Can you hear me Forrest?
insert obligatory quote here< >
Two employees of French telco SFR who last week broadcast a live vid of themselves apparently trashing a difficult customer's mobe are now seeking new jobs after their entertaining footage escaped into the open plains of the internet. According to this report, the pair at an SFR shop in Villeneuve d'Ascq, in the country's Nord …
I work on embedded avionic systems. Do you plan to take a plan those days?
OF COURSE it was not an acceptable behaviour.
Sigh...Had to choose between the "devil" and the "joke" icons... Guess I overestimated the ability of people to recognize a joke when they see one...
Another reason that you use companies that recognise that you "being an ass" is actually because they're doing something wrong.
Either not dealing with previous requests properly (note: This does not mean saying Yes to everything), or by not dealing with an unreasonably irate customer in the correct manner.
Refuse his custom, or take it on. Don't take on his custom and then cause criminal damage because you don't like him.
I guarantee you in this case that he has a rather shiny new phone, that the cost to him will be zero, that two people he didn't like were sacked, and that next time he goes in there his customer service experience will be impeccable. Who "won" there?
Just because your customer's an ass, doesn't mean you can break the law and damage his property. If you don't want to help him, refuse his custom. Literally "Sorry, sir, but I'm refusing to deal with you if you're going to speak to me like that." It's not hard. And that's 99% of dealing with customers direct, maintaining politeness no matter what they do. You're the professional, you deal with it.
This does not mean "bend over", it doesn't mean do things you're not supposed to do, it doesn't mean treat them like a king, it doesn't mean kowtow to them. But it REALLY doesn't mean "cause criminal damage and both lose your jobs over a stroppy customer" either.
I completely agree, and I have refused to serve customers in a previous retail job for being an arse. That said it was a high end liquor merchant and it ended with the panic button being hit. What can I say, things would have really gotten out of hand if we'd have freaked out or antagonised him (I've gone straight now, back on the it wagon these days)
It must be nice to work somewhere that a line employee can summarily refuse an asshole's custom. Most places I can think of, that's up to the pointy-haired boss known as the "manager," who, not having to personally deal with the asshole, will laugh in the employee's face if they bring up the issue of the customer being a twat and tell them to suck it up or find other work. Meanwhile, asshole customers, suckled from the tainted teat of "the customer is always right," along with a heaping helping of "I'm better than this workaday slob," feel free to hurl the most ridiculous and awful abuse right in the face of the line employee.
So, honestly? I can only hope that the asshole had a metric asston of non-backed-up data on his old mobe that they rendered impossible to recover. Because if you're going to blow your job taking revenge on an asshole customer, you may as well make a workmanlike job of it.
If they've done it once, they've done it before. I suspect this may become a big issue for SFR - anyone who had repairs or claims turned down for 'it arrived like this' is now clearly going to get back in contact to reclaim or get a refund on the higher charges incurred, etc.
But yes, two rules here. Don't be a bastard customer (although we only have the idiots' word on this, and bad customer service can turn the nicest customer into a ball of anger) and don't be an idiot. Just do your job. Luckily these two will be having a long search for their next opportunity.
French job contracts are full of loopholes in order to ease sacking. If you ever ask, before signing it, to close them, it's always "take it or leave".
There's also the nice "mutual agreement firing" which is very popular in HR departments. A bit of pressure here and there, et voila!
In this case, it's a legitimate motive ("Faute grave" in french, the employees cannot work there any longer)
You can just add any random clauses for firing in French contracts. Such clauses, being illegal, would just keep the not-quite-ex-employee laughing all the way to the Labour court (Prudhommes) where they'd be declared invalid, and the employees either reinstated or awarded a few years of salary as damages.
The reality is that it's difficult to fire people for economic reasons, or for being incompetent, or even for not doing anything. If they actively do something illegal with easy to prove evidence, it's still possible to fire them, at least in the private sector.
Yes, but there's no point of adding outright illegal clauses : Just add a simple mobility clause, send the parisians to the middle of nowhere and the non-parisian to Paris, and just wait for them to refuse or quit by themselves...
I'm pleased to see that SFR sacked the two employees. SFR has actually got a good reputation for customer service and having been one of their customers for several years can attest to that; unlike Orange (France) who have the most appalling customer service of any company I've ever had the misfortune to deal with.
