We Don’t Have The Power To Supply You With That

I work in a call centre. It’s a small-ish, family-owned business, so we managers wear many hats.

In the UK, for businesses, all electricity suppliers are done under contract, and there are a lot of suppliers (over thirty) you can choose to go with. In order to stay competitive, suppliers update their prices every week or two, all with different schedules — more right now due to the energy crisis. As a result, any price is that day’s price.

One day, I had to take an escalated complaint call (the buck stops here). They were complaining that our agent had used high-pressure sales tactics to try and sign a customer.

I immediately saw that something was off as we don’t do that.

It took quite some conversation with the customer, but we were getting nowhere as she couldn’t figure out how to explain her problem.

I made it easier for her and explained what our staff was supposed to do and how everything worked.

When I got to the point about any price being that day’s price, she lost it, saying that that’s how we’d pressured her.

It transpired that the customer was of the opinion that providing that information was pressuring her. She thought she should have a couple of weeks to think on those prices and make a decision. She would only sign with a company that gave her that.

And when I told her that no UK business supplier was offering prices that way, I was apparently pressuring her again.

I pointed out that, according to the way that things actually work, informing her honestly of the situation so she could make an informed decision could not be considered pressuring her, and if she had a problem, she needed to take it up with the dictionary people.

She hung up on me at that point, but I reasoned that if that didn’t get the reality of the situation through her head, we’d not win her as a customer anyway.