Poll on worst customer service you get from any large company you have to deal with on a regular basis?

[A580Hojas]

My nomination is Vodafone. By miles.

I rang them earlier, got the "we're all busy, do you want to book a call back?" option. So I booked it. They have now called back and I have now been waiting 35 minutes listening to their music interspersed by "sorry for the delay, your call is top priority and will be answered next" every 60 seconds.

In the time I've been holding I've been for a wee, husband has cooked the pasta to go with the bolognese, served it all up, mine's going cold while I wait for Vodafone to give me a few moments of customer service.

How crappy can a telecoms company actually be in 2022? I can only assume there is one person taking calls for Vodafone tonight.

RAC - I broke down on the side of the motorway and it took them 6.5 hours to recover me and even then it wasn't them that recovered me. I was also made to pay £100 for the recovery and I'm still waiting for a response to the complaint I raised back at the beginning of Dec.

Absolutely shocking and they put my life in danger!

Vodafone, the CEO could bring me a gold plated all singing all dancing free phone and I would still tell them to stick it up their arse. Utter bastards.

Despite living in London I could not get a signal on their network. Cancelled within 2 weeks owing them nothing.

3 more bills arrived, 3 long phone calls explaining the situation, 3 occurrences of them agreeing with me that they were at fault and I owed them nothing.

Didn't stop them referring my case to the bailiffs though demanding an amount they had already confirmed I didn't owe them 3 times.

Took months to sort out, utter bastards.

Definitely virgin media or three! Both are terrible

@PositiveLife

Yes: its the way they're all over you like a rash when you leave and they throw all sorts of discounts etc at you. It's the total inability to learn lessons for poor service which really makes me mad.

Nine times out of ten when people leave a service provider its because the quality of the service has made them lose faith. Throwing a bunch of shiny discounts and new channel packages will not make any difference.

DVLA
Passport Office
Local council
My sons University

My mother moved into sheltered accommodation in October 2020. Everything done over the phone/online. Rental contact and info left in flat to fill in and send back.
Housing officer was utterly useless.
I had a voicemail from him last month
"Oh hello Mrs X its the housing officer from X Council here. Is your mother still interested in the flat?"
Erm...she's lived there for over a year....🙄

DVLA - not answering phones at all.

Passport Office - keep emailing me to send them documents which on their own tracking system shows they processed on 20th December!!! When you phone them they tell you that they can only see what I can see. So what's the point???

My sons University - no one to speak to. Phone message to contact via e mail. Emails take 6-8 weeks to be answered. He finally got his parking permit at the end of his 1st term!

Ugh

At the minute for me it's DVLA, My license was stolen in November and DVLA have messed me about ever since, sent out a form to send off proof I am who I say I am except it never arrived and they were expecting me to provide my only proof of my identity and weren't going to guarantee it's safe return! I queried with them about forms of my identity and also where the form was and they insisted on my identity document and said they were resending the form, this was in December. Since Christmas I have been trying to call them nonstop about the whereabouts of the form they want me to send back but you just get through to an automated line telling you to call back later and live chat is even worse- it's just a bot giving generic non relevant advice!

BT are lying bellends.

Also, as above have said Vodafone are terrible! My phone got stolen at the same time as my driving license and they were so unhelpful, refused to give me information about date of barring etc, then it turned out they had mistakenly not barred my phone on the date they said they did which could have impacted me being eligible for a new phone through the insurance I pestered them until I got a letter stating the date the barring was actually requested. Also, I couldn't get onto the my vodafone portal to sort the insurance or new sim and they suggested I went into my nearest vodafone store with photo proof of ID to confirm I was me and refused to help me out on the live chat to get a new sim because I was unable to phone up! Also as someone else said the signal in London is shocking for most of London, I cannot wait to move from them.

Also DFS for me.
My sofa still isn't right and it was delivered in June. You can directly call the store as they have no direct numbers anymore.

Does everyone use Resolver?

Sat on hold to Aviva health insurance claims as we talk, 20 mins so far, they are rapidly going up in my list of 'crap companies'...

