Customer Service? Never heard of it!

Isn’t it comforting to know that, despite all the negative publicity, complaints and anger, some of our largest companies are still arrogant enough to put the customer last?

The energy company at the centre of my story has successfully maintained a track record of coming last in customer satisfaction surveys. I should have guessed further errors were on the cards, after a couple of previous foul-ups had left me baffled as to how anyone could think what they were doing was acceptable.

Sure – when you first buy a house and sign-up with the utility firm, they aren’t going to know how much gas you’re going to gobble, or electricity you’ll eat through. After a few years, it seems reasonable to assume they would now have enough data to know that if they needed to vary your direct debit payments, it should only be by a few quid to balance things out.

Not my supplier. 8 years into our ‘relationship’, I’ve had refunds after it turned out I’d massively overpaid, then had my payment set so low (and you’ll be able to guess the next bit) that at the next review they put the figure so high I could hear my wallet screaming in the other room. Repeat until fade - despite me suggesting a middle ground figure on several occasions.

Perhaps more irritating was the time I changed my tariff, only to discover at my next random bill interval that I was still paying for the old cost – 3 months later. Despite being told it was in a queue to be processed (I hope they’re never in a bus queue that long), it took repeated calls and finally a complaint, plus more months, before it got sorted.

Of course, time is a great healer. I’d all but forgotten these Customer Care calamities, and everything seemed fine.

When I got home from work to find a couple of truncated automatic messages, weeks apart, I didn’t immediately associate them with my old energy foe. As their computer obviously triggered message delivery as soon as my answering machine cut in, like a man with a very small toilet, I didn’t have much to go on.

Emails followed. Urgent! Legal Requirement! We’ve called ‘a number of times’ and left a ‘couple of reminder cards’! Dangerous! We need to safety check your gas meter! It was obviously desperately vital, as when I called they didn’t have any appointments free for a couple of weeks. And I never received any cards – did you mean the phone messages?

Right on time, the engineer came and was in my house for a total of two minutes, including the cursory look given to my gas meter.

But it wasn’t over. The next day I received another email, reminding me of the previous day’s appointment, apparently to read my gas and electricity meters.

Alarmingly “Installers will arrive between 10am & 12pm”. Only if they’ve got a time machine. And what are they installing?

Hopefully it’s some respect for their customers.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 17th of April 2015. You can view the version used by them on their website here

The only real change they made was to break some of the longer paragraphs up... which rather spoiled my little "name and shame" joke, using the first letter of each paragraph. Ah well.

Impending holidays mean I've got to come up with two columns this week. I've got a pretty good idea for one, but the other, like my energy supplier's customer service skills, doesn't actually exist. Hmm...

(CD single ROCK! Currently enjoying Evanescence's splendid "Bring Me To Life". 2003? Get the chuff out of here!)

Faking it for real

As Donald “I’m really great, everybody says so” Trump is so fond of pointing out, there is a lot of fake news around nowadays. Honest. Your friends at Facebook think so too, and have recently been publishing their top tips for spotting false news – by placing them as ads in newspapers. Considering they came in for considerable criticism themselves, that’s like shouting “Squirrel!” and pointing at a tree whilst you hastily kick away the prize begonias you just trampled. To help you make sense of this (and because I’m a caring person), I thought I’d run you through their suggestions and help to explain them for you. I know. I’m lovely. 1. Be sceptical of headlines READING THIS ARTICLE WILL IMPROVE YOUR SEX LIFE!!! And explain that catchy headlines, or stuff all in capitals might be a bit iffy. 2. Look closely at the URL You can find out more about this at www.wowyouregullible.com if you want to understand how phony web addresses are a sure sign of dodgyness. 3. Investigate...

Going Underground

The US presidential election and Brexit must have made me more nervous than I’d realised. It seems I’ve created an underground bunker without realising I was doing it. Still – we’ve all done that at some point, right? No? Ah... In that case, the fact that I have inadvertently turned my cellar into a rudimentary survival shelter, just in case it all kicks off, demonstrates a severe case of bunker mentality. Fretting about Donald and his wall, and Hillary and her emails, clearly made me more paranoid that I thought about the possibility of WW3 kicking off. Whilst attempting to find a specific size of imperial washer the other day (turns out I’d mis-filed it in the nut cabinet – Tsk!) I was struck by what a lot of jam and chutney we have in the cellar. And I do mean a LOT. There are boxes of boiled-up sugar and fruit and more boxes of boiled up vinegar and fruit. We’re still only part way through 2015’s output too. Then there’s the plastic containers holding pasta in various for...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog