How can we not help you? Welcome to customer disservice

One of these sofa, please - do you do it in "heavily delayed"?

“The customer is always right”, the saying goes.

That may well be true, but it would appear some well-known companies are unable to remember that.

I’ve encountered two fine examples of big names getting it badly wrong recently, both of which left me considering switching allegiance and frothing at the mouth.

First to get their logo emblazoned boldly onto this particular wall of shame is energy supplier NPower. They’ve struggled badly in the past with customer service, regularly appearing way down the rankings when it comes to keeping their punters happy.

I still have decidedly un-fond memories of calling them up to change tariffs, then repeatedly having to call them months later as they still hadn’t switched my account and were charging me a higher rate.

My current beef revolves around the amount I pay each month for the honour of receiving gas and electricity from them. I have an old house, which guzzles both supplies like they’re going out of fashion. I therefore need to pay a sufficiently large amount each month so that I build up a bit of a buffer by the time the even-chillier-than-usual winter months roll in.

So, what did they do? Refunded me £103. Then informed me they estimate I’ll owe them £101 by the time my next bill is due. Bravo. I’m presuming you have vacancies in your Rocket Scientists department.

We move on to John Lewis next. Usually very good, a recent purchase of lounge furniture highlighted that keeping your customer informed of what’s happening is a sensible thing to do to avoid annoying the hell out of them.

On Christmas Eve, we spotted something in their furniture clearance sale that was just what we wanted. Sofa, so good. We didn’t buy it on the spot (we felt bad about upsetting our vintage settee over the festive season) so rang the next day. They could deliver it, free of charge. Lovely! Someone would be in touch to arrange a delivery date.

Four weeks later, the silence was deafening. I rang, and a lovely lady agreed it had been a long time. Despite being on hold for 15 minutes, she couldn’t find out what was happening, so told me I’d be called back inside 48 hours. 4 days later, Mrs G got a phone call from a carrier who wanted to deliver it the next day, and was disgruntled when we said no as we’d both be at work – he’d been told it was urgent and had to rearrange his schedule.

JL were even worse when we rang. This time they were decidedly grumpy about it, and keen to point out how much it was costing them for our sofa to be delivered.

A simple phone call, at any point, to agree when we could be in to greet the delivery guys (who were a genuine delight, by the way) could have avoided all this. It might also have left me a happy shopper and likely to buy from them again.

I’m off for a lie-down on our new couch – I need some retail therapy.

This post first appeared as the lead piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 2nd of February 2018, where it was re-titled as "Are you sitting uncomfortably?"

Still no sighting of a News & Star - I'll keep you posted!

Deeply disappointing to have been let down by the normally very reliable JL, and so very simple to have avoided, utilising that marvellous invention, the electric telephone.

(CD A-Z: Midge's Ure's rather splendid "Move Me".)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"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...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog