Are you being served?

“The cheque is in the post.” In the 20^th Century that was the most frequent lie which large organisations told to their customers. It has now been replaced by a recorded message saying that “Your call is important to us.” Although obviously not important enough for them to answer it before you have lost the will to live.

As you may have guessed, I’ve had several bad customer experiences recently. Here are a couple of the most awful.

Back in February I needed to go into Glasgow city centre for an appointment and decided to be green and travel by bus. Unfortunately I missed the appointment because the bus didn’t turn up. When I asked First Bus for an explanation they simply sent me a template email response saying that my concern had been noted.

I then entered into a lengthy email correspondence with the First Bus Glasgow customer service team, which for some strange reason is based in Leeds. All I wanted was for them to say sorry and tell me why the advertised service had not operated. Eventually I was told that the service had not run because the bus had been unable to trace. I then asked what unable to trace meant but nobody at First Bus customer services seemed to know.

A further several weeks of email exchanges followed. First Bus did eventually send me a modest sum in compensation, but I am still no nearer to knowing why the bus didn’t turn up. If you happen to know what unable to trace means in relation to buses then please do me a favour and tell the customer service team at First Bus.     

My second bad experience came as a result of the trip which Eileen and I had planned to make to Germany in May to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Understandably the trip was cancelled due to Covid 19 and Flight Centre assured us that we would receive a full refund. So we waited, and waited……

Flight Centre explained to us that there would be a delay in processing our refund because they were short staffed due to a large number of employees having been furloughed.

Repeated emails and phone calls got us nowhere. We did what any good PR would do and gave the story to the media. The Sunday Post ran it in mid July and, you will be astonished to learn, the refund was in our bank account just a few days later!

Those are just two examples of shockingly bad customer service, I am sure we’ve all experiences countless others. The sad thing is that it really isn’t all that difficult to get customer service right. All you have to do is listen to the concerns of the customer and act on them.

It’s not rocket science, which is why I don’t understand why so many organisations choose to damage their reputation by sending out bland template responses and stonewalling clients in the hope that they will get fed up and go away.    

I am currently in dispute with My Business Works and Moonfruit who are blaming each other for problems with my website, which I pay them both to facilitate. Here we go again!

Stay safe.

Ends

Tags: Customer service, First Bus, Flight Centre, Moonfruit, My Business Works, Sunday Post