Your best and worst customer service experiences [rant & praise]

Dues Bellator

Nasty_Girl wrote: »

Argos. I won't get inti the whole saga of ordering a home delivery from them and them sending the wrong thing and it taking an age to resolve. However, heres a little tale from the branch in Swords.
Husband was in the process of buying a sat nav and me beinf almost 9 months preggers went and sat on the sofa - checking for any signs stating they weren't to be sat on.
Husband was having some difficulty finding what he wanted so I was there for about 5 minutes when some sales girl came over and without making eye contact rattled off "this is our display model so I'll have to ask you to get up".
I called loudly over to husband "they told me to get up don't give them any money" and we left the store.
I can understand they dont want people wrecking their sofas but I felt it was unessecary.

Best customer experience recently would be Eurobaby in Airside. So friendly and helpful

This story genuinely shocked me , please ring there head office and tell them what happened so this can never happen again:mad:

CaliforniaDream

Nasty_Girl wrote: »

Argos. I won't get inti the whole saga of ordering a home delivery from them and them sending the wrong thing and it taking an age to resolve. However, heres a little tale from the branch in Swords.
Husband was in the process of buying a sat nav and me beinf almost 9 months preggers went and sat on the sofa - checking for any signs stating they weren't to be sat on.
Husband was having some difficulty finding what he wanted so I was there for about 5 minutes when some sales girl came over and without making eye contact rattled off "this is our display model so I'll have to ask you to get up".
I called loudly over to husband "they told me to get up don't give them any money" and we left the store.
I can understand they dont want people wrecking their sofas but I felt it was unessecary.

Best customer experience recently would be Eurobaby in Airside. So friendly and helpful

THB, I think you over-reacted. The girl simply told you it was a display model. You even said yourself you 'understand they don't want people wrecking their sofa's'.
Being pregnant doesn't give people a right to be rude or break rules either.

The_Conductor

CaliforniaDream wrote: »

THB, I think you over-reacted. The girl simply told you it was a display model. You even said yourself you 'understand they don't want people wrecking their sofa's'.
Being pregnant doesn't give people a right to be rude or break rules either.

I'd echo this- I've been moved off display sofas in other shops (I'm male- so obviously I wasn't pregnant- but I did have a broken leg at the time). Its life- they are perfectly within their rights to ask anyone to remove themselves from display furniture- if I worked in a shop I'd do the same.

In defense of Argos- my wife loves Sodastream- and after Argos stopped stocking the Cranberry and Raspberry soda that my wife loves- the manager phoned around other stores (DID Electrical and Maplins- not Argos), established who had it in stock and had them hold it for me. That goes well beyond the call of duty in my mind- and while I don't shop in Argos very often, I'll definitely be back.

Procrastastudy

As we're indulging ourselves a bit;

I used to work for Time Computers - a company that had more small claims court summons than staff! They'd almost always cave.

There was a legend of a CS guy working in Burnley - couldn't do anything right so they put him on the 'legal call back' line. All he had to do was arrange to get the machine picked up and refund the customer.

First day he was sent home for shouting "Alright then matey we'll see you in court then!" at the very first customer.

They were a complete bunch of b****rds but I miss them in a way lol.

AhInFairness

Nasty_Girl wrote: »

Argos. I won't get inti the whole saga of ordering a home delivery from them and them sending the wrong thing and it taking an age to resolve. However, heres a little tale from the branch in Swords.
Husband was in the process of buying a sat nav and me beinf almost 9 months preggers went and sat on the sofa - checking for any signs stating they weren't to be sat on.
Husband was having some difficulty finding what he wanted so I was there for about 5 minutes when some sales girl came over and without making eye contact rattled off "this is our display model so I'll have to ask you to get up".
I called loudly over to husband "they told me to get up don't give them any money" and we left the store.
I can understand they dont want people wrecking their sofas but I felt it was unessecary.

Best customer experience recently would be Eurobaby in Airside. So friendly and helpful

With all due respect, being pregnant doesn't entitle you to plonk yourself wherever you like. You're not ill/disabled. It was a display model and the clue is in the name really. Shouting across at your husband like that was just crass tbh.

_AVALANCHE_

AhInFairness wrote: »

Shouting across at your husband like that was just crass tbh.

+1

alie

Most Argos stores have seats for customers . You could have asked was it ok to sit down?

AhInFairness

alie wrote: »

Most Argos stores have seats for customers . You could have asked was it ok to sit down?

Actually, that's a really good point. The Argos in Swords does indeed have seats near the area where you pick up the goods you're buying. Oh well, this is all off-topic. Sorry!

P_1

Rant
Paddy Power on Kilburn High Street in London:
Was over for the rugby last weekend and put a bet on there over the weekend, the bet came in but then when I went to collect it I was told that the manager had marked it as a loser and that I'd have to come back in on the Monday (yesterday) to pick it up.

Rave
Paddy Power on Amiens Street in Dublin:
Sorted out the winnings of the bet in there, they called up Kilburn High Street and f'd them out of it. Got the winnings in Euro rather than Sterling too.

yorbloke

This is the following issue i am having with Electrical Ireland regarding my early payment of my bill. this is the 1st email i sent to them today. 23rd/May

To Electrical Ireland,
I paid my bill on the 12th of May through your early payment option on your website and which is also stated on the Bill itself. This meant I had paid my bill of €122.31 two days before my Direct Debit, which was due on the 14th. Subsequently i receive a letter from Electrical Ireland stating that my Direct debit was not paid and that I will be punished for this error by the sum of €6. I was also fined €12.07 by Bank of Ireland for non payment of a direct debit. So basically for paying something early which all businesses enjoy receiving i am at the loss of €18.07.
Plus I also used over €4 on my telephone credit for a long telephone call to your customer service where I highlight this issue, I was treated like another rat on a thread wheel and my complaint was dismissed with no sense of regard.
Now If i am not reimbursed or appeased in any way I will be taking this further either through a small media campaign (the field I work in) or I will switch to another provider based on principal and fair play.

My account number is xxxxxxxxx

I hope to hear from you soon and this can all be avoided, however I am very angry about this and that anger will drive me on if nothing happens.

Regards

David Condon xxxxxxxxxxx
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Old Today, 13:01 #2
yorbloke
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Join Date: May 2007
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Electrical Ireland reply.
Good Afternoon David

Thank you for your email.

For this query we have assigned tracking number 367435.

When you paid your bill on 14.05.2012 unfortunately we have already gone out to collect your direct debit. We collect the payment 14 days after the bill issues. The exact payment collection date is shown on each bill.

Your bank account will be deducted on the date of shown on your bill but your bank may initiate a payment transaction 3 days before from the date of our payment collection.

For future reference, if you need to change your payment date, please call us on 1850 372 372 as soon as you get your bill.

If you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to help.

Mahelet

Customer Care Team

Electric Ireland
National Contact Centre
Ph 1850 372 372
Outside Ireland 00353 1 8529534
Fax: 021 4844532
Email: service@electricireland.ie
www.electricireland.ie
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Unread Today, 13:03 #3
yorbloke
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Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 7
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I'm astounded at their incompetence. I paid the bill on the 12th of May..!!!
here is my reply...!!!!

More incompetence on behalf of the Electrical Ireland group. I have stated in my email that ! paid my bill on the 12th of May and not on the 14th as you declare. . "Payment terms are 14 days from date of bill issue". as written on your website and invoices.
I will state again I paid the Bill on the 12th of May.

And no disrespect to yourself Mahelet but I would like to deal some one who is proficient in the English language or your supervisor..

Regards
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ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Good

"And no disrespect to yourself Mahelet but I would like to deal some one who is proficient in the English language or your supervisor.."

Why play the racist card? Judging by your own attempts your use of english leaves plenty to be desired.

