Doing The Math
I had a customer call me up in mobile tech support with the problem that his data wasn’t working for 20 minutes. Pretty quickly I find out why: He had accidentally turned off his data on the phone menu, which happens a lot and usually the customer goes “oops silly me”. Except this customer starts demanding compensation for his time without service and being very rude about it.
After a couple of minutes he’s not getting that this is not something we do. So I get an idea. I tell him I’m going to go speak to my manager. I went up to my manager, explain what’s happening, and he says the customer’s being ridiculous.
I said, “Listen I have this idea for him, are you okay with this”? then explain my idea.
“Are you kidding? Let me get on call listening before you go back, I wanna hear this”.
I go back to the phone, he gave me the thumbs up that he was ready to listen, and I proceed.
“Right sir, I just had a word with my manager and I’ve managed to swing something for you, so let’s break this down. You pay us 39.99 a month for three services, calls, texts, and data, so let’s divide your bill by three. That gives us 13.33, so let’s divide further by 30 days, which gives 44 cents for your daily data. Now you had your data turned off for 20 minutes but for the purpose of this I’ll round it up to an hour, so we just need to divide that 44 cents by 24 hours. So that means you’re looking at compensation of 1.8 cents so let’s just say 2”.
I looked over at my manager during this and he was covering his mouth laughing. Customer goes; “Are you having a laugh”? “No sir, the math is there”. “…Go on then, I’ll take it”.