Assurances from customer service people over the phone are among the least reassuring assurances you can receive. The person who assures you of the co-pay cost of a medical procedure, the person who assures you that your payment has been processed, the person who assures you that this erronous charge has been removed from your account. There is a space of uncertainty between the time they tell you something, and the time the evidence that what they have told you is true becomes available. Even if that space of time is only for a few minutes after you hang up the phone and refresh your web browser, it feels like an eternity of trust when your money or your records or your electricity is on the line.
And I have learned, with time, that the customer service people on the phone have no business with my trust; that just because a call is being monitored for "quality assurance" does not mean the call is being monitored for the fact that those assurances may turn out to be utter bullshit. And so now, when for some reason I cannot get the internet to do my bidding and I must resort to interacting with a human on the phone, I am sure to insure my assurances.
The surest was to insure your assurances is to grab your reassurer by the balls. And make them aware that you are holding them firmly in your fist, and that should their assurances fail to be true you will yank down. Hard.
I had an interaction of this kind just the other day when making an urgent credit card payment. I was assured that my payment would clear by 8am. To make sure of my assurance, I asked for the name of my assurer. I was told it was "Xandar." He even spelled it for me. I think to myself, awesome name, Xandar. And you will rue the day you ever introduced yourself to me if my payment doesn't clear by 8am.
When I asked Xandar his last name, he became confused. As if he wasn't sure if I was trying to hit on him. He stuttered something about a policy of not being allowed to give out last names. Which is, I suppose, a good policy given that there are people like me out there who, if our payments don't clear at 8am like you promised, will Hunt. You. Down.
So then I explained to Xandar that I needed some way of being able to report him to his superiors in the event that my payment did not clear at 8am as he assured me it would, not that that would happen. But nevertheless, it was very important to me that payment cleared at 8am and if it did not clear, I would need to talk to somebody at the credit card company about him. At which point he might have been slightly relieved or slightly more terrified, but he told me that he had been assigned an employee number for just this purpose, and he would happily give that to me. I said I would happily take it. And he told me he would happily waive the fee of processing my payment over the phone. And I told him I was so happy, and that I looked forward to my payment clearing by 8am.