You were at fault. You don't seem to understand that Direct Dibits take about 3 days to process. You paid too close to the due payment date and did not allow for a weekend either. You have no cause for complaint and certainly owe the person in Electric Ireland an apology for your extremely rude behaviour.

Nasty_Girl

AhInFairness wrote: »

With all due respect, being pregnant doesn't entitle you to plonk yourself wherever you like. You're not ill/disabled. It was a display model and the clue is in the name really. Shouting across at your husband like that was just crass tbh.

Well if she had been a bit politer to me and maybe pointed me to the actual seats I would've been happy to move over I've seen them in other argos but not in this one (I'd never been in there before).
I did check the signs on the sofa for any warning not to sit on them so I didnt think it would be such a big deal to sit for a couple of minutes.

Nasty_Girl

alie wrote: »

Most Argos stores have seats for customers . You could have asked was it ok to sit down?

There was no one around to ask that I saw. I checked the signs on the chair.

fasttalkerchat

Alejandra Defeated Spine wrote: »

"And no disrespect to yourself Mahelet but I would like to deal some one who is proficient in the English language or your supervisor.."

Why play the racist card? Judging by your own attempts your use of english leaves plenty to be desired.

You were at fault. You don't seem to understand that Direct Dibits take about 3 days to process. You paid too close to the due payment date and did not allow for a weekend either. You have no cause for complaint and certainly owe the person in Electric Ireland an apology for your extremely rude behaviour.

Agreed. If I was the member of staff the email would have been deleted and I would have disregarded you as a racist whinger.

(I know that wasn't your intention but it came across that way.)

artyeva

Nasty_Girl wrote: »

Well if she had been a bit politer to me and maybe pointed me to the actual seats I would've been happy to move over I've seen them in other argos but not in this one (I'd never been in there before).
I did check the signs on the sofa for any warning not to sit on them so I didnt think it would be such a big deal to sit for a couple of minutes.

you looked for seats, they didn't have any. you didn't see ANY staff in the shop at all [?] to ask if it was ok to sit on it, so you sat on the display model, the staff member quite rightly asked you to get up. complete non issue. if she did indeed word it as ''this is our display model so I'll have to ask you to get up" and not ''get up off that and get out of the shop'' then i think you might have over reacted tbh. and you being pregnant has nothing to do with anything.

Procrastastudy

Firstly the you have exposed yourself as a bit of a knacker but;

What is a display sofa for if you can't sit on it? Thats just daft 90% of buying the thing is checking it's comfortable. The pictures are in the catalogue so you know what it looks like. Is it there so you can smell it or something?

Secondly - any retail worker with an ounce of common sense or half decent manager would offer a pregnant woman a seat it she needed one. I was always fetching chairs from the back as women would sit on our kick stools.

Dudess

yorbloke wrote: »

I paid my bill on the 12th of May through your early payment option on your website and which is also stated on the Bill itself. This meant I had paid my bill of €122.31 two days before my Direct Debit, which was due on the 14th. Subsequently i receive a letter from Electrical Ireland stating that my Direct debit was not paid and that I will be punished for this error by the sum of €6. I was also fined €12.07 by Bank of Ireland for non payment of a direct debit. So basically for paying something early which all businesses enjoy receiving i am at the loss of €18.07.

"Enjoy receiving" - you'd swear you gave them a present. You paid them the amount you owed for a service they provided. You didn't pay early, you paid two days before the deadline and it takes a further period of time for the funds to clear. The "bill due" date is not a target, it's a limit.
If you agree to pay by direct debit, then pay by direct debit. If you are making an exception, don't assume they can just drop everything and accommodate it - two days is nothing. You need to give ample notice. For a direct debit to be over-ridden, you need to pay about a week in advance of the payment due date. The system had no way of knowing yet that you had made the manual payment and so the direct debit was returned unpaid because there were no funds in your account (granted, due to you paying, but it was too early for this information to be received), thus you incurred an unpaid direct debit fee due to administrative costs. It's quite a hassle for a bank/company.

