More tales of drama from the call center!

Saturday my last call of the day was a customer saying he was moving to Idaho and he needed a new Idaho number. I looked up Fitzsimmons' coverage for his new Idaho zip code, and reported that unfortunately he was going to have to drive 300 miles to Salt Lake City to pick up any signal. We don't have any towers in northern Idaho. On second look I did find we had "partner coverage" there, which means Fitzsimmons rents signal from another company. That's called "roaming." If over 50% of your use is roaming, and his would be 100% due to living in that area, then he would get hit with huge penalties in the hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars every month. That's because if Fitzsimmons has to buy service from another company for more than half of your calls, you are no longer profitable as a customer. I had to report that per Fitzsimmons policy I could not give him an account in an area like that.

Somehow the concept of "no signal" didn't sink in to this guy. He kept saying, "If you look you'll see I've been with you for years. There has to be something you can do for me." No, unfortunately as I just said, there is no signal there except for partner coverage, which means all of his calls would be off-network roaming. He went on to tell me that the people in his local Utah store seemed "more knoweldgeable" than me because they knew about Fizsimmons buying some rinky-dink local company and I didn't. I told him I was in Atlanta and not privy to the buyout of Utah cell phone companies. Silently I wondered why, if he thought the Utah store was so smart, was he calling me?

He went on and on for about five more minutes about how I just had to be able to do something, until I finally said, "Look, I can't drive out there and build you a tower!" At this point he asked for a manager. I told him I would be glad to get one, as they were about to tell him the same thing I had.

So this guy Brian came to the phone, who's a great guy. He told the customer yes, unfortunately we didn't have any towers for 300 miles in his area and he would probably have to go with a new company. Brian, however, imparted this news with more of a hand-wringing, "Ooh, don't yell at me, sir! Oh, gosh, golly, I'm sooo sorry!" kind of tone.

The customer said, "I thank you for your honesty, and thanks to this I may stick with Fitzsimmons anyhow."

As he hung up I said to Brian, "Why was he thanking you for your honesty and he wanted my name, rank and serial number?! You said the same thing I did!"

Brian said, "It's because you said it in that Arthur way."

Hmm...maybe so. I take pride in that.