The more you hear about banks, the more you want to round them all up and horsewhip them to within an inch of their lives in a public square. We should all draw our collective money out at once and watch them cry on the news.

Those bastards are at it again, by continually failing to tell us about changes to interest rates on our accounts. That’s accord to an article in the Guardian which is reporting on a report from Which? Money. There were too many whiches and reports in that last sentence weren’t there?

Apparently, only four banks/building societies inform savers of all saving rate changes. The rest of them only do it via adverts in newspapers or on boards in the branches.

The good-guys are Cheltenham & Gloucester, First Direct, the Co-operative Bank and ING Direct who promise to personally notify their customers by email or letter of all cuts in rates on their accounts.

The Nationwide building society seem to be the worst of the bunch as they seem to be saying that they just can’t be arsed at all. They make no commitment whatsoever in its terms and conditions to personally notify customers of changes to interest rates, regardless of how big they are.

Of course, this hasn’t been a problem as such as the Bank of England base rate has been frozen at 0.5%, but once that changes, customers may be missing information that could see them wanting to change who they bank with. Who would have thought that eh? Financial institutions being dicks.

Which? chief executive, Peter Vicary-Smith, said: “Our research shows that outdated and inconvenient methods of notice on interest rate changes are keeping savers in the dark for longer, at a time when they need greater disclosure than ever before. This is just another example of banks treating their customers badly.”

A British Bankers’ Association (BBA) spokeperson said: “If all customers were to be notified of all changes to their interest rates – as Which? has suggested – the costs to the environment, the economy, to banks and ultimately to customers would be considerable.

“Around 13.5m personal letters would have to be sent for each rate change; in 2008, when there were five negative base rate movements, this would have generated 67.5m letters.”

Or you could just send an email out?

Not so long ago, we highlighted the ‘unusual’ practices of Zoombits, an online purveyor of memory card and computer accessories. It seemed that they regularly had problems with their stock levels and the time it took for them to issue refunds to customers.

Now there’s more. Over at HotUKDeals, site member D-C-S has been suffering at the hands of Zoombits and their refund policy.

He says: “I ordered some RAM from Zoombits a few days ago and the order has stated ‘Ready to print’ for a while so I spoke to ‘Matthew’ on the live chat facility who told me it is currently out of stock. I asked for the order to be cancelled and he told me that apparently I am not entitled to cancel as it is RAM and therefore non refundable/returnable. I knew this when I ordered and if I cannot get a refund then that’s fine I’ll wait for the item to come in stock, my concern is that the item will never come into stock and I will be £68 out of pocket with nothing to show for it. I stated this in the live chat and, unless I misinterpreted what he said, even if it does not come into stock then they will not return my money.”

Here’s a transcript of his online chat with ‘Matthew’ at Zoombits…

info: You are now chatting with ‘matthew’

matthew: Welcome to Live Chat. How can we help?

you: Hi, I ordered something from you two days ago and it says on the order status ‘Ready to Print,’ what does that mean?

matthew: order number please

you: xxxxxxxx

matthew: I’m sorry for the delay. I’ll be right with you.

you: ok

matthew: your item you have ordered is currently out of stock

you: ok, do you know how long stock will take to be in?

matthew: I will be right with you.

matthew: i dont have time sclae at moment but hopefully should not be to long

you: ok, sadly I think I’ll need to cancel the order as I need it by next week at the latest

matthew: as you ordered RAM item is non exchangeable or refundable as per terms and conditions on our website

you: right so if the item does not come in stock will you then refund me?

matthew: no coz RAM is none refundable only if RAM is faulty then we refund

you: so if it does not become available and I am waiting indefinitely then I will not receive a refund?

matthew: yes that is correct

you: ok, thanks for that

matthew: You’re very welcome and have a nice day…

Obviously D-C-S wasn’t prepared to leave it at that, and after making a subsequent phone call, he says that his order status is listed as ‘being refunded’ – although given Zoombits’ track record, who knows how long it will take for him to see his money again.

So Zoombits then. Approach with caution, people.

Any blog post entitled “Why I’d rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service” will always have our full attention:

[The Oatmeal]

Whenever we call customer services, invariably our conversation may be “recorded for training or monitoring purposes”. A business called HyperQuality is in the business of improving business for other businesses, by monitoring these recordings, assessing and analysing them. Here’s some of the shizzle they’ve heard on their tapes:

Routinely, after a customer is notified that the call may be recorded for quality purposes, but before the agent arrives on the line, we receive an insightful glimpse into:

Multitasking
A substantial number of customers use this time for a bio break; usually a toilet can be heard flushing around the time the agent answers the call.

Psyching up
Prior to the agent joining the call, many customers rehearse their arguments, and audibly elevate their blood pressures, in preparation for unloading their frustrations with a company’s products, services or policies.

Improvising
Some customers choose to use this time to sing to themselves, often improvised songs involving the name of the company with which they are about to engage.

