At what point are you allowed to hang up on a caller?

Hey,
To let you understand about this I need to share this example with you.Then you decide yourself.

Not too long ago I was actually hung up on by a company. I made a comment about an email the company sent me being awfully vague (I believe I said “You should probably work on your pre-defined responses.”) and the representative told me to call back when I had calmed down and hung up. I’ve had never been hung up on by a customer service representative before that and there were some other people in the room that heard what I was saying and they agreed I wasn’t rude.

The reason that particular representative hung up on me is probably because she was A) overly sensitive, B) having a bad day, C) not well trained/informed as to when a customer should be hung up on, or most likely, a combination of all three.

Your rules as to when a customer should be hung up on should be crystal clear. There shouldn’t be one bit of uncertainty as to when to hang up on a customer. An example operating procedure would be:

If a customer is cursing:

* Tell the customer that cursing/using profanity will not help solve their problem and that they should calm down.
* If the customer continues to curse, say if they curse again, you will have to hang up on them and they can call back once they’ve calmed down.
* If the customer continues to curse, say “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have call back once you’ve calmed down.” and hang up immediately.
* Describe the situation in the call log and make a note of it in the customer’s account.

That’s a very effective operating procedure. It’s not a script, but general guidelines as to what the representative should do. That way when the customer calls back an hour later, the next representative can be prepared for what may happen (a rude and angry customer) and if the customer service representative isn’t good with those situations, transfer the call to someone else.

The reasons to hang up on a customer vary from company to company, but here are some other possible reasons:

* He/she is making constantly personal insults against the representative (e. g. you’re a worthless idiot)
* He/she is constantly yelling or screaming.
* He/she is being consistently arrogant and completely refuses to listen to logic (e. g. keeps insisting that he/she is right and that the representative is wrong, regardless of the information being presented)
* Any physical threats and other extreme things of that nature.

As a front-line employee, what reasons are there when you should hang up on customers. You should be able to get a fairly good list fairly quickly. Once you have the situations, develop an operating procedure for each one. For most instances, the customer should get at least one warning prior to being hung up on. A lot of times, companies will transfer angry customers to a supervisor or manager who will deal with the issue. It really depends on the company and the company’s culture.

However, Please don't hang up on a customer just because you will be late by 10-20 minutes.

Regards
Sushil Singh

Thanks Jason,

And yes I agree with you on the same, even abusive calls could be transferred to a mature or good caller and could be resolved. We follow the same culture.

Regards
Sushil Singh

This is a brilliant question! As previously mentioned, your call centre should have clear guidelines on when it acceptable to end a call and the script to use to firstly warn the customer and then before actually pressing the release button.

Abusive callers are one thing, and generally it is accepted that you may release the call after sufficient warnings.

As for the customer who wont hang up for the sake of been awkward and arguementative, silence is a wonderful tool! When you can get a word in (which will be sooner than you think if the other person hears nothing),calmly explain that your conversation has reached its conclusion and you can't add anything more. The silence (or active listening, depending on how you look on it!) will make the caller uncomfortable and they will soon realise the game is up, if a customer wants to escalate to a team leader you just need to calmly explain that the TL will say exactly the same as you have already said, and it will avoid the escalation most of the time.

The situation you describe is often one that only gets easier with experience...sometimes all the training in the world can't prepare you for Mr or Mrs Obnoxious!

@James C

While you make an excellent point in your post and quite often what you have said is correct, but this is a forum for call centres as a general, while I can see most members are of a managerial capacity, this doesn't mean we can't answer a question or query which has almost always been a problem of anyone who has been a call centre advisor.

Whilst your command of big, long words is clearly better than mine, and maybe that of most members on here, it does not give you the right to latch onto a submission that is written in the security of these forums, god forbid, I would think the last thing intrepid explorer would do is actually call someone an idiot on the phone.

If you have ever worked as a call centre operative I believe you would connect with intrepid explorers comment, and quite honestly, 'in my opinion, a bigger problem, and sadly endemic in the UK customer service sector, are pompous, arguementative, ignorant people who treat call centre operatives with contempt and rude behaviour.

I certainly expect my advisors to take every customer on their merit and 99.9% there is no problem, the scenario this thread is about I should hope is a rare occurance, but one an advisor quite rightly asked for help with...

