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a particularly fucked up thing about this is that often when someone on the phone tells you "it's policy", it
A) isn't
or
B) wasn't until ten minutes ago when they put you on hold to talk to their boss who also didn't know
A) isn't
or
B) wasn't until ten minutes ago when they put you on hold to talk to their boss who also didn't know
when you're talking to customer service of any level at any company it is extremely common for the people you're talking to to make shit up from whole cloth. i have seen it done by coworkers and been a verified recipient of it countless times.
it works like this
company never thinks to write a policy about this
it comes up on a call
agent has to give an answer; not giving an answer is not an option
agent has no access to anyone with true authority
company never thinks to write a policy about this
it comes up on a call
agent has to give an answer; not giving an answer is not an option
agent has no access to anyone with true authority
"policy" is weird and fluid. i have never encountered a company with a "policy." policy is made in meetings, and then it's summed with literally millions of ad-hoc decisions made during 10-minute hold periods. just like the justice system, policy has case law.
on a lot of topics, the only people able to make policy are the "Legal" team. they are not reachable - it takes days or weeks or is impossible for an issue to get from CS to Legal. the fastest way to get a policy answer is literally to sue the company.
and that *certainly* can't happen during a phone call. you can't be put on hold while an agent asks Legal "can we refuse to do a first-name change?" so the policies that get created ad-hoc are basically the conservative decisions made by worried and powerless middle managers
usually these questions *do* get to managers, but one of these things happens:
A) manager gives an answer they don't actually have authority to give; agent relays that
B) manager gives an answer that WILL get the agent yelled at; the agent massages it into something that won't
A) manager gives an answer they don't actually have authority to give; agent relays that
B) manager gives an answer that WILL get the agent yelled at; the agent massages it into something that won't
there's no accountability for any of this, ever, anywhere. it takes some fuckin, film noir rubber-hose work to find out where misinformation of this sort came from, and companies don't typically bother. if there's a lawsuit, they just take it on the nose.
no company will admit they don't have a policy on something, or made one up, etc. etc. they won't do it. once you lie, you *have to stick to the lie.* no business is willing to take the perceived reputation hit of admitting that an employee just made something up.
a lot of this is because of the "Representative" lie - Customer Service Representative is a lie. it's not true. CSRs do not represent the company, they represent a set of policies and procedures. A "Rep" is a lawyer or an executive or someone *authorized to make commitments*
Nothing you are told on the phone by a CSR holds a drip of water because they are not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Their promises mean nothing, and their primary job and motivation is to get you to hang up the phone. This is not cynical, this is bona fide fact.
But businesses don't want to admit to this very long con - the fact that when you are on the phone with them, you are not speaking to the company, but to someone like a community manager, who has only a little more pull than you do and does not have the ear of anyone important.
In a lot of cases you're talking to people who don't work for the company and have zero respect in the eyes of their execs. The concerns of an outsource call center worker are less than nothing to management.
The ultimate outcome of this is ironically that the call center agent is able to make up basically anything and it *becomes company policy* - as far as YOUR case or account is concerned.
What I'm coming around to is this - no, paypal doesn't have that policy. That's laughable. No company has that policy, it's completely absurd. Name changes have been a part of society for millenia and this is not their first rodeo.
They had no policy, or they had a shortsighted policy that was written in the space of ten seconds and has possibly been replaced by other shortsighted policies also written very quickly. But this HAS come up before and it HAS been permitted, guaranteed.
But a couple things can happen
A) It did come up, and there was a long, drawn-out internal argument, and then it was permitted - and nobody "updated the policy" (because no such body of work exists)
B) The agent BSed and now CS dept. has to roll with it
A) It did come up, and there was a long, drawn-out internal argument, and then it was permitted - and nobody "updated the policy" (because no such body of work exists)
B) The agent BSed and now CS dept. has to roll with it
when decisions get made, they *do not* consistently percolate out to similar future situations. it's a struggle in every CS department in the world, and it's because of lack of funding and shit-giving from the execs. They do not want to solve this problem.
There are probably companies or sub-orgs that don't have these problems - those companies employ a fulltime technical writer who owns the entire Knowledge Base and is contacted with policy decisions. I've only distantly heard of this sort of thing.
In practice, most orgs have no funding or resources for maintaining documentation. Many companies literally email around .docx files live, while on phone calls, that contain someone's version of a procedure or policy.
Literally, an agent asked how to do a thing once, wrote down what they were told, and that file gets emailed around for years. It gets changed, and none of the other copies get updated. You get different .docx's depending on who you ask.
Most "policy decisions" are made off-the-cuff by an overworked manager, delivered verbally to an agent. Nobody follows up. No email is sent because there is nobody to contact to add this to the body of "policy." Either the manager does the legwork or it doesn't get done.
It turns out that hiveminds are expensive and tedious to create and maintain, but no business wants to admit this, and CS depts are the least funded part of every business. And don't forget that, again, many businesses literally employ no CSRs.
If you talk to Ver i zon, you are speaking to someone who has had the job for six days and may not last three weeks. The "policy" is docs in a Sharepoint they access over a VPN, and it's the only server in their "employers" network they're allowed access to.
Their managers may not even literally be in the same country as they are. Nobody has any pull, and everyone is miserable. Customer service is extremely bleak work and at the majority of corporations it simply does not function at all.
In closing: the OP's situation sucks, and none of this apologizes for it, but I thought it was important to clarify that "policy" is mostly a fake idea and you need to remember this when having these fights.
The correct approach is probably to start with "I can't accept that you have never had someone with this need, that can't possibly be the policy you've used in the past, and I need to be contacted by upper management."
This won't work, but nothing less will. The situation has become adversarial and the person you're speaking to is powerless - otherwise they'd fix your problem. They want to help you, they know this is wrong, but they do not have the tools or authority.
