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!)

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