[Russ]

Originally Posted by Flyboy

But when I ask, "who is in charge?" the answer is almost always, "I don't know." The other alternatives are, "me," "someone in a different office/city/country," or "I will get someone to call you back" (which never happens). I am sorry, but there is no way that every single manager, at all times, is always in a meeting. There is no way that customer service representatives are placed in charge of an entire department, for hours on end, with no management contact. Any manager worth their salt would be able to tell their staff where and when their meeting starts and finishes. They should also appoint some to make decisions in their absence and where they can be reached, or a contact to someone who can make higher level decisions. This is what I always demand of my project managers and I don't see what it should be any more difficult for a business a thousand times the size of mine. If I ask," what would happen in an emergency and they needed to contact someone in charge, who would they contact, this is when they start to "umm and err." If one asks about a specific company policy and why that policy exists, the typical answers are, "I don't know," or "I don't need to know" and when one asks how can we get the answer, we are told, "that information does not exist."

It seems to me that you're in no position whatsoever to decide when they are lying or not. Hell yeah I know how frustrating it is to come up against a 'traffic warden' type agent but it doesn't mean they're lying. They could very well have been told that management can't take calls on that particular day. I'm not saying it's right, in fact I agree that someone should always be available to take an escalation (and not a "senior member of the team" which means nothing at all as usually they're just frontline people who have been doing the job a number of years) but it does NOT mean the person you're talking to is lying.