I fully accept that this forum should offer a means for Call Centre Operatives to discuss their frustrations.

However does that mean that a balanced debate, giving both perspectives, is out the question?

Please accept my humblest of apologies for daring to offer a perspective that recognises, and acknowledges, that the Customer Service Sector in the UK is widely vilified for how it treats customers.

I started "front line" as it were, and progressed. No one starts out as a Manager.

And frankly I am tired of having to go to Team Leaders to receive a satisfactory response to a query when I have my "customer" hat on. However, I acknowledge much of the frustrations are borne form a distinct lack of autonomy within larger organisations, and I believe this is a challenge that we need to overcome if we are to start properly dealing with customers, without escalation being the only means of achieving customer satisfaction.

Finally - for the record - many customers can be obnoxious, intolerant, belligerent (yes that word again - sorry, but any Apprentice fan will have heard this word every week for ages....) unpleasant, impatient, etc etc. But a great % of them would be placated by the introduction of better practises in handling "spikey" issues.

You may not actually call a customer an "idiot", but it's clearly a formed opinion - so how can you remain calm, rational, helpful, constructive, and even conciliatory (if appropriate) and if you have already formed an (hopefully unspoken) viewpoint that the customer is an idiot?

In summary - don't be afraid to hear the other side of a debate my friend - it's good to listen, as well as talk.

Firstly a big thanks to the people on this forum for taking part in my thread. And to JoR for posting it on my behalf (please do not refer to my real name).

Wow, I am surprised at the huge jump of responses to this thread, though looking at the responses, I have thought to see how can we produce a way in which a telephone operator can end a call ASAP with an angry and dissatisfied customer who expected THE WORLD for the price of a vehicle insurance policy!

let me clarify a couple of things, firstly my use of the term "idiot" for James C - it was used in this fashion:-

I am a telephone operator who is employed not to speak to one customer for hours on end but employed to speak to 100+ customers a day, and this means when someone says they are happy to "stay on the line" to get a satisfactory response (in their favour) from someone other than the experienced telephone operator, and "hold" for, I don't know, one hour or two of time, to be served by a team leader who will repeat EXACTLY what I have stated as per clients terms and conditions (which 99% of people cannot be bothered to read), well, that is not going to let me hit MY target of 100 clients a day and most certainly wont be beneficial to the clients who are waiting to be served by my colleagues who are now busier than usual.

Please to all of you bare this in mind when you have a problem, the person at the end of the line may supposed to be doing 3 minute phone calls, not 30! Even on the faeces pay we are on, we still take some pride in the number of calls we can do in a day, its literally the ONLY job satisfaction a lowly paid call centre worker can get... Now, i am not saying we don't want to solve problems, if it takes half an hour to resolve a genuine problem, fair enough, if its half an hour of going around in circles, that's another story.

Idiots also include people who think they have to be "told" their insurance will be cancelled because they stopped paying their insurance when they have moved house and swop phone numbers so we could not tell them, without telling us. Idiots who presume they are covered for X,Y and Z in addition to the actual agreement they made, apparently, just because it would be 'convenient' to them...

Also at James C, going around in circles is NOT the result of improperly trained staff, I am talking about customers who think the phone conversation will magically go their way if they just keep on reiterating what they have said. Phenomenal!

Dave, brilliant to see another person here who actually cares for the point of view of front-line staff. All this people on TV who tell the audience to bark as loud as they can at the businesses they are dealing with, simply don't understand the people they are barking at are NOT in any way shape or form the business, they are shouting at staff who get faeces money for very long hours under very crappy circumstances.

@Dave, no, I certainly would not call someone an idiot on the phone, even if they are. I carefully explain things in a matter of fact way and they just don't like what they are hearing when it is not in their favour.

@ Kowlaski who wrote
"The idiot callers and the idiot call centre agents are one and the same. They go to work people call them, they get angry with the people because they can't understand what seems obvious to the call centre worker now that they have done it repeatedly for 5 years, then they go home, their telly doesn't work, they call a call centre and the roles are reversed ..."

NOPE! I CAN be bothered to read my terms and conditions of my insurance policies...