And once the call begins, all manner of dialogue and diatribe have been observed between company and customer:

Anger mismanagement
In a recent tech support call, a customer was very upset. She was yelling and at one point said “I hope those people are listening in!” The agent said “Yes, madam, the call may be monitored.” The customer then replied “Good, I hope they hear this,” and then she proceeded to growl loudly into the phone. She concluded “THAT is how mad I am.”

Dating services
In this digitally-enabled world of anonymity a number of calls turn into attempts at romantic encounters. Frequent offers to meet up, to talk offline and to take exotic trips together have become somewhat routine in the interactions between service representative and customer. This is despite the clear statement at the beginning of the conversation that the calls are recorded for quality purposes and also that much of a customer’s information is known to the agent by the conclusion of the call.

Scenes from beyond
A customer shared with a representative that he had recently died for several minutes, and during his time in “the great beyond” he had a chance to meet with Albert Einstein. It remains unclear how this impacted the customer service experience, but both agent and customer remained serious and focused throughout the dialogue.

[Seattle PI]

Vodafone’s official line on their Sure Signal product is that it’s supposed to give you “a strong mobile phone signal in your home – no matter where you live,” before adding, “If you live in a mobile signal blackspot – places in the UK where mobile operators are unable to give customers a strong enough signal in their homes – Sure Signal is for you.”

You’ve probably guessed that this is going to be one of those articles that points out the failings of said promise.

Customers have stumped up £50 on the promise of getting a connection over their own ADSL line, when there’s no wireless service available. However, they have been left facing repeated disconnections and slowdowns of the service as Vodafone seemingly finds itself unable to integrate their mobile phone network with the internet.

Sure Signal boxes have been playing up of late and now Vodafone’s forums are filled with annoyed people complaining of connection failure.

The Register spoke to Vodafone about the problem and they said: “Some customer[sic] will have noticed changes in their Sure Signal service for short periods of time over the last few days during planned maintenance upgrades”.

It seems that this might not strictly be the case as customers have faced continual outage that can at times last several hours. Quite why Vodafone didn’t deem it sensible to warn customers of any “planned maintenance upgrades” is another matter entirely.

Have you had any hassle with Vodafone?

If you’re a well known brand, there’s no such thing as dipping your toe in the world of social media – you either do it or you don’t. DSGi have suffered at the hands of Facebook in the past, although it was admittedly at the hands of their staff. Now they’re trying to embrace the network with an official Facebook page for online brand Dixons. It has nearly 1,000… well, ‘fans’ is the technical term for people following them, but it’d stretching the truth somewhat.

Everything seemed to start out reasonably well; as expected, customers joined to vent their spleen but were promptly greeted by online representatives who attempted to solve their issues. That was until the beginning of February; for the past two months, customer service reps have abandoned the page.

The result is that it’s turned into a bit of a dog’s dinner; there are one or two customers praising Dixons, but otherwise it’s a long stream of complaints about their appalling customer service, a perception reinforced by the lack of any customer service whatsoever:

Dear Mister Elliot,

Can I call you Mike? No? Now Mike, your role is Head of Credit and Collections at 3, so you may think this letter doesn’t matter to you. It does. Keep reading.

Here’s the deal. If Three is to continue providing customer support via email through the Three website, then at the very least Customer Services should acknowledge any emails they receive and deal with any issues. That’s what customer support is.

Specifically, if Three is going to offer email as a legitimate way of contact for issues such as contract cancellation – as stated in Three’s terms and conditions – then once more, Customer Services need to read the emails and act on them, not ignore them and deny all knowledge of their existence. If an operator asks a customer to re-send the email, then somebody really should reply. Really.

(By the way, in all our collective time of working on Bitterwallet, none of us have ever seen a more impenetrable set of terms and conditions offered by any business – a two page PDF document featuring over two dozen pages from a booklet. Staggering.)

Mike, these issues are not strictly your concern, but given how the failure of Customer Services must provide plenty of business for you, I thought I’d let you know. What is relevant to you, Mike, is this:

If Three is going to attempt to contact a customer during daytime hours, then failure of the customer to respond to a phone message your operator left with an 8 year-old child is not really an excuse to push an account to a collection agency.

And when a customer responds to the letter you signed, by sending a letter recorded delivery, one that contains all the correspondence they sent to Three by email in the past two months, have the decency to have a note put on their account. If you’re going to threaten people with adverse credit ratings, act when they attempt to put things right.

There are probably many reasons why Three has such a poor share of the mobile market. Treating customers like dogshit, even if they don’t want to give your their custom anymore, really can’t be helping matters. You’re putting your name on these letters, Mike. Do something about it.

Cheers,

Paul

PS – for the love of Christ, change the scripts you dish out to your call centre staff. Asking the customer “is there anything else I can help you with?” when the operator called them to threaten them for non-payment – I’ve gotta be honest, Mike, it’s taking the piss.

