Coming Home

I'm coming home, coming home, tell the world that I'm coming home.

Not that I'm excited or anything. I'm ready for a break. I need a break. Sooooo bad. I had a psychotherapist customer the other day (she therapizes dreams) and we had a discussion about what my dreaming about selling phones meant.

"Your subconscious is calling you and you're trying to get rid of it by selling it. What do you suppose it's calling you about?" she asked.

I made a flippant remark of course, because no one really likes being therapist-ed in their place of business, but it got me thinking. It's saying I need a break, and I'm refusing to listen.

Yesterday, the ill-fated Friday the 13th, wasn't quite so bad as all that (I actually had a decent day numbers wise) except for one event right before I went to lunch. I had a guy return a phone.

Except I hadn't known he had returned the phone because the person who returned it didn't give me the courtesy heads-up. It's by no means a requirement, but it's just the right thing to do and we all do it. Unless of course you don't return the favor. So I wasn't able to ask him, "Hey, what's up? You spent an hour yesterday deciding this was the right phone for you, what's the deal?" and we could have avoided the whole situation.

Because what that other rep didn't know that I knew, was that his original phone had a blown speaker, so there had to be a hinky reason if he "just wanted to go back to his Blackberry."

And then the guy was back to re-buy the phone. He had received bad information from an asshat who had no business giving out that information in the first place. *Hand to face* The problem with re-purchasing the phone was that the gentleman in question had used an "early upgrade" and if you return the device you used the early upgrade for and don't just exchange it for something else, that early upgrade goes away and you have to wait until your actual upgrade date.

Sound confusing?

Don't worry, it is.

Bottom line was that what should have been a nice guy enjoying a nice 16GB white iPhone turned into a 3-ring circus where I lost a sale, got hit on my return ratio, he had to be on the phone for an hour with customer care to get his upgrade back, he ate $55, and I still ended up selling that nice guy an iPhone. Again. But we were out of the white ones. So he had to get a black one.

Oh well.

Just promise me, that if you have Verizon and someone tells you something that sounds too good to be true, run it by me first. Please. Because while I don't know everything, I have the tools to help you find out if it's true or not. And I would love to help you do that.

And sometimes it isn't too good to be true. Usually it is a really really good deal.

But then there's that one time it is.

The moral of the story is that from the bottom of my heart, I want your day to go smoothly. I don't want to see anyone have to deal with what my customer had to deal with yesterday. Part of it was that the right questions weren't asked, but they shouldn't have had to been asked in the first place. There were a number of places where someone should have said, "Hold up, wait a minute..." and it never happened.

I guess what I'm just trying to say is that I work for a fantastic company, but like the rest of the world, we have good days and bad days, smart people and not-so-smart people and you have to give us a little credit for being human — and I don't mind at all if you have a question. I'll do my best to answer it or direct you to someone who can.

Ciao,
kc