. Please contact letting agency XXX for further issues."

We laughed ourselves silly for a few minutes.

"What a dope, surely he'd realise we'd think something was wrong..."

My colleagues are laughing again.

"What?"

"What a dope?" one grins.

"Up yours."

My first call. Aww.

Two days ago I took my first call in the new department.

I was rather nervous, for many reasons, you never really know what you're going to get, some customers are philosophical about it, some are only phoning to shout.

I squared my shoulders and switched my console over to "available".

The phone rang and I hit the button to pick it up, an automated voice told me which section of our collections cycle this customer was calling from, in this case, she'd received a reminder, one of the earliest stages.

"Good afternoon, welcome to Company, can i take your account number please?"

We go through the preliminaries.

"That's great, I'm showing an outstanding balance of £xxx on your account, how can I help you today?"

"Well I'm not very happy, I received a Very nasty letter from your company today telling me to pay my bill. I found it extremely offensive! If your company had bothered to come and read my meter then this would never have happened!"

Yeah and if you'd read the bit on your bill where it says in bold typeface that your account was estimated and to please call in with a reading then it would never have happened either.

"Very well, I can see that there is a payment pending on your account, it will take a few more days to clear though, so should you receive any more communications from us regarding the debt you can ignore it."

"I should bloody well hope so! And you need to change that letter, it was disgusting! In fact I'm thoroughly disgusted with your service and I'm moving to Company X!"

"Very we*click*ll....?"

She hung up on me.

I switch myself off available and glance over at the experienced advisor who is shadowing me and he grins. "Tough break, but you did well."

I grin.

Back into the breech.

Well Ladies and Gentlemen, my training is nearly over and i'm about to hit our debt collection floor, and already i have tales of wackyness to regale you with.

It's really not been too bad, despite a problem with a manager which i won't go into, you're not here to listen to my woes, you want the good stuff.

So, onwards, let's see what we've got...

Happy Chinese New Year!

A friend of mine who read this blog has just seen my latest post and commented: "Happy new year in February? You ought to have gone for Chinese New Year!"

So...

Happy Chinese New Year!!!! Yay!

UPDATE: I've spoken to my friend again and they informed me that they actually don't know when Chinese New Year is, after checking we have determined that it is in fact today!

Talk about serendipity!

Happy new year.

So, happy new year! It's a little late, but better late than never, or something like that.

Anyway, no updates recently because nothing of note has happened, they took us back off phones because it was "Inefficient" so i have no fun customer stories, however in a month i move from my current area off to Debt collection, so we'll see what happens then. I'm bound to get a few fun customers in there.

In the meantime, we ran a cross an account today that was returning reads of 0 all the time. Someone had booked for an agent to go check the meter and return a report to us.

The report came back saying "Property has been demolished."

That's a pretty good reason for not using the gas...

We tried to get it fixed by calling Customer support to get the account shut down, they put us through to property movements, who put us through to property support. Who told us to call back when they were open and cut us off. This took 36 minutes.

So, anyone who gets stuck in a queue for a customer service agent...don't despair. It happens to us too.