Don’t Bank On Me Finding A Solution

We owned a small but popular fine-dining restaurant. Our phone number had the same first four digits as the local branch of a big bank. Apparently, their transfer system was to dial a three-digit extension number from an in-house phone only. But employees wanting the loan department would dial the first four shared digits and the three-digit extension number, which, of course, was our phone number.

Me: “Thank you for calling [Restaurant]. How may I help you?”

Bank Employee #1: “Loan department, please.”

Me: “This is [Restaurant]. You need to check your phone procedures.”

After two or three calls a day, I figured out what was happening and calmly relayed what they were doing wrong, but the calls kept coming. I called customer assistance at the bank and crawled up the chain of command trying to find a solution.

The employee I spoke to clearly didn’t care about my problem.

Bank Employee #2: “You’ll have to change your phone number, I guess.”

Me: “No. This is your problem to fix. The next time I get a call, I will politely ask your employee to hold, and it might be a few minutes until someone is available. I have four lines, so you may have lots of people wasting their time and your money on hold because you’re too lazy to send out a memo.”

The calls miraculously stopped.