Poor Customer Service Exposed[2]
This webpage lists very poor customer service I have experienced and is placed on the web as a warning to others. As they sometimes said on old maps as a warning, "Here Be Dragons!".
Consumers make better decisions with better information, so I hope this helps and I hope it provides encouragement and success to companies like Smile Banking, who rule supreme in customer services.
- Outdoor Shops in Cambridge are pretty poor but perhaps the worst is Open Air in Green Street, Cambridge (2003) - perhaps it's because the area is so flat around here that all the local outdoor shops are hopeless...
- Worldwide Movers Ltd, New Zealand (NZ), Shipping Company (2005) - an apparently reasonable, helpful and cheap international shipping company based in Christchurch, NZ. However, over several weeks they have spectacularly failed to pay the UK importers they are supposed to have an arrangement with. "The accountant will pay the money to the importers within 2 days", is becoming a boringly predicatable mantra...
- Magnet's Lindman Doors (2005) - my new front door from Magnet, supplied by Lindman, has not lasted very well at all and is looking extremely weathered after only 6 months.
- Amazon's Telephone Support (2005) - although Amazon has pretty amazing online User Experience their the experience you receive when you talk to them on the phone is another matter. Recently I bought some software from Amazon Marketplace which turned out to be pirated and the Amazon folks on the phone were extremely unhelpful about the whole thing and could not advise me as to the correct course of action in this case - and this is something which much happen all the time on Amazon Marketplace.
- The Woolwich (Barclays Bank - BARC) Mortgage Retention Team - An Open Letter to Barclays' CEO John Varley (2006) - I've had some unpleasant dealings with The Woolwich customer services teams in Cardiff before but I thought since the takeover Barclays would have made some improvements. My mortgage has come out of the locked in period so I decided to explore my remortgage options. I tried The Woolwich again, since they have a good deal and I've been with them 6 years. I was dismayed to discover The Woolwich staff, especially those in Cardiff, continue to be surly and unhelpful and could not care less whether they keep your account with them or not - even the 'Retention Team'. This is appalling service and as a Barclays shareholder I have written this open letter to the John Varley, the CEO of Barclays, asking what he is going to do about this. If The Woolwich customer service is causing people like me to move our business elsewhere, this cannot be good for Barclays shareholder value.
- Hertz Heathrow Airport Branch - An Open Letter to Hertz CEO Mark Frissora (2007) - I hired a car from Hertz in January 2007 and inadvertantly left my sunglasses in the car when I returned it. I fully expected that Hertz would be able to return them to me. I left them in an obvious place and they had all my details from the car rental so returning them should have been easy. When I got in touch with the Heathrow Airport office of Hertz I was told that they didn't have any sunglasses in lost property, in fact, they hardly had any lost property at all. For an airport branch of a car hire company this seemed strange to me so I wrote to the CEO only to be informed by his staff that, "The majority of our customers would remove all personal items". They didn't find it at all strange that the Heathrow Branch didn't have much lost property. So, when I hired another car from Hertz in February I deliberately left some sunglasses in the same place within the car that I had the last ones. When I phoned up I was unsurprised to hear that the lost property had not been recovered once again.