Orange (UK) were no better in that respect. After being hit with a £200+ data bill due to their incompetence on a tariff change, they repeatedly promised that a manager would call me back (never happened), they repeatedly promised to re-calculate my bill (never happened) and assured me that my complaints were being noted on my account (can you see a pattern forming here ?). They even refused to sign for a recorded delivery letter of complaint I sent to the Executive Office ! I eventually got my money back, but I had to fight for it.
Back when they were part of Hutchison, Orange were very good. Think about Line 2, HSCSD (and the Demon Orange ROMP), Wildfire and all the other technical innovations they made available for customers.
Then France Telecom bought them out, and what did we get ? "Simplification" (read: Less Choice, More Money Please), overseas call centres and all the cool stuff got scrapped - but hey, we got free pizzas and cinema tickets. Yay for mediocrity !
@ Chris King "Back when they were part of Hutchison..."
The FT era was certainly the time when CS at Orange UK continually plumbed ever new depths of disservice. "We're not satisfied, until you're not satisfied" must have been written by/for them.
I got my first mobile in Feb 1997 on Orange and they were brilliant but as the newest entrant (until Three started 9 years later) they had to be, to differentiate themselves and minimise churn. Unfortunately I think the rot started to set in sometime around mid-late 1999 as I noticed CS standards tangibly dropped in early/mid-2000, 6 months before Snook left as CEO and before FT appeared on the scene.
FT purchased Orange group from Vodafone in Aug 2000. That was after a brief period as part of Vodafone's Mannesmann AG unit (bought Feb 2000) who had acquired Orange in Oct 99.
Was with Orange for years as a PAYG customer. Staff in shop quite helpful, but couldn't do anything apart from handing me one of their phones to call the customer service desk. Tried several times to set up a credit card for top ups rather than a voucher. The last thing she said was "You just have to use a voucher then." Hung up, gave the phone back (resisting the urge to slam it down on the desk), thanked the staff for their help - and walked across the road to the O2 shop. It was easier to set up a new PAYG contract and transfer my number across than deal with Orange.
Fortunately I've never broken a phone to the extent that I couldn't repair it myself. If I did, I might just write it off and get a new one. What these guys did is actually pretty tame, compared to what a couple of arseholes could do with the personal information on someone's phone, if they really wanted to be nasty.
Not quite Darwin Award material. We might want to create the "Double Facepalm Award" for cases like these.
Imagine the acceptance speeches (extreme rarity in the case of the Darwin Award):
"I would first like to thank my complete lack of self control ....."
Icon, because, well, there is no double facepalm icon
They could qualify for a "Special Mention" - they didn't remove themselves from the gene pool, but they've probably committed career suicide.
Being dicks toward the customer and busting their phone is bad enough, but being so monumentally fuckwitted as to post it on the internet is, what can I say... "Special" ?
If I had a pound for every loon who over-exposed themselves on social media and said "I only thought my mates could see it", I wouldn't need to bother with the Lottery.
Some years ago a friend bought what he thought was a £30 Nokia from a well known telco's high street outlet.
Few days later we checked the receipt for his phone when we spotted a similar but different looking phone with that model number in another shop's window. Turns out the telco boys had sold him a £20 Nokia for £30.
Returning to the telco shop, noticed that the guy who'd served my friend ducked into the back office as we entered. Manager "explained" that the error had been spotted after my friend had left -- but they hadn't thought to ring him about it. No apology was offered and they still tried to charge £8 for the USB cable that Nokia hadn't included.
Convinced that these jerks had been pulling this switch ever since spotting how similar these Nokia models looked -- assuming few would notice the difference (the poor camera performance was obvious immediately).
When my phone broke, I asked the guys in our IT department where they took iPhones for repair.
They immediately answered: "iPhone Curt!"
One man show, 20 minutes down the road (Brighton, Massachusetts). Dropped off at lunchtime, picked up an hour later. Reasonable price and I've subsequently sent some mates, my wife's school IT person and more of my broken stuff his way. Never a complaint.
Another argument for treating the IT guys at work right. I'm a big fan of using local folks rather than large corporations for this kind of thing. And not ever being a dick to them. Make discretion work in your favor, not against you, is my philosophy.
I like to use the local firms too!
We use iPads and iPods here as well. Had one returned with a broken screen, so googled how to fix it. Then Googled for iPad repairs in local town. Small place 10 min walk down the road, he can fix them quicker, cheaper than I could - any problems I can take it back and they'll sort it out. Persuaded the bean counters here to set up an account. And as a bonus - I get mate's rates on my personal stuff!
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