Daily Insanity dot com :)

Get a call and they are talking to someone else when you answer

I really hate it when people call me and they are talking to someone else when I answer the phone. I pickup the phone and I hear them talking to whoever about whatever when they should be paying attention to who they called. This is just being discourteous. I basically give it about 2 seconds then I hang up. If they feel it is important to talk to one of us at the store they can call back. How do you handle this?

Customer falls on computer and wants warranty

A customer came in with a computer that was crushed. The customer fell down with the computer in his hands and he landed on the computer. We just rebuilt the computer 2 weeks before. He requested that we look at it and see what we could do. So we check it in and diagnose the computer. The case is destroyed and the motherboard is damaged. The customer is expecting warranty repair on the system because hd told me as much. I told him that we would look at the computer and see what the problems are. He is a very good customer that we have been doing business with for along time. My choices are call him and tell him all of the problems with the pc and make him pay for everything and lose him as a customer or take care of the motherboard under warranty and charge him for the labor and the case and keep him as a customer. I will be going with option 2, but what would you do? Better to break even on it and keep him as a customer than to lose any future business.

Customer wants to claim computer equipment after 9 months

A customer actually came in the store and tried to claim their equipment that they left with us 9 months ago for service. We looked back at the notes and we had called them every month for 3 months straight. They never called us back. We left numerous messages. Our policy which is on the wall and is also on our service tickets states that equipment left with us gets donated or recycled after 30 days. We didn’t discard the equipment until the 4th month just to be sure. The laptop which the customer left was 7 years old and it would have cost more to repair than it was worth. We were very nice about it and told them that the equipment had been discarded according to our policies. The customer then became extremely angry and used a few choice words. We just kept repeating what the policy states and that we tried to contact them. We finally had to ask them to leave because they were becoming verbally abusive. I personally wouldn’t even consider getting my equipment back after that period of time. What do you think?

Make that door buzzer go off over and over again

Why do people stand by the front doors and move around and make the buzzers go off over and over again? Kind of like hitting the little bell on a counter in other stores. Just had a couple come into the store and they kept milling around in front of the doors. I guess they didn’t put 2 and 2 together. Move and buzzer goes off.

A Couple of Strange Business Taxes

The city has some strange taxes for businesses. The first tax is the sign tax. They actually charge me a tax for signs on the building that I rent. It is a flat fee plus 12 cents per foot. The fee came to $21.84 which isn’t a lot, but it is still a nickel and dime fee from the city that doesn’t make any sense to me. The second tax is the what I like to call the furniture tax. The tables, chairs, desks in my business are all taxed based upon their value. Now this isn’t the sales tax when I purchase them, but a yearly tax on their value. The city used to tax us on hazardous waste which we don’t have any of, but they taxed all businesses for this. They dropped this tax finally after enough complaints from businesses. The small businesses in this country help to pay most of the taxes and the various governments seem to be coming up with various ways to take the maximum amount of income from us.

Dell Problems

I received my credit card statement today from the bank and I am checking it over and I see a charge for $213.41 from Dell. Now I know I didn’t buy anything from them since last year and I am trying to figure out what this charge is for. So I call the Dell phone number on my credit card statement and I get India techs support. I go through 3 people on the phone and no one can tell me what the charge is for. They keep transferring me hoping that I will get aggravated which I did. I finally hung up and called the credit card company instead. I filed a dispute. I was told it takes 60-90 days to process the request. In the meantime I have to pay the amount on the credit card and wait to be reimbursed or I will get charged interest. Awesome, its like money grows on trees.

Update on this: I received the money back from Dell by disputing the charge. The lady from the bank called the number on my credit card statement and she couldn’t get anywhere with them so she put through the dispute for me.

Bought Phone and the whole Sprint Network Died

Purchased a brand new HTC Hero phone last night 11/3/09 and left the store and sat outside the store to play with the phone at around 7:45 at night. The store closes at 8:00. I noticed that I could not connect to the internet so I went back inside the store before they closed to get the phone checked and they managed to fix the internet. I left the store and sat outside again to check the phone and I couldn’t make a phone call. I know the phone part of the phone was working because I checked it before going into the store. The techs must have disabled the calling function when fixing the internet. By this time the store had already closed. The next morning at 10:20 I took the phone into the store to get checked again and the whole sprint network was down. All of the computers in the store were down and I couldn’t make a call from my old HTC Touch Pro or from my new HTC Hero. So I sat there for a few minutes and the network came back online. Sprint fixed my calling capability on my phone, but they said to check my internet throughout the day to make sure that it is working correctly because of their network difficulty.

Customer takes their PC to a tech in a different state

Customer moved from Arizona to Texas. She calls us up and wants to know what the motherboard is inside her computer. We said bring it in and we can check for you and help you load the drivers that you need. She said she had moved to Texas and couldn’t come in.  Come to find out that she bought the computer from us in 2006. We don’t keep detailed records of parts going back that far. She wanted to know what the motherboard was so that they could get the drivers. She took her computer to GeekSquad and they couldn’t figure out that you can take the side off of the case and look at the motherboard and google the system motherboard name and numbers for the drivers. We had to explain to her what GeekSquad needed to do. It is standard in the industry to figure out what drivers are needed because almost all customers misplace their computer disks. Did you ever run into this? I am surprised that they couldn’t figure this out.

Customer’s Life Stories

Why do customer’s feel like telling me their life stories? Customers come into the store and you ask if you can help them and they are off to the races, they tell you everything about their day and everything about their computer since they took it out of the box 5 years ago. What I would like to hear is the problem that they have so that I can input it into the computer. So, what exactly is your problem? I don’t want to be rude so I give them a little bit of my time, but sometimes I have to bring the conversation back around to the issue at hand. It is my own fault sometimes because I ask a question and they will start all over again. Has this every happened to you? I know a lot of you have done retail in the past. What is your experience?

Customer Hardware versus Software Problems

We had a customer come in with a computer about 2 weeks ago for viruses and spyware. We eradicated the problems and gave the customer their computer back. The customer calls two weeks later and says that their computer won’t boot up. We tell them to bring it in at no charge. We diagnose the system and find out that the main board in the system is bad and needs to be replaced. The customer loses their minds and says that we should have tested that when we had it in two weeks ago. The customer also says that they hadn’t used the computer since they picked it up, but then they countradicted themselves and say that some of the software work that was requested wasn’t done correctly. So which is it? We try to explain that hardware is different than software. We worked on software before and now they have a hardware problem. We removed viruses and spyware and now their mainboard has a problem. Sometimes you just can’t get information across to people. What do you think?