Scream If You Don’t Want To Go Faster

(I work at a call center that uses an online ticket system for open issues and assigns the tickets a priority level. Our “Tier 2” team then works the tickets based on the level of urgency: the high priority tickets are dealt with within a day, medium within two or three, and low priority about a week. Our company is a subsidiary of a well-known, multi-billion dollar corporation, and as such, they very much have the “customer is always right” attitude. To retain our sanity with horrible customers, we have developed a subtle way to “stick it” to them when they’re being obnoxiously rude: knocking their priority level down. The customer still ends up with a resolution, but not nearly as expeditiously as they would have if they had behaved civilly. One customer finally catches on after months of slow resolutions after being constantly verbally abusive.)

Caller: “I don’t understand why this s*** takes so long. I yell to light a fire under your a**es and it just takes longer than ever! Meanwhile, my friend, [Other Regular Caller], says when he calls his tickets seem to be processed right away! This is bulls***!”

Me: “Oh, you’re friends with [Regular]?! He’s such a sweetheart. He just called in this morning. He talked about how he was traveling in a few days to spend some time with his mom and he wanted to see if we could push his ticket through before he left. We really aren’t supposed to, but it’s so hard to say no to someone so nice!”

Caller: “SEE?! How come he gets priority and you lazy f*****s all drag my s*** out?”

(Suddenly, the line goes quiet.)

Caller: *clearly coming to an epiphany* “Ah. I think I get it. I’m an a**hole. [Regular] is nice. You guys do nice things for nice people. Well, ain’t that some s***! I’ve been going about this the wrong way!”

(He did a quick 180 and started being one of our nicest callers, even though we knew it was just to get “expedited service” — which wasn’t really expedited; it was just not knocked down — but we didn’t even mind. We were just happy to have one less screamer!)