WILMINGTON – Don Cook worked in customer service.
The company he worked for was one of the largest manufacturers of highly specialized tools in the country, with hundreds of thousands of their products in circulation at any one time.
At $8900 a pop, plus lucrative contracts with the US Government and others, business was booming.
The company, of course, boasted about the “high reliability” of their product line, but Don still received his fair share of calls from customers experiencing issues.
One afternoon in 2011 was no different:
“Thank you for calling customer service. My name is Don. How may I help you?”
“This thing’s not (expletive deleted) working!” Said a far-away, slightly garbled voice.
The caller continued, “You gotta help us right (expletive deleted) now! We (unintelligible) and this whole situation are going to (expletive deleted)!”
Don was used to dealing with upset folks.
After all, they wouldn’t be calling in to customer service if everything was great.
But this customer didn’t exactly sound simply upset.
He sounded panicked.
“I’ll be happy to help you sir,” said Don. “What seems to be the problem?”
“The thing keeps stuttering,” said the caller. “I have to…hang on.”
Don waited as he listened to sporadic yelling and muffled repeated pops coming from the caller’s end.
The caller returned. “I have to keep manually resetting it to get it to work!”
Don, having heard this complaint before, advised the caller that it sounded like the ears of the lower receiver had been bent up (probably during routine maintenance) and the caller simply had to bend the ears back down to return the tool to full operability.
The caller did so and thanked Don with a brief, “Done. Back in business,” and shouted orders to the rest of his squad as he hung up the phone.
In all the years that Don worked for the Barrett Rifle Company, he, being a former Marine himself, had never fielded a customer service call from a soldier actively engaged in a firefight, until that day.
The soldier, understandably, hung up with Don before having a chance to complete the customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call, but Don liked to think he would have received a 5-star rating for his performance.
