Congratulations. You've Made Your Life A Bit More Complicated. *clapping*

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I'm now working for a new company. It has been operating for over 2 years now and I'm under a website account, we take phone calls and we deal with not so heavy billings (refunds, billing information, subscriptions). It's an easy account so I'll be staying here for a while. Just earlier during my shift, I was on a break and was listening to a call an officemate was taking. I can hear the customer's voice in his headset but it's not enough for me to understand what he's saying. Now, there's a survey saying that most irate callers have been made irate by the customer representative and this is a good example of it. My officemate was asking for the exact charge that the customer has on the card statement. The customer said it was $33 so my officemate searched for an account that has a $33 charge. He found an account that matches the information that the customer gave him, the only thing that doesn't match was the $33 charge that the customer told him. I don't know what the customer said exactly but he changed the charge to $38. After hearing that, my officemate kind of snapped at him saying that it should be a $33 charge and now he's saying it's a $38 charge. I mean, my officemate was kind of implying that the customer gave him a hard time locating the account. From what I understand, the customer is always right, right? This officemate is a call center agent from hell. I mean, he has serious issues if you ask me. He could have just taken the customer's issue and handled it accordingly but instead, he made the customer irate (I was can hear the customer's tone from where I was) and on top of that, he escalated the whole issue. In short, he just made his life a bit more complex because when escalating, you need to have additional information about the customer, which the customer didn't want to give, by the way, and you also need to seek approval from a number of people. It's just a waste of time. I really do think that professionalism should be practiced often whenever I'm in the office and emotions should be kept until I'm out of there. Don't get me wrong, I also get irate callers and I also get angry dealing with them but stopping yourself before you blurt out something unnecessary and uncalled for is really a great help. So have you been in a situation where you know you could have done it the easier way but instead took the hard way out? Have you inadvertently made your life a bit complicated before? ...just recently? How did you deal with such situations?