Archive for the 'complaint' Category

Posted by: Peter Massey | 23.06.2008

A customer on my train spent 50 minutes this morning arguing with the guard. The guard’s credit card machine had taken his transaction twice according to the receipts. The guard “knew” it hadn’t because it made this error before.

The customer wanted confirmation that it hadn’t taken his money twice. The guard couldn’t do that but asked the customer to write in. Naturally the customer did not want to waste his time when it wasn’t his fault. Both were locked in an impasse.

The supervisor was called by phone. The conversation was not understood by the supervisor. Several times the customer asked the supervisor not to talk over him. He eventually told him (”Jim”) that he did not believe that Jim “understood what I’m saying” since he hadn’t listened to him.

My point isn’t better training for the ticket man or the supervisor. It’s two questions:

Why didn’t the machine get fixed when the conductor knew it was broken?

How much time was wasted and how much damage done to SouthEastern’s brand?

Uncategorized, complaint, customer experience, the best service is no service, train | No Comments

Posted by: Jo Sparkes | 8.11.2007

Whatever you do, if you talk to my Dad this week, don’t mention Marks and Spencers.

His church has recently had a lovely new extension, including a cafe and bar facilities. They were looking to furnish it with some good value but contemporary chairs and discovered that M&S were offering a £16 discount on a set of four dining chairs, an online offer of the month. Bargain - they ordered 6 sets (24 chairs). An email confirming the order was received immediately. Two days later, notification of despatch and an estimated delivery period was given. Brilliant - they’d all be there in time for the first hall booking, a 70th birthday party three days after the end of the delivery period - or would they…

Not having received any communication from a carrier by mid-day on the last day of the delivery period my Dad rang customer services to ascertain progress. That was apparently the wrong number to ring, he was given another number that dealt with furniture deliveries. On calling this number the agent couldn’t trace his order and Dad was given the name of the transport company. They did their best to help but could find no record of his order. This agent talked to her supervisor who informed her that they didn’t actually deliver furniture for M&S.

I could sense just a tiny bit of frustration in Dad’s voice as he called the furniture section of M&S again, only to be redirected to the first number he had called. On talking to a different agent on the customer services orderline number she again tried to redirect him to furniture. When he pointed out that he was now embarking on the same cycle of five phone calls that he’d just completed she promised to look into the problem and call back. To be fair she came back quite quickly but only to say that the items were out of stock and not expected to be in until the 4th November. No-one had any idea why he had an email telling him they’d already been despatched. Dad wasn’t exactly pleased but didn’t have much option but to accept it. Who needs chairs at a birthday party anyway?

Imagine his surprise at 7.00 the same evening when he had a call from HDN (Home Delivery Network - if you google that the results are also very revealing) informing him that they had his chairs and would deliver them three days later. Dad asked them why they couldn’t be delivered in the original time period and they said “Well, that’s only an estimate.”

Three days later the carrier turned up… with four out of the six packs of chairs!

The whole cycle of phone calls was repeated yet again. One agent was so insistent that he should speak to someone in furniture and not the customer services orderline that she transferred him mid-protestation. Dad’s had enough - 3 hours in total on the telephone and a letter to Customer Correspondence which hasn’t been replied to 14 days later. In actual fact it’s probably the carrier that let M&S down but at no point could an agent find out what had happened to the order or take control of the query.

Today someone at church just asked Dad to order two more packs…….

Marks and Spencers, complaint, customer experience | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 8.11.2007

I’ve been struck lately by the correlation between 2 things:

• The people who return (or have returned for them) their phone calls and their emails
• The type of experience given to customers in those same businesses

One of our Chief Customer Officers, who is excellent with his personal communications despite being very busy, told an interesting story of Marks and Spencers.

He had a bed ordered to be delivered on a particular day in a new house, because he had guest coming to stay. It didn’t get delivered when it should have been so he escalated it of course only to be told it couldn’t now be delivered and that, no, there was no one he could raise it with.

Not happy. Our man isn’t one to take that lying down (joke, oh do keep up !!). He was going to go through all the various folk needed to get what he wanted. Ultimately the fruitless trail led all the way to the customer service director. He was told the customer service director does not speak to customers! Imagine his fury and his vehement retelling of this story. Of course he, the story teller, does speak to customers. It’s part of his job to be responsible in person. And it keeps him real. Maybe that’s why he returns his calls. Because he cares even when he’s busy.

