It All Comes Down To The Wire

When customers order large dollar amounts from our store or website, they tend to wire the money directly to us. Wiring the money can take anywhere from one to five business days before it shows up in our system.

A customer calls us because she has a pending order of $45,000. She keeps asking us to release her order. After explaining that we can do nothing until the money arrives, she claims that she spoke to someone in sales who told her the order could be released on credit terms. This means she has thirty days to pay. This is something we only offer our corporate, education, or government customers.

My coworker, who believes the best in everyone, tries to track down every employee this customer could have spoken to about releasing her order. She spends maybe half an hour trying to figure out who told the customer her stuff would be released and overnighted. After finally giving up and asking another coworker to look into it, she tells me what’s been happening.

I am much more cynical and ask my coworker if she ever considered that the customer probably lied to her about speaking to anyone else. It has never even crossed my coworker’s mind!

Considering how no one in our company would tell her something that goes against every policy, especially on such a large dollar order, my coworker eventually begrudgingly admits that it is possible that the customer probably was hoping that if she claimed someone in another department told her we could ship her stuff, we would bend policy for her. 

When I reach out to the customer the next day to get the bank receipt for her wire transfer, she says she sent the wire two hours before her first phone call! There’s no way it would have shown up in our system in that time!