In my early twenties, I worked in a cell phone store in a strip mall. The store was an authorized dealer for a national, growing cellular provider. As an authorized dealer, my store could not do all the same things as a “corporate” store of the cellular provider, despite most of our branding looking identical.
As employees of the authorized dealer, we were sales agents, and our main focus was on selling phones, service, and accessories. Anything beyond that — warranty claims or exchanges, in-depth troubleshooting, most account maintenance, etc. — had to be handled at a corporate store. This often resulted in confused and/or frustrated customers.
One day, an elderly woman came in with an old flip phone that was no longer working properly. She needed it fixed or replaced. Upon looking up the woman’s account information, we discovered that she had obtained this phone several years ago, and as such, it was out of warranty. However, she wasn’t eligible for an upgrade, either; this was back in the days of two-year contracts, and she always gave her upgrades to the other family members on her account.
Unfortunately, this meant that she didn’t have many options apart from adding a new line of service to her account (which would significantly impact her monthly bill) or purchasing a phone “outright” at full retail price. She couldn’t afford (and didn’t want) anything fancy, and although smartphones weren’t around yet, most of the phones we carried were “feature phones” with things like QWERTY keyboards or fancy cameras. We only had a couple of “basic” models, and even then, the full retail price for those was at least $200.
I’ve always been service-oriented more than anything else, and the rest of the employees in my store — and even many of those from other stores in the region — knew me to be a very honest person who hated taking advantage of anyone just to make a sale. I really wanted to do everything I could to help this woman, so I grabbed a cheap pre-paid flip phone out of our stock room and explained to the customer that although it was marked for pre-paid service, we had a workaround that would allow us to activate it on her post-paid plan.
Technically, this wasn’t allowed under the authorized dealer contract we had with the cellular carrier, but it was a common tactic that we somehow managed to get away with for quite some time. An important caveat of selling a customer a pre-paid phone is that the sales representative doing the sale got virtually no commission from it unless they convinced the customer to purchase some additional accessories. I wasn’t invested in this particular transaction for the money.
The customer seemed a bit confused about the whole process — she wasn’t very tech-savvy or even fully understanding of how her service was set up in the first place — but decided to purchase the pre-paid phone and a phone case on clearance. (Read: still little commission for me.) My assistant manager helped me activate the phone in the system, and the elderly woman left the store with a working phone.
Alas, that didn’t last.
The woman came back the next day, complaining that the phone was dropping calls, failing to connect when she tried to place calls, etc. A coworker and I did some basic troubleshooting but to no avail. Pre-paid phones were often older post-paid phones that had been refurbished (poorly), and I suspected that this was the case with this phone, although I didn’t voice that concern to the customer. We encouraged her to visit the corporate store about three miles away, and this only furthered her confusion about the whole situation. Eventually, she conceded and left for the corporate store.
A bit later that day, we got a call from a representative at the corporate store, who asked us a number of questions about the phone and how and why it had been sold to this poor, frustrated woman. Despite my assistant manager’s explanations, the other store’s rep seemed convinced that we had sold the customer the pre-paid phone illegitimately in order to scam her out of her money, and they hung up.
I don’t know what the corporate store did to assist the woman, apart from somehow getting her a (different) working phone and sending her back to my store to return the pre-paid phone and case.
When she walked in the door, she was visibly angry, although calm, and she marched up to the sales counter and spoke to my assistant manager, who happened to be standing right next to me. She politely asked to return the phone and the case, and my assistant manager complied. Neither of them said much during the short transaction. Once the return was complete and the customer was assured that her money had been refunded to her debit card, she thanked the assistant manager and then turned to me and looked me in the eye.
Customer: “And you, young man. Shame on you, taking advantage of naive customers like me. You shouldn’t be allowed to keep working here with your unscrupulous sales tactics. I don’t know how you sleep at night.”
Keep in mind that I had made next to nothing on the sale.
While she was speaking, I maintained eye contact with her and waited a moment to be sure she was done. I then simply nodded my head and said, “Okay.”
This seemed to fluster the woman, whose expression passed through confusion and then further anger before she huffed and quickly left the store.
As soon as the door had shut behind the customer, my assistant manager burst out laughing at a customer telling me — who would rather take a punch to the face than be unkind to anyone, ever — “I don’t know how you sleep at night.”
To this day, I still appreciate him for recognizing how ludicrous that was and for making me feel better about myself.