M&S came up again in our weekly meeting - interesting things that have happened this week. Jo’s dad spent Saturday afternoon on the phone to M&S….. I expect the customer service director at M&S is a nice guy or lady. They’d probably cringe at the thought that they “don’t talk to customers”.

To quote one of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sayings: “Be very afraid of our customers. They’re the ones who have the money”. Perhaps the customer service director was very afraid…

So who is in charge of representing the customer at M&S. I took at look at their board. It isn’t clear that there is anyone. Lots of product and logistics and so on. Now that can be a great thing - the customer is everywhere. Or it can be a bad thing - no chief customer officer to listen to, aggregate and prioritise what customers want done across the business and represent doing the right things for customers.

I know, I’ll mail this to Stuart Rose. Now he does talk to people. He even responds to mailshots to say no thank you. That’s the kind of eye for detail, care of your brand and personal responsibility that makes great companies great. I bet he returns his calls or has them returned.

One cannot expect great customer experiences from your company unless one represents that ethos personally.

CCO, Marks and Spencers, complaint, customer experience | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 28.08.2007

Apparently Dave is the most common name of Orange customers, but I suspect Andrew is the most common victim…. let me explain

I got home early tonight, eager for a beer and a catch up with my girlfriend, Sylvie. Alas she was chained to the phone. She’d already invested 30 minutes in the queue at Orange to stop them taking money out of her bank account. She wasnt going to let go now!! Why?

Orange had texted her a week or two ago to apologise for billing her the wrong amount on her international calls, She’d kinda guessed that when her bill went from £35 to £180, but it was at least honest to admit it.

So you’d think they’d be ready for the barrage of people asking what the real bill was. You’d think they’d have some procedure for saying sorry, what happens next. They might wait til the bill is correct before taking the money

Nope, they take the money from your bank account anyway and cause untold strife

And when you phone……there’s a lot of people phoning.

Anyway so what’s this got to do with me? Well I got to her house to find her on her third such company just today, about ready to rip, and not ready to go for a hard earned glass of wine. So I took the phone, to just hold on whilst she was being transferred to “complaints”. Whilst she was having a makeover and a change of clothes. Apparently complaints was the only thing to do

Alas the queue to complaints was less than the 15 minutes it takes a lady to dress and so I ended up speaking to Andrew in complaints

Quite thrown by the surprise of getting through, I engaged in polite banter, aka research, to see what was happening in Geordie land.

No he couldn’t say what the real bill was. Yes, all he could do was offer an address to write to. No there was no email address. No his supervisor was busy, already taking escalated calls. No, he didnt have the ability to email people in Orange. And yes there were lots and lots of people he couldnt help. I explained a system whereby he could inform management that he was about to give up the ghost because so many customers were so fed up and he thought that’d be great. But he didnt have that system. In fact all he could do was offer an address to write to. Yeah right….. that’ll really happen

Dumb things

A waste of Andrew’s life. A waste of Sylvie’s life. Is there a better way?

Orange, complaint, customer experience | No Comments

Posted by: David Naylor | 23.08.2007

The web has certainly done its bit to kill off the IFA and I’m as skeptical as anyone about the money you pay them for the service they offer. I must be one of the few people who still has a relationship with an IFA for certain investment products including my pension. My pension is not going to set me up in a style to which I’d like to become accustomed just yet so I guess I’m just expecting the guy to do a periodic review of investment funds and keep me informed of any funds that are about to go down the pan.

I recently changed my pension payment arrangements which the IFA happily helped with but the pension provider completely screwed up - letters from the same department that contradicted each other, cancellation of new direct debits - that sort of thing. I told my IFA that I wasn’t happy about the mess up but in the end I didn’t lose out financially and didn’t really have much to do personally to get the problems fixed. I left that with him.

Today I recevied a letter from the pension provider offering me £100 compensation so long as I didn’t take the matter of ‘poor customer service’ to the Financial Ombudsman Service. The IFA had complained on my behalf and a 2 page letter explaining what went wrong had been the reply. I wonder how far I would have got with a complaint if I had not been working through an IFA? I probably wouldn’t have had the time, and certainly wouldn’t have had the impact of one of the UK’s largest IFA organisations.

I won’t say the value I see in IFAs has increased but I hope that when the time comes to draw down the pension, the amount I receive will be greater than the amount I would have got if I’d tried to manage my investment personally. Trouble is, I’ll never know.

Wonder if I should reject the compensation and hold out for £500. What do y’think?

IFA, complaint, financial services | No Comments