RHS, due to a computer glitch my address and someone else’s name and postcode got blended and thus misdelivered. They will not refund or redeliver. Plus the plant I received and the pot are really shoddy given I paid £26 plus £6 delivery. I’ve gone to M and S for a delivery, hopefully they’ll be better

I wonder how much more we would have to pay for actual customer service from these outfits?
They clearly don't employ enough staff and are disorganised - but have no incentive to improve as they are all as shit.
Vodafone were wank, so are BT but there's no-one with reliably better service to change to.

Some names come up repeatedly don't they...

Would be great to somehow get this thread on their SM channels ...!

Openreach are lying bastards. Promised us Fibre to the Property in July 2020. Still waiting. No contact info, so we keep getting onto our MP to chase it up.

Scottish Power are lying shits but due to my old lovely to deal with company went bump I'm back with them. They transposed meter readings over a few years ago so instead of a £250 bill for a month, it was around £12k. They seemed to think that was normal. Switched to Ovo Energy who were good for a while then an upgrade on their system completely messed everything up. They could not work out my account even though I read my meters monthly and keep the readings, Eventually they settled on a figure which I'm sure is wrong, but they claim I don't owe them any money, so there you go.

John Lewis is good in the store but their home delivery is a joke. I ordered a Miele washing machine and when it arrived the plug was smashed and the front caved in. The idiots that came along claimed they couldn't take the old machine out. After half an hour, DH and I took the old machine out. It took 5 further attempts and me tweeting Miele to get an actual working machine. I plumbed it in - took me all of 90 seconds.

Finally, DPD and Hermes are just useless. My property is 3 houses all attached together. DH has a note on the front door telling people to go to the back. The first door at the back is my dad's and there is an A4 notice telling people not to leave things for the Malbec family there, but to go to the next door with an arrow. DPD drivers can't possibly read and act on that (but UPS and DHL manage fine). DPD lie but once you confront them with photos/video, they back down very quickly.

To everyone moaning about Vodafone, they put up a mast in my area, the only provider to do so. I knew they were crap so looked up which other providers use their infrastructure. Talkmobile are absolutely lovely. They answer the phone quickly, they have people who know what they are talking about and their contracts are less than half the price of Vodafone's. I don't work for them, but really recommend them.

@missfliss

Some names come up repeatedly don't they...

Would be great to somehow get this thread on their SM channels ...!

I think we can just share the thread to their sm actually.. might have a go after work

Vodafone disconnected my phone without warning saying I owed over £1k. Spent hours on the phone trying to work out why. I barely call or text and only use whatsapp and play occasional game. Their advice was that I must have downloaded a ‘virus’ that caused a huge bill.

Turns out that instead of renewing my contract they’d randomly cancelled it and the 1k was to pay off the remainder of my contract. You’d think they could just see this on their computer system and tell me this, but no. Hours and hours of calls and getting the CEO involved etc etc. Got offered £100 credit which they then didn’t add. I’m a freelancer so missed work calls and all sorts.

Argos is also on my shit list for selling me a dodgy table which broke after four months and then sending out a ‘technician’ who fobbed me off saying I’d caused the damage by dragging it around. I hadn’t. They can fuck right off.

Churchill Insurance: Someone crashed into my car and wrote it off, they were insured by Churchill. It took many weeks of daily phone calls to get Churchill to provide and pay the settlement figure. Every day, I had to hold in the phone queue (despite my call being important apparently), and then have to go through the whole sorry saga with random customer service assistants who couldn't do anything - they couldn't put me in direct contact with their "engineer" to discuss the value, they couldn't expedite my claim. At first I was told they'd get back to me within a week, after that came and went, they lied to say I was "next on his list", another week passed, told my case hadn't even been referred, and so it went on. Even when I escalated it to a formal complaint, the complaints handler said she couldn't expedite it and could only give compensation for the delay, phone calls, etc! Absolutely hopeless firm.

@daimbarsatemydogsbone

I wonder how much more we would have to pay for actual customer service from these outfits? They clearly don't employ enough staff and are disorganised - but have no incentive to improve as they are all as shit. Vodafone were wank, so are BT but there's no-one with reliably better service to change to.

