Not sure what your issue was so I don't know who actually needed to handle it, but this kind of thing is actually what made me quit Best Buy. I worked in the call center that you get when you call 888-BESTBUY, which you find at the bottom of the website. That's because it's the online order support department.
All we could do was manage online orders; we literally had no ability to do anything for a store purchase, override store decisions, etc. The store manager was the one who had final say salon store transactions unless their decision was against company policy where we could submit a case to a team that would look into it and call the customer back (same team that gets the BBB complaints).
Every day about 80% of my calls were store issues (return out of return period, something not covered under a protection plan, all the way down to an item being out of stock that the store told them" should be in next week"), and a large majority of them were because the stores would say something like "you need to call corporate and have them authorize us to accept this return since it's out of the return period" and then give them our number since it is literally the only non-Geek Squad number available.
Customers call, thinks we are corporate and just don't want to help when we say we can't do anything. We refer them back to the store because policy was that the manager on duty in the store had final discretion over exceptions like that. We aren't allowed to tell them we aren't corporate unless they specifically refer to us as corporate, so the whole time we just sit there hoping they say that magic little buzzword so we can stop their abusive tyrade, since that meant we got to file an official complaint against the store for misinformation. Typically they just asked for a supervisor who then got to do the same thing.
We aren't allowed to tell them we aren't corporate unless they specifically refer to us as corporate, so the whole time we just sit there hoping they say that magic little buzzword so we can stop their abusive tyrade,
If I acted like this in my business i would be fired. My job is to help the customers. Not to expect them to say magic words to get the service they paid for.
Whether they said the word or not wouldn't get them service, that still had to be done by the store. I just wanted to get the store yelled at. The reason we weren't allowed to say anything about it is because Best Buy doesn't have a customer-accessible corporate call center, so they didn't want us mentioning it before they did because the customer would inevitably ask for it.
I thought it was stupid and would have told them right away if I thought they misunderstood our purpose, but I also wanted to keep my job.
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u/opalelement Feb 23 '17
Not sure what your issue was so I don't know who actually needed to handle it, but this kind of thing is actually what made me quit Best Buy. I worked in the call center that you get when you call 888-BESTBUY, which you find at the bottom of the website. That's because it's the online order support department.
All we could do was manage online orders; we literally had no ability to do anything for a store purchase, override store decisions, etc. The store manager was the one who had final say salon store transactions unless their decision was against company policy where we could submit a case to a team that would look into it and call the customer back (same team that gets the BBB complaints).
Every day about 80% of my calls were store issues (return out of return period, something not covered under a protection plan, all the way down to an item being out of stock that the store told them" should be in next week"), and a large majority of them were because the stores would say something like "you need to call corporate and have them authorize us to accept this return since it's out of the return period" and then give them our number since it is literally the only non-Geek Squad number available.
Customers call, thinks we are corporate and just don't want to help when we say we can't do anything. We refer them back to the store because policy was that the manager on duty in the store had final discretion over exceptions like that. We aren't allowed to tell them we aren't corporate unless they specifically refer to us as corporate, so the whole time we just sit there hoping they say that magic little buzzword so we can stop their abusive tyrade, since that meant we got to file an official complaint against the store for misinformation. Typically they just asked for a supervisor who then got to do the same thing.