Working customer service is hard to begin with, but during Covid?
Yeah, that was rough.
This person had to deal with a lot, and she was done with this nasty customer.
Let’s see how she got revenge…
Forcing someone to live up to their threatening promise
It was January 2022. A new wave of Covid hit, and it devastated the workforce in the major cities here.
On average, about half the workforce for any industry was home sick for about a week at the same time.
Shelves in supermarkets weren’t stocked because there weren’t enough workers to keep them full.
The number of bus routes were cut in half. The list goes on.
This is where our story starts…
At my retail store, all but two of us were sick. With two people on staff, we couldn’t get to everything, so we had to decide what parts of the job we’d neglect.
Most of our revenue is from online sales, so we decided to close the store and focus on dispatching online orders. We still had to answer phone calls and emails though, so we were very stressed.
This was only happening in the major cities of course, more rural locations dodged the major disruptions.
One day, I got a call from a customer. He placed an online order the day prior, paid for express post, but noticed it hadn’t been sent.
He called, asked why it hadn’t been sent. I looked on his account, and saw he lived in a rural town hours away. This was the conversation:
Customer: Hi I placed an order yesterday with express post, why hasn’t it been sent yet?
Me: very sorry, there’s only two of us on staff because of Covid and we are doing the best we can to keep up with the online orders.
Customer: but I paid for express.
Me: yes, and as I explained, there’s only two of us on staff, we’ve had to close the store, and there’s a lot of orders to pack and we pack them from oldest to newest, we’re trying our best.
Customer: well, your best isn’t good enough. I paid for express, it should have been sent out by now.
My best wasn’t good enough? What an absolute piece of s***.
They were done with this customer…
At this point, I had dealt with enough stress, so I let him have it.
Me: paying for express doesn’t mean we pack the order faster, it means that once the courier has it, they deliver it to you faster. That extra money you spent doesn’t go to me or this company, it goes to the courier. There are orders older than yours, they have priority, they have waited longer than you and will be packed first.
Customer: I don’t care, you need to ship it today.
Me: I can’t promise that. Do you have any idea what Covid has done to the workforce here?
Customer: no and I don’t care. If you don’t ship my order today, I promise I’ll never shop with you again.
I genuinely laughed out loud at that.
Me: I literally could not care less, it’s no skin off my nose.
At that point, I hung up.
It doesn’t stop there, though…
For the entrée of my revenge, I purposely skipped his order even though I caught up to it. It got sent the next day.
The main course though, that was tasty. I blocked his account so he couldn’t shop with us again.
He promised he wouldn’t, so I wanted to make sure he didn’t break his promise.
He tried to though. He made another account. I recognised the name, and confirmed it was him through the shipping address.
I cancelled the order and processed the refund.
For revenge’s dessert, I did something truly petty.
When you process a refund, you reverse the payment made by the debit card.
You can put a note in it when you do so, so the customer knows why that money is reappearing in their bank.
The note I put was “to help you keep your promise”.
Let’s see what Reddit users thought of this petty revenge!
This commenter thought it was perfect.
Most commenters got a good laugh!
Several users had similar stories, too.
A few people questioned the revenge, though.
In my opinion, if you’re rude to a customer service person, you don’t deserve to shop at that store.
Sorry not sorry!
If you liked that story, check out this one about a Costco customer who got their cart stolen… so she hatched a plan to get it back!