I really don't think it's a matter of paying more. It's more a matter of them employing people who have the ability to do their job, improving their systems, etc.

A lot of the time, they're only "busy" because customers have to keep contacting them repeatedly to get things done as promised in previous calls, or to rectify mistakes that they've made. That's their fault for employing staff who are incapable of doing what they promise.

Argos, argos, argos. I had a gift voucher to spend through work, ordered something, £50 voucher, £75 debit card but the order didn't go through presumably because the item went out of stock and now I've got a zero balance on the gift card and £75 pending out if my account. I've spoken to them and all they say is I have to wait 3-5 days for the gift card to be recredited and to get my money back. Why do they do this?! I'm luckily not desperate for the £75 but it's not a tiny amount and somebody else would be. The stupid thing is now showing back in stock but I can't but it as the gift card doesn't work, aaaaargh.

Is we're straying into public sector, then definitely HMRC who are absolutely hopeless.

I'm an accountant and had dealt with HMRC (and their predecessors IR, HMCE, etc) for nearly 40 years. The last 10-20 years have been diabolical, ever since the different depts were merged, local offices were closed and huge numbers of experienced tax inspectors were made redundant and replaced by inexperienced/untrained call centre staff.

Letters/forms can routinely take a year or more to be dealt with, and even then, only after repeated reminders, phone chasers and sometimes MP involvement. I've still got cases of tax refunds claimed 2 or 3 years ago which still havn't been processed.

It's never been so bad. In fact, it's so bad, I've stopped taking on new tax case clients. Routine things that are done 100% online seem to work fine most of the time. The problem comes when you need a HMRC staff to manually do something, like read and reply to a letter, or process a form. They're truly hopeless. It takes forever to actually get a human to do anything and then half the time, they misread your letter or do it wrong anyway and you're back to the back of the queue again.

Actually I’ll have to go back on the RHS comments I made up thread. I’ve had phone call from them and they’ve resolved all my problems (well the plant based ones). So I’m perfectly happy with their customer service 5*.

Verizon Wireless is the worst. If you forget your customer code, you are toast. Unlike most American firms, they won’t take the last 4 of your Social Security Number. They are arrogant, charge crazy prices for phone insurance, and only one local store out of five will help walk-in clients. I only keep them because they have superior coverage out here in the woods.

Vodafone. I've had bad service from other companies but no-one gets close to how awful they are. If they were the only mobile company left I just wouldn't have a mobile, they are that bad. Even worse really is that they constantly come out badly for customer service but don't give a ff!

@thepeopleversuswork

Can I just say that the single thing companies big or small could do to improve their customer service (aside from hiring more staff) would be to stop insulting our intelligence by looking on their website.

I absolutely hate this. You're on hold to some utility/telco/grocer or whatever and the recorded messages pipes up to say: "Have you checked our website?"

Well fuck me that never crossed my mind, Doris. What a blinding idea.

Company websites almost never provide any tailored information that you can't get from an individual in a call centre. It's all about getting people off the phone. I get that. But FFS stop trying to tell us the website is an additional resource. 99% of the time someone calls because they have exhausted the website as a source of information.

This absolutely. And why read out the sodding website address? As if anyone types in a URL rather than using Google. Twats.

I cannot believe I’ve read through this entire thread (very enjoyable, thanks @A580Hojas) with no mention of The Hut Group! Oct-Jan I placed multiple orders with 4 separate THG companies and had issues with EVERY. SINGLE. ORDER. To the point where I started to feel like I was being filmed for some sort of spoof show. And then refunds take weeks. Customer service is just standardised replies even when you are speaking with a real human. Horrendous. With the weird exception that every order from Cult Beauty, another of their companies, has been faultless.

@thepeopleversuswork OMG I HATE THE “HAVE YOU CHECKED THE WEBSITE” MESSAGE, your post makes me feel seen . Particularly for companies like HMRC where you sit through aaaaages of “look online here”, “press this button if by some miraculous chance you haven’t already considered the website and would like to talk to a human”, “oh wait have you checked this part of the website” to then be told there is no one that can take your call and no option to hold.

We have to laugh or we will cry