Complaint about Thomas Cook - worst customer service I've ever received

Laz123

stuartJo1989 wrote: »

Yea, good post!

If there was indeed a queue of up to an hour then you've got to realise that the (typically minimum wage) people on the other side are probably going to be stressed out and potentially be funny !!!!!!s! Can you imagine it? They typically get X calls a day and that's what they are paid to handle. Then suddenly a "hurricane" of calls comes through and they are doing 2x, 3x or maybe more work and facing a constantly high number of calls in the queue! Add to the fact that the last 10 people on the phone have probably gave them abuse because flights have been cancelled due to an act of 'God'!

You've got to be the bigger person in situations like that. Let any funny stuff go over your head and just be polite + get what you need out of them.

You sound like you are fairly reasonable in that you know that acts of God are going to delay flights, and you had a contingency. But I think you handled it just as badly as the person on the other end of the phone.

They're not even on that. They're typically people who have been bought on the people trafficking black market and are so poor they can't even afford shoes or clothes and have to sit in the freezing cold in their tattered underwear. They also have one meal a day which consists of a bowl of rice. I should know I was once poor m'self, Gov, an' ever so 'umble. This is how I remember those days:

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You're right there, Obadiah
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o' cold tea
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an' all
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son"
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was right
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you
ALL:
They won't!

The-Truth

hollydays wrote: »

I've never worked in any job where I've felt the need to be rude to someone in the course of my employment. It's not professional.

What occupation do you have out of pure interest?

JuicyJesus

Honestly if even one of the many awful things the rep said in the OP actually happened that's beyond scummy.

I worked in customer service, face to face, for a long time and dealt with some absolute !!!!!! beyond all redemption - shouting, screaming, insulting pillocks one and all. The one thing I didn't do was get sarcastic, insulting or mocking back because that would reflect on me, not the t*sser I was dealing with, and it wouldn't be him that got in trouble, it would be me. If anything it was a skill that is required; the ability to be polite, if firm, when dealing with the unreasonable, the rude and the shouty. If the rep cannot do that he should not be working in customer service. End of.

It is completely irrelevant to a person's treatment by a firm the sort of bad day that the person representing that firm is having, the person's wage level or whether the caller is themselves a bit of a d*ck. They are entitled to courteous service as a customer of that firm, up until the point at which they get actually abusive and even then the call should be politely terminated after a warning is given. Quite why there are people in this thread defending the indefensible (and again, a lot of this rep's comments if verbatim are completely indefensible) is beyond me - if they were spoken to so sh*ttily I don't imagine they'd be so sanguine.

baza52

I have also worked in a call center role before and have come across countless abusive customers, ones that think they are right and wont listen to you and ones that are quite happy to argue the toss all day if you were to let them.

Lets look at some extracts from the OPs post,
"I went back on hold for a second hour, and ended up in a long argument with who was definitely the rudest customer service representative I've ever had the misfortune of speaking with."

"I'm going to hang up now and you can call back again later when you've got it." We argued about this for a few minutes"

"By the end of the conversation this guy was being such a douche and talking down to me as much as it was possible to do so. I asked for his name, and he absolutely refused to provide it and we ended up in an argument about it"

If the OP had her booking ref this could have been a 2 minute call.
We only have 1 side of the story/call but why would the OP need to keep having arguments?
The customer (OP) also has zero right to be told the workers name. At most a christian name would be given.
If the OP want to take the complaint further im sure TC will have recorded the call and they will be aware of the person the call was taken by.
People that work in call centers will not just hang up on people for no reason, Its one of the worst things you can do and if caught doing it they wont have a job for long.
They are also told not to let calls go on for longer than necessary especially when there are lots of calls waiting.

The-Truth

The-Truth wrote: »

What occupation do you have out of pure interest?

Hollydays has logged in today but has chosen not to enlighten me as to the answer to my question. It's not a surprise though is it. Baza52 has pretty much summed things up. The long and the short if it is hollydays has no idea of what this sort of work is like. Or at least if hollydays has ever done it it was that long ago they've forgotten all about it and will point blank refuse to admit what they do now.

ScorpiondeRooftrouser

I've never been a customer service advisor. But for people who are to complain about customers getting angry with them "when it's not their fault" is like a sewer worker complaining about the smell. That's the job. You're supposed to put up with it. The people whose fault the customer's problems actually are are paying you to deal with it so they don't have to. Your job is to try and leave the customer in a place where they will spend money with the company again, and if you don't do that you've not done the job.

scd3scd4

ScorpiondeRooftrouser wrote: »

I've never been a customer service advisor. But for people who are to complain about customers getting angry with them "when it's not their fault" is like a sewer worker complaining about the smell. That's the job. You're supposed to put up with it. The people whose fault the customer's problems actually are are paying you to deal with it so they don't have to. Your job is to try and leave the customer in a place where they will spend money with the company again, and if you don't do that you've not done the job.

Spot on.....

stuartJo1989

ScorpiondeRooftrouser wrote: »

I've never been a customer service advisor. But for people who are to complain about customers getting angry with them "when it's not their fault" is like a sewer worker complaining about the smell. That's the job. You're supposed to put up with it. The people whose fault the customer's problems actually are are paying you to deal with it so they don't have to. Your job is to try and leave the customer in a place where they will spend money with the company again, and if you don't do that you've not done the job.

Don't think your analogy is 100% correct.

Its more like a sewer worker being on a sewage plant which, when working correctly, has a very mild or no smell. Every so often the filter breaks and you get overwhelmed by the smell.

Whether that would justify complaining or not is a matter of personal opinion to some extent..

SevenOfNine

The-Truth wrote: »

Hollydays has logged in today but has chosen not to enlighten me as to the answer to my question. It's not a surprise though is it. Baza52 has pretty much summed things up. The long and the short if it is hollydays has no idea of what this sort of work is like. Or at least if hollydays has ever done it it was that long ago they've forgotten all about it and will point blank refuse to admit what they do now.

Perhaps hollydays simply doesn't feel obliged to enlighten you by answering your question. Perhaps she just got bored by the thread & couldn't be asked to read further than page one.

"Hollydays has logged in today"..........you're starting to sound like a stalker! :eek:

Laz123

The-Truth wrote: »

Hollydays has logged in today but has chosen not to enlighten me as to the answer to my question. It's not a surprise though is it. Baza52 has pretty much summed things up. The long and the short if it is hollydays has no idea of what this sort of work is like. Or at least if hollydays has ever done it it was that long ago they've forgotten all about it and will point blank refuse to admit what they do now.

You're a little bit worrying mate if you don't mind me saying so. You smack of being some kind of stalker. Posters aren't committed to having to answer to the likes of some jumped-up little prat stamping their tiny feet demanding attention.