I also used over €4 on my telephone credit for a long telephone call to your customer service

Not their problem.

Now If i am not reimbursed or appeased in any way I will be taking this further either through a small media campaign (the field I work in)

Won't achieve much considering it was your error.

or I will switch to another provider based on principal and fair play.

Why would they be any different?
As far as I know, Airtricity charges an even higher unpaid direct debit fee.

I'm astounded at their incompetence. I paid the bill on the 12th of May..!!!

It was terribly written, I will concede that - a person whose first language is not English should be given a template to work off; it's only fair - on them and the customer. But the advisor was very pleasant, and there was no further incompetence.

And no disrespect to yourself Mahelet but I would like to deal some one who is proficient in the English language or your supervisor.

Mahelet's supervisor or an advisor with a stronger command of English would say the very same thing to you.

I realise given your other posts you're likely to get stroppy and abusive to people who don't support you (even though you're in the wrong) or you might throw out a devastating "You must work for Electric Ireland" (because apparently one can only recognise it's the customer at fault, not the company, if one works for said company) but that doesn't change a thing. Your mistake. Chalk it down to experience and learn from it. To be fair, it was a reasonable enough mistake to make, but making out that you're not at fault and the company has wronged you, when it has been explained clearly how it was your error, is not reasonable in the slightest.

Procrastastudy

yorbloke wrote: »

And no disrespect to yourself Mahelet but I would like to deal some one who is proficient in the English language or your supervisor..

This made me LOL. Or should I say. And this made me LOL.....!!!!!?!?...

Fey!

A rave for A&E in UCH, Galway.

Mrs Fey is pregnant, and last night had severe pains. At 2am I had to bring her to the hospital. The receptionist had her sent in to a nurse with a porter within 30 seconds, and the nurse had her in a bed in the gyny unit within 15 minutes. The nurses there were just as efficient and incredibly helpful, and she had been seen by the doctor on duty within about an hour.

They kept her in overnight, and her own doctor was with her within minutes of coming on duty. I had a phone call from her to pick her up before 8:30.

Very efficient, very helpful, and at all times the staff were brilliant at putting her mind at ease.

lazygal

This reminds me, we had a great experience in Holles Street recently. I was a little concerned about a lack of movement so was told to come in for a trace (monitoring of fetal heart rate and movements). I was seen within ten minutes and the whole thing took 25 minutes. The nurses and midwives were great at explaining everything and reassuring us and really were fantastic. Very, very impressed with them and I'm very happy to be having my baby there.

paddyandy

Mobile Phone Companies without a doubt but it's not the frontline staff more the wickedness of the Board of Directors .I am looking forward very much to Viber and Skype getting very strong on android and i wonder at the fight they'll put up .They have gouged and mugged and robbed us for a very long time now .

Thoie

Praise for Homestore, Fonthill. I dashed in there yesterday to pick something up, and stupidly left something of mine on the counter.

Mailed them last night when I realised where I must have left it, and got a prompt reply this morning say they'd found it, and have put it away safely for me!

hattoncracker

paddyandy wrote: »

Mobile Phone Companies without a doubt but it's not the frontline staff more the wickedness of the Board of Directors .I am looking forward very much to Viber and Skype getting very strong on android and i wonder at the fight they'll put up .They have gouged and mugged and robbed us for a very long time now .

There's a season why they don't allow it though... The network physically cannot support it. If they start letting everyone use Skype through mobile the network would crash..

O2, Vodafone and FloGas Natural Gas are in my good books, have never been let down by them. My worst experiences would have been Microsoft, followed by UPC.

With MS, I couldn't activate a PC after a repair installation because when I tried to open the activation program it just wouldn't open. They were being helpful, until they heard that I didn't use the CD that came with the PC, despite using the product key from the PC. That was the only time I lost the rag with a CSR on the phone. What got to me was that it was the same disc, just not the one that came with the machine. I ended up fixing the problem myself by reinstalling IE8.

