When you work in customer service, you will often have to deal with upset customers.

What do you do if one of the customers is not only upset right from the start, but also ends up returning the wrong product to your company?

That is what happened to the manager in this story, so he told the customer they could only have their product back if they paid the return shipping, which they refused.

Check it out.

Going to be nasty and complain about shipping costs to me? Turnabout is fair play, friends.

I’m a mid-level manager for my company, my duties mainly revolve around marketing and managing our e-commerce websites.

Because of my position, I sometimes get customer service calls escalated to me – which means if I’m talking to a customer on the phone, they’re usually not happy.

Why are some customers so upset right from the start?

I received a call from a customer who was very upset, demanding a return authorization and shipping label to send back a product she recently purchased.

According to her, we had sent the wrong product.

Now, I’m more than happy to accommodate customers, and certainly understand mistakes can occur in fulfillment.

However, this lady was extremely combative and uncooperative from the jump.

I asked her to read me the model number of the product she received (common troubleshooting in this case, to identify where the mix up occurred), and she immediately spat back the same model number on her receipt.

If she would just listen, the problem could be solved.

When I told her the model she read was the same as what she ordered, she rudely said “you messed up,” citing the product was not as advertised.

At this point I was calmly trying explain to her how the product should function, as I could tell she was older and possibly just didn’t understand how to get it to work the way she expected.

I didn’t want her returning the product she ordered only to purchase the same model again, and having the same problem.

She wasn’t having any of my attempts to help.

Both of these people are a real piece of work.

Within a couple seconds she passed the phone off to her husband, who wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise.

He demanded a return authorization and shipping label, and in the two minutes it took to put that together for him I got to sit through his tirade of insults before I could end the phone call.

Multiple times through this jaunt he complains about the cost of shipping, how “he better get his shipping refunded,” and he’ll “be mad if he has to pay return shipping, too.”

Whatever, it was done.

Sometimes you get rude customers. I move on with my life.

Oh my, what do we have here.

Fast forward a week or so later, the return package arrives.

Inside of it is… not the product the customer ordered.

In fact, it’s not a product our company handles at all.

My guess is the customers purchased a lot of similar products around the same time, and they confused the product they received from another company with the one they ordered from ours.

We sent them the correct product the entire time, and the one they returned was probably incorrect, they just had the wrong company to return it to.

I figure when I originally asked the lady what product she received, she was just reading back from the receipt, not actually bothering to check the box to see she had the wrong company altogether.

If only they had been nice from the beginning.

Normally in a situation like this we would send the product back to the customer and close the return.

But I remember the crap I had to take from this couple and am feeling petty.

So I called the customer and pointed out the product they returned wasn’t what they ordered, and asking how they’d like to proceed.

I’ve got the initial lady I spoke to on the line at this point – she’s clearly not showing any more humility or respect toward me even after being told the fault was their own.

She tersely tells me to send it back.

“Sure,” I say, knowing exactly where this going, “all I’ll need is to know how you’d like to handle shipping. Would you like to send a shipping label, or should I charge your credit card?”

Turn about is fair play.

Oh it was glorious.

Within a minute of arguing with her, her jerk of a husband was on the line, telling me I can’t charge him to ship back his product.

He then goes on to admit what I expected all along – he needs the products he sent to my company to return to the company he actually bought them from, and I’m effectively holding the package hostage.

I let him know we’re perfectly willing to send it back, but since we covered the shipping to get an unwanted package into our building, we’re not covering shipping sending it back due to their mistake.

He huffs and puffs but knows he’s beat since he made a very rude version of the same argument a week ago to me, and says he’ll “get his wife to handle it.”

These people are never going to deal with this.

That was over a month ago. The package is still sitting on our shelves with his return information, likely well out of any return period from the original seller.

Haven’t heard from the dynamic duo since. I smile every time I pass it in the warehouse.

Why don’t people realize that being nice and friendly will get you good results much more often than being rude?

Read on to see what the people in the comments think about this story.

Nah, they will never call again.

Yeah, don’t deal with these people again.

This commenter has a great idea.

This would be the right way to handle it.

This person really benefited from this type of situation.

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but these customers will never learn.

This was totally their fault.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.