Good customer service is a thing of the past. AIBU ?

[green18]

In the last year I have had cause to complain to a couple of companies. The customer service I have received after the complaint has been shocking. Very slow response, having to use online forms generating automatic replies, no available phone number to speak properly to a staff member and a general complete lack of awareness of a customer's needs. The first complaint was last year against Ryanair and took 9 months to resolve, the second is ongoing but after waiting 3 weeks to a reply to me email, I rang the only available number to be told they are sales, don't deal with it, don't have a number for complaints. When I asked what I should do then and was told to send another email(that generates a generic standard reply of 'we'll get back to you in 21 days') I said I wasn't happy and was asking to speak to a supervisor when the staff member said " If i can get a word in...." AIBU to think this is not the way to speak to a customer? Granted, I wasn't happy but I was not being rude or shouty. I used to handle complaints for a large building society and would have been seriously reprimanded for saying that.

Does anyone know what the normal time frame is for getting a payout from a car ins claim? They have no awareness that people need a car to get to work!

Depends on lots of things. Are they your insurers, or the other driver's? Was your insurance fully comprehensive?

how did you get a resolution from jet2? I have a dispute ongoing since october!

Bad , it is my insurance. Car was written off and value assessed and agreed verbally. The only thing we didn't have was the guaranteed courtesy car, which I will sort for the future, although I hope never to need it. What I need now is for the claim handler to call back and finalise the claim and pay me. Everytime dh calls, he us on hold for an hour, only to get through to someone who says they can't help us, we need the claim handler, who will call us back. He doesn't and so the cycle begins again. It's now been 4 weeks and I need to pay for the replacement car. They seem to have no sense of urgency or that people need a car to get to work.

I complained to Asda about bad customer service at one of their shops and after investigating it, they sent me a £50 gift voucher. I rang Tesco yesterday and told them I didn't like the lamb shank I'd bought there and got an instant refund to my bank. I complained to the Co Op that the fridge I bought from them was starting to rust after just 13 months and they posted me a £90 cheque as compensation (the fridge cost £130). I wrote to Ryanair about the attitude of customer service agents and they refunded £50. All without tweeting. I must have "the knack"!

I think a large part of the problem is that good customer service in reality doesn't match up to the promise. Adverts all babble about how they 'care' about us, how they 'go the extra mile', yadda yadda yadda, but we've all had dire experiences trying to resolve problems and realised that, in fact, you can't take it for granted that complaints will be resolved swiftly, courteously and to your satisfaction.

Part of the secret is knowing how to complain, and that can't be right. Time and again I read consumer newspaper columns where complaints are dealt with instantly because the press office has been in touch, but the poor customer has already spent weeks or months battling away to no avail. Some companies really are great but some are shit, and not always the ones you'd expect - I've had shockingly bad service from John Lewis, for example.

I used to be the head of customer service at a quite small company. Our service was absolutely exemplary, probably disproportionately so for our size; but it was a crowded marketplace and we really needed to keep customers loyal. It's much cheaper to spend time and effort retaining a customer than it is to recruit a new one, and quite often a bad complaint can turn into a lifelong loyal customer if it's handled excellently.

As a result, I have incredibly high standards and get FURIOUS when I encounter bad / lazy customer service

We bought an expensive fridge from Fisher & Paykel ( New Zealand company which distributes in the UK). It had to be connected to the mains water supply.

F&P engineers failed to call an hour before arrival as we had been promised they would, then completely fucked up the installation. I realised this about 5 minutes after they left but the only way to report it was to a call centre in NZ (obviously working on UK time) who said they'd raise a complaint but had no way whatsoever to get in touch with the actual engineers, who were probably only a few miles away at that point. I of course had no number for them becuase they hadn't rung me in advance as they'd promised.

It took a week to get another engineer out and he tried to charge me for the re-installation on the grounds that I had used an unauthorised installer! Despite my 20 odd calls and emails to customer service he had not even been told that it was his own colleagues who had fucked it up! It was only when I described the guys that he realised that it was his mates "Dave" and "Colin".

Shocking.

Oh and the most annoying thing for me about my fridge was that not one person I spoke to ever said anything vaguely resembling "sorry", despite my being very vocal about how inconvenient it was for me to take another day off work while they fixed their error.

With airlines however (I have some experience of this) part of the reason that they are so slow in responding to complaints is because their customer service departments are overwhelmed with ambulance-chaser companies who have sold their services to passengers for recover of compensation for delay under European regulation 261. The law was recently clarified on this, widening the circumstances in which compensation is payable, and there was a huge backlog of complaints that had been placed on hold or not initiated till the change on the law. The ambulance chasers often pursue unsustainable claims as well as valid ones. This has put pressure on resources. Plus airlines get a lot of utterly ridiculous complaints from ridiculously entitled passengers (not meaning you OP) .

Just on the other side of this.....

We receive some complaints at work.... people scream down the phone, cry, shout, swear. We are often accused of fraud, rudeness and "not listening" - after we have been ranted at for hours .

We are told items people have bespoke specified (that we have made to their instructions) are wrong, and when we produce their instructions we are told we have altered them, even when they are in their own handwriting .

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the complaint is unjustified, often they have damaged the item themselves, sometimes deliberately, in order to get a refund or compensation. They believe that the more abuse they level at us the more likely we will compensate hah. They believe that if they make themselves difficult they will be given cash.

We sell high value items which makes us a target for chancers people trying to get some money back.

They don't I think realise just how many people are out there trying this on or how many times we have heard the same old script. We can now spot the chancers a mile off.

For clarity on genuine cases we are very generous, replacing items, remaking items, giving compensation. We do make mistakes, and own up to them. This is far far far outweighed by the sheer amount of brass neck out there.

So I think you should be targeting the utter cockwombles who basically make it more difficult for people like you. We end up spending hours on stupid complaints and it makes it hard to get round to them all.

It totally depends on the business, some companies will put a lot of care into the CS department others just do it as a legality and have the bare minimum available (no phone number, 21-day response emails, measly generic discount voucher).

I manage the Social Media for a very well-known brand and I'll tell you what will work if you decide to air your complaints on Facebook or Twitter.

1. include detail, photographs, as much undeniable evidence as possible
2. be polite and firm, "I expect an answer today or i'll be taking this higher" rather than "wheres my refund give me my effing money shambles company rip off "£!*$%'s"
3. don't get personal with the agent helping you or they'll drop you to the back of the queue
4. do your research and assume you know more than you're letting on
5. if the company goes quiet on you, post something new (preferably their response-time promise) rather than rehashing the same complaints.

Remember though, smaller companies really rely on good reviews and good reputation so before you go destroying their image online make sure you've tried your best in every other avenue.

Large companies (and cheapy ones) have new business constantly coming in so they really won't care if you never use them again, bear that in mind.

HTH!