UPC come second. I had a problem with my modem which was due to outdated firmware, verified by some of the posts on here and previous experience. Despite knowing exactly what the problem was, the tier 1 rep point blank refused to accept that it was a firmware issue. I kept my cool and tried to explain the issue, but he cut across me several times. I continued to remain calm and he eventually agreed a callout to replace the modem - which worked because the replacement modem had the current firmware revision on it.

hattoncracker

fasttalkerchat wrote: »

that

Went into a shop to get change for a Dublin Bus. Bought something and got 2 euro coins. Asked for 2 single euros instead and was told sorry, we're low on change. Asked for whatever you have ( need small change for the bus). He said sorry, cant do that. Their were a few people waiting behind me in the queue so I decided to be awkward and demand a refund.

So you went into a shop because you weren't organised enough to have the correct change for the bus, and I assume this was the morning time when shops have very little cash in the till, and you decide to waste her and other customers time because she didn't have the change that she is not obliged to give..

You sir, come across as a tool.

fasttalkerchat

hattoncracker wrote: »

So you went into a shop because you weren't organised enough to have the correct change for the bus, and I assume this was the morning time when shops have very little cash in the till, and you decide to waste her and other customers time because she didn't have the change that she is not obliged to give..

You sir, come across as a tool.

How else do you get change? Should I have went to a bank for change for the bus? I bought something so the least they could do was give me the change I wanted. Its not like I wasn't a customer!

And no, it was the afternoon.
He just looked at the next customer over my shoulder and didn't seem to care that I had clearly only come in for the change but bought something so as not to put him out of his way.

Corruptedmorals

No, it is ridiculous not to give change in a situation like that. I always refused to break notes for people who came in for that purpose, because the majority of them were scammers. The shop assistant might have lumped you into that category, even though you were buying something and it wasn't notes. They might well have been out of single euro coins, floats in spars and the like tend to be pitiful to decrease the amount of cash in tills, but they would have had 50's and 20's.

I would have waited until the queue was served and then ask for smaller coins really politely when there's no excuse such as other customers waiting. Difficult I know when the shop is constantly busy.

the groutch

big thumbs down here.

ordered 12 of Product A & 12 of Product B (a very similar product) on the 7th.

two weeks before they even dispatch it, and arrives today.

came in a crappy padded envelope, and the items were loose inside, so had been bashed around all over the place, and to make things worse they sent 24 of product A, not 12 of each.

and the receipt inside was a store one, so someone had literally put them through a till in a random shop (he/she coulnt even do that right as I was overcharged 8 cent), and then bunged them into an envelope.
to do this they would also have needed my CC details, a major data protection issue.

NEVER AGAIN!

artyeva

the groutch wrote: »

NEVER AGAIN!

yeah, i noticed that about holland and barrett too. till receipt from a shop in dublin and loose inside a not-even-sealed-properly white A4 envelope. i would have thought the online sales would have been sent directly from the warehouse? unless they are and they're just using an internal till number from a store?

ynul31f47k6b59

To the dude incapable of removing irrelevant content before hitting 'publish', why in the hell did you even bother paying your bill two days before it was due to be paid automatically?! Don't you know that transactions like that take a couple of working days to come through?! I pay my O2 broadband bill on a Friday and I only get a message the following Wednesday to say a payment has been received.

And your own grasp of the English language isn't overly impressive, so I don't know who you think you are to make a comment like that to someone trying to help you for your own mistake.

To the pregnant woman - you're not entitled to sit where you want just because you're pregnant. You have a baby growing inside you, not a disability that entitles you to whatever you want. I wouldn't rest myself on a display sofa, why should you?

Want to praise the paramedics from Longford/Mullingar who managed to put a very, very worried and agitated 76-year old man at ease on his way to hospital this weekend. I didn't catch both their names, but if you know a paramedic named Gabriel who started work at 7pm Sunday evening, he deserves serious credit for being such a professional and friendly chap, he's in the right job. Same goes for his colleague.