This Customer Clearly Has A Lot Of Hang-Ups

I’m a supervisor at the call center for a large retailer in my town. One of our phone representatives is a young guy in his early twenties. He’s about 5’5″ with a nerdy voice and big blue eyes. He’s polite and professional to a fault, he works hard, and he does whatever is asked of him without question or complaint.

At my company, hanging up on a customer is a cardinal sin. Worst of the worst. On paper, there’s supposed to be no reason we are allowed to hang up on a customer.

At this point, I should also add that I’m in my mid-forties with a twenty-year-old son, so I’m pretty protective over our younger representatives like this guy.

He called me yesterday.

Representative: “I just had a customer who got very irate with me and threatened to ‘choke the s*** out of me’. I panicked and hung up on him.”

Me: “I completely understand. I’ll handle it.”

I pulled the recording, and holy h***, y’all. The dude sounded like he was either drunk off his a** or had a mouthful of marbles. He rambled off his credit card number to [Representative] in this garbled voice, and very quickly. When [Representative] asked him to repeat it one time “to verify,” the customer devolved in seconds, insulting [Representative]’s intelligence, dropping F- and MF-bombs, and then making the threat.

I put the customer’s account on hold, pulled the recording, and contacted my boss. Before listening to the recording, she said that he should have passed the call to a supervisor instead of hanging up. I pointed out that he did so in a panic after being threatened, and she then agreed that he did the right thing.

After listening to the recording, my boss said that she had passed the matter to Human Resources, and they were making a police report for a legit threat. They also contacted [Representative] to check on him. He called me again later.

Representative: “How could I have handled that situation better?”

Me: “You did fine. If anyone gives you trouble for hanging up, you tell them to come and talk to me.”

At this point, I’d honestly take any punishment on myself instead of him, but I don’t think it will come to that. I won’t let my representatives get bullied.