Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 12:41 pm

I thought that for this article I would tell you a story about customer service and how not to do it.

Here in the UK there is a mobile phone company that insists that if you want to end your service at the end of your contract that  you ring them and give them 30 days notice.  The only problem with this system is that the call centre that you end up talking to is based overseas and the operators often speak with a strong accent.

So the story starts…  An email is sent to the mobile phone company asking for a MAC (the code needed to transfer your phone number to a different network) in Mid January explaining that making private phone calls at work is not allowed and that there is a problem understanding heavy accents.  A email response came back saying that I had to ring the company so a further email was sent saying that I was not able to due to restrictions at work.  Eventually a MAC was issued and there you might think the story ends.

Not so…  it seems that you cannot use a MAC if you have used the phone that you are porting the number to, so an email was sent to the phone company saying that I was not able to move the number and that I still wanted to cancel the contract (and that I assumed that the original notice period still stood).  This resulted in more emails saying that I had to ring them with me emailing back saying that I was unable to, even with my passenger taking phone calls from the phone company while I was driving and repeating that I was unable to talk to them as I was driving.

Eventually I looked on the web and realised that I was not the only person to be having this kind of problem so I went to the top and wrote to the CEO sending it recorded delivery.

A week later I got an email saying that the months cancellation period would start from the date of the email – at this point a furious email went back saying that I had given notice in January (it was the end of March by now) and an email came back saying that the months notice period still remained but that they would make an exception for me and cancel immediately.  A final invoice was issued showing that I owed them £2.76 and that they would take this by direct debit.

Now the story takes yet another twist – at the end of the month I checked my bank statement to find that instead of £2.76 the phone company had taken £35.  A phone call later and I had a promise that  within 7 working days they would send the money back to the bank account – bearing in mind that they had taken the money out 2 weeks before this means that their failure to abide by the Direct Debiting rules meant that  had had £32 of my money for three weeks.

All of this could have been sorted with a simple acknowledgement of the written cancellation right at the start, after all in the UK emails are treated the same as other forms of written communications and the last time I looked you could legally cancel contracts in writing.

While all of this was going in I was monitoring the web and in forums, twitter and facebook the phone company name kept coming up for their customer service time and time again all with people complaining about the service or lack of service.  In todays’ world a bad review can be tweeted and re-tweeted around the country (or world) faster than you can imagine, causing “bad press” for any company. 

I do wonder whether any of these companies ever send their staff on customer care courses so that they can appreciate the impact that bad customer service can have and how to react when a customer has a problem.

Our post on good customer service shows how easy it can be to make a good impression on the customer and gain lasting benefits from making small steps while our post on the penalties of not listening to customers illustrates what can happen if you don’t make a good impression.