@Kowalski

"I think this notion that abuse to the employee should have to be constant before they are allowed to remove themselves from the situation is shameful. The employee has a right to not be abused. I've worked in many industries and the only situation where an abusive customer would remain a customer is if the abuse had been delivered over a telephone into a call centre."

Yes this is shameful. And the sad thing is customers do get to remain customers, yet if I abused other staff members the way I get abused everyday, I wouldn't last long as an employee there...

"When I worked on the phone I would terminate calls at the first point of abuse and I now, as a business manager, encourage that ethos."

I don't suppose you are recruiting? I'm a business graduate LOL...

"If you think this way and try to adapt your communication with this in mind, you will, over time, develop the necessary communication skills to bring all of those calls to a satisfactory and timely solution for all parties."

Not when you are talking to a persistent idiot.

@james C who wrote "And frankly I am tired of having to go to Team Leaders to receive a satisfactory response to a query when I have my "customer" hat on. However, I acknowledge much of the frustrations are borne form a distinct lack of autonomy within larger organisations, and I believe this is a challenge that we need to overcome if we are to start properly dealing with customers, without escalation being the only means of achieving customer satisfaction."

Yes, I once had a job when I had some authority to make something high priority if it were already on low and this had to be used appropriately, I also had a shop job where I could issue a £10 customer care voucher to help situations, this was great. In this job I am in, I NEED internet access t help do things quickly like find a dealers website to ascertain their email address or whatever, yet it is restricted to just the team leader, ridiculous.

"You may not actually call a customer an "idiot", but it's clearly a formed opinion - so how can you remain calm, rational, helpful, constructive, and even conciliatory (if appropriate) and if you have already formed an (hopefully unspoken) viewpoint that the customer is an idiot? "

Easily done my friend! You just stick to the facts! How would you like it, if I called you and wasted half an hour of your time???

Cheers everyone,

@Kowalski,

I do not presume myself to be an advance communicator, although I don't see how this is remotely relevant as advance communication to an audience of those that this post is about, will clearly quite logically go into one ear and out of the other...

Presuming you are English speaking, as I am, I would expect you to also use a capital letter at the start of a name. It is you who is not communicating properly.

This is also an internet forum, so as a user of the internet since about 1995, I promise you, it is very much the custom to produce response posts with "@" at the start of a response, as is currently used in one of the worlds most popular used websites, youtube.com - and no, the missing of www. at the start of that was not a mistake.

"Do you not see that by referring the problem outside of yourself you are creating conditions for a solution which you have no control over? Meaning you will have this problem forever."

I fully understand this philosophy, however, you are not appreciating my original enquiry fully. I am talking about customers who DO NOT LISTEN and or DO NOT ACCEPT WHAT THEY ARE BEING TOLD. For example, there are 365 days in a year, if someone takes out insurance and they use it for 36.5 days before cancelling it, they may presume within their own logic, they should be refunded 90%, however, the scheme of refund may not produce a refund of exactly 90%, it may be 80% or 70% or even less. When you tell SOME customers this, they bombard you with their logic of how if they have only used 10% of the service they should get 90% of refund, regardless of the agenda of the business they are dealing with, that being, to make money and effectively fine people for early exit out of the contract.

"That you don't believe it is possible to talk these belligerent customers around is only because it is outside of your experience or belief. I.e you can not do it and you have not seen someone else who can do it, or you have seen someone else who can do it but you think that person is intrinsically different to you such that you couldn't do what they can do."

Nope, I am talking about people who will not take "no" for an answer.

Regards,

@kowalski

"we'd explain their insurance to them, for free, no problem."

"If I were their customer, I would now demand to speak to their manager too."
Just to be told the EXACT same thing? Where will that get you specifically?

Explaining insurance isn't the problem, their lack of ability to accept what is being said because it isn't convenient for them or they don't like what hey are hearing is the problem.

"I don't recruit rude idiots, they get stuck on calls with customers they've wound up through idiocy and rudeness. "

Where specifically have I stated any rude behaviour towards a client?? I am never rude on the phone! You have the nerve to imply I am a bad communicator and yet you don't understand my post at all.

It is kind of amusing what is happening on this list with kowalski is the kind of behaviour front line staff want to avoid while on the phone. Kowalski as an employer, possibly doesn't have a clue what his front line staff go through.