What Happened to Customer Service in This Country?

[nightwish]

How can you get good coustomer service from a call centre abroad when you cant understand what they are saying and they cant understand you!

 

Perfectly obvious these companies do this on purpose so they dont have to sort out problems. They know most people will be put off ringing them myself included. As previous posts have said we should move to different companies but it is hard to find one that is still operated from the UK.

 

My worst experiences have been with HSBC and Talk Talk both useless.

[nightrider]

Thank you for lending your intellect to the debate.

 

How can I pay my debt if they won't send me a final bill? .

 

phone them up and pay on debit card?

[simondjuk]

Why is it so difficult to get any sort of resolution to an issue with big companies these days?

 

I have recently transferred from British Gas to Powergen but still can't get BG to close my old accounts. I've cancelled the direct debits, phoned them three times and emailed them twice. All I get is some stupid response like "we don't have enough information to process your request". As I owe them about £100 I can't honestly say I'm that bothered, but no doubt if it doesn't get sorted they'll sue me and then I'll have to fart around to avoid having a CCJ against me.

 

 

Maybe the reason they wont close your account is because you do owe them some money

[sazaboo]

every big firm will have horror stories i left n power to go to grittish bass, that was months ago and due to n power having terrible customer service, we are now having problems with BG, i cant be arsed to change again so im just crossing my fingers that it will get sorted. good luck every one

[Chumley]

OK, I obviously didn't make it clear enough in my first post. Apologies (except to samcdcd who's just rude).

 

The problem I have is I don't know how much to pay them because they won't issue a final bill, even though they've had the meter readings 5 times now. I know from the reading I owe them roughly £100, but obviously I need a final bill so I can settle up.

 

If I was a bad debtor I wouldn't be trying to get a bill from them.

 

If I had a bill and knew how much to pay, I wouldn't be complaining about them not closing the account.

 

I cancelled the direct debit because they took the usual monthly payment even after the transfer to Powergen had gone through and given the difficulty in getting these people to sort anything out, I certainly didn't want to be in a position where they owed me money.

[gempud]

I was on a British Gas pre payment meter and moved to an Npower pre payment meter. As the word 'pre pay' suggests, if I didn't buy my gas and electric by topping up the card before hand, I had no power. Despite this both companies still continued to send me bills for approx £200 of debt each. Their customer services were crap and despite me pointing out the whole pre payment fact, they still couldn't write the debt off as apparently it was impossible that I could be in debt if I had not used the power. I had to go to the official energy ombudsman before they wrote the incorrect debt off but it took about 6 months of constant battling, phone calls, and dreading it when I saw a British Gas envelope on the door mat. Even then they did not write the debt off by admitting that they were incorrect - they stated that they wrote it off as I had no history of bad debt previously. Argh!

 

I work in customer service myself for a very small company, there are only 3 of us in the office and we certainly offer excellent customer service. Nothing is too much trouble as we realise that without the customer, we would have no job. It generally tends to be the large companies that can't keep a constant tab on all their hundreds of employees that tend to be the problem.

[Chumley]

It generally tends to be the large companies that can't keep a constant tab on all their hundreds of employees that tend to be the problem.

 

The utility companies and financial services certainly seem to be the worst offenders. Maybe it's the result of deregulation and competition - they cut prices so much they can't afford to invest properly in staff and training?

 

And on balance I would probably agree that UK call centres are no better than offshore ones.

[llamatron]

I realise this is an old thread but I was going to start one with the same name. Seriously why is every company out to (and allowed to) shaft their customers? I watched panorama last night all about those stupid telemarketing and scam cold calls. Sheffield city council is trying to shaft me currently, the banks are shafting us constantly!

 

I am constantly getting calls and texts from companies that must have bought my details from o2 or some other company I have stupidly been a customer of. I always make sure I have not allowed companies to contact me when I use internet forms and desubscribe from everything possible, I am x-directory and use fake phone numbers on any form that requires a phone number. Who is selling my details????

 

Pheeew feel better now!

[Mecky]

Don't let customer service stand in the way of profit!

[llamatron]

forgot to moan about the lovely train monopolies that charge us extortionately and tell us how much we like their service even though you rarely meet people who agree with that-who are they talking to:huh: