The Worst Case

After my post about people stealing cable boxes and cable companies trying to bill people for boxes that were destroyed in a fire, several people asked me about other cases of this type. During my time as the accounts receivable and collections officer for the cable company I saw a lot of these, including a surprising number of people who didn’t actually steal their decoder box so much as just leave it in an empty apartment when they moved out, somehow believing that we would magically or psychically receive notice of the abandoned unit and come to pick it up. Why exactly this was – and why these people could not manage to read the section in their contract where it specified that they had to either CALL US on the telephone to arrange pickup or BRING the cable box to our office to turn it in – remains a mystery to me, but most of these people did eventually pay up once they realized what a $250 charge for a stolen piece of merchandise was doing to their credit rating. One man actually threatened me over the telephone when a $750 charge on his credit report blocked his purchase of a $2.5 million home a year or so later (he’d walked off with three cable boxes and never considered returning them). In hindsight, being arrested for making terroristic threats (we recorded those phone calls) probably didn’t impress his bank, either…

As bad as that was, I think the customers who had managed to destroy their cable box and then demanded a replacement – at no cost to them, of course – were even worse. We had a couple that had been immersed in water (I’m still not sure how), a number of units that had been dropped, stepped on, struck with various objects, or in one memorable case, run over with a car, and a large collection that various users had tried to “fix” – ostensibly to correct some picture quality problem or other, but more likely to get one or more premium channels without paying for them. The one that stands out in my memory, though, was the box that was returned with a three-inch hole melted through the plastic housing, straight through the main circuit board, and down into the metal base plate. When our field technician inquired, the customer admitted she had placed a large, lighted candle onto the top of the box. She got positively indignant when we told her she was going to have to pay for the replacement…

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in customer service roles; I spent nearly four years in cable television alone. But despite that and subsequent experience, plus a master’s degree in business and almost half of a doctorate in management, I’m still unable to fathom why the customer believed that the damage to this decoder unit wasn’t her fault and that the costs should be shouldered by the company. Certainly, nowhere in her contract did either party specify that a cable box was – or should be – able to function as a candlestick or an ashtray; nor did this customer attempt to deny that she had willfully lighted the candle and set it on top of the box. But she was still refusing to pay – and threatening legal action of her own against the company – when the destruction of her credit nearly resulted in her car being repossessed, her being evicted from her apartment, and her being fired from her job…

I’ve seen a lot of cases of bad customer service in my time, and I’ve seen a lot of asinine behavior on the part of customers over the years – but this one wins. I think the lesson here for all of us is, try not to be that customer. And the lesson for business managers is that customers like this one are out there, so make sure that your customer service reps are equipped to deal with cases like these, and that your supervisors and managers are prepared to back them up. Because sooner or later your company is going to run across this customer – or someone very much like her…