You can be insulted or pleased when you get IDed in a shop. Some coo and think “Oooh! I must look young!” whereas others may well mutter “cheeky twat, saying I look like a child! I’ve been divorced three times…”

However, for the most part, you understand that these people are just doing their job. You whip out your ID and take away your smokes or booze and no-one gets hurt.

But what about quiche?

First it was the pyjama ban, and now, one poor sod who went to the Tesco at Cannon Park in Coventry got IDed for some quiche.

Christine Cuddihy who happens to be 24 – not that this should matter one jot – was told she couldn’t buy the 50p quiche slice unless she could prove she was over 21. Was it made of knives or something?

She said: “The girl told me: ‘You don’t look over 21. I need to see some proof of age.” She went on to say “At first I thought she was joking but her face was deadly serious. I didn’t quite know what to say.”

Amusingly, she added: “There was nothing suspicious about me and it’s not even like I was buying a whole quiche to binge on… Tesco should at least give me a free quiche after all this – this time without asking for proof of my age.”

Surely the woman serving (who was apparently in her thirties) was having a laugh? Surely she’d been put up to it by another member of staff? Maybe it was her last day and she thought she’d dick around a bit?

Anyway, Tesco have apologised and said there was no reason why Christine was asked to prove her age. A spokesman said: “We’re completely baffled how, or why, this has happened. If you’re buying an age-related product like a knife or a bottle of booze, a prompt will come up on the till, and there obviously isn’t one on quiche.” He added: “We couldn’t find the staff member who asked for the ID.”

[CoventryTelegraph]

Last week we reported on the rock-vs-hard place conundrum faced by Bitterwallet reader Robert, whose daughter cancelled her Orange mobile contract in August and received verbal confirmation she was canceling-without-fee. The mobile service provider then proceeded to charge her £164 for the remainder of her contract and passed the debt onto Moorcroft Debt Recovery Ltd – not one of the favourite debt collection agencies judging by your comments.

The situation was causing Robert and his daughter a barrel of grief and sleeplessness, but happily Orange have come up trumps after we contacted them regarding the situation. A spokesperson told Bitterwallet:

“We have reviewed the case in question and are contacting the customer to apologise for any confusion this matter may have caused them. We can confirm the charges associated with the issue specific to this account have been dropped.”

We’ve popped out and bought a hat specifically to doff it in Orange’s general direction. Dealing with debt collectors is never fun, especially when there’s a question mark over the debt. We’ve some advice for folk finding themselves in a similar position here.

When it comes to rating computer purchase customer service satisfaction, 7,683 Which? magazine panel members have spoken, and guess who came out worst? Step forward PC World and get a slap across the cheek.

Yes, the DSGi brand that everyone hates to love fell horribly short, even though their name suggests they’d be just the kinds of places you’d love to go when you need to buy a computer. The survey gave them a small and twatty customer service score of just 42%.

PC World’s big cousin Currys fared little better, with a crappy 45% score in the survey. In case you were wondering and are one of those positive types who likes to celebrate winners instead of naming and shaming losers, Apple came top with a tidy 88%, with John Lewis just behind them on 73%

Surprised by any of this? Tell us why. Meanwhile, there should be a fresh dollop of DSGi sleaze to follow later in the day…

Every day you pour out the contents of that swill bucket you call a mind, straight into the comments section of Bitterwallet. Every Friday from today, we’re going to sieve that swill, pick out the lumps and phlegmy viscera to determine what the collective brains of Bitterwallet readers really think.

Let’s kick off with an easy one – budget airlines. On Tuesday we reported on Sky Marshall O’Leary’s plans to expand Ryanair’s operations at Leeds-Bradford Airport, introducing 13 new routes to add to the four existing destinations served. Then yesterday we noticed the extreme knee-jerk reaction from Jet2.com, who clearly didn’t know about the announcement until it happened. Their website is now swathed in claims about the outrageous charges levied by “other airlines” while failing to point out any of their own wallet-raiding techniques.

Plenty of you provided a list of reasons why Jet2 is worse than Ryanair, while others had nothing more to say on the matter other than Ryanair is a lot of old balls. So which is it? And what about the likes of easyJet? So for Friday, vote with your fingers and decide the fate of the big 3 budget airlines:

Any comments, informed reasoning or wild accusations, stick them below as usual.

At Bitterwallet, we’re not just about nit-picking, confused ranting and braying on about how shit everything in the world is. Most the time, yes, but not all of it.

Very occasionally we’re struck by stories of good, such as that of the 96-year-old who received a cheque some 70 years after making a deposit in the Unilever Savings Bank. The Telegraph took up the cause of the nonagenarian (look it up):

The Unilever Savings Bank was wound up in October 1984. In line with standard procedures, the liquidators would have written to interested parties, including creditors, to notify them of the intended dissolution, and provide them with the opportunity to present their claims within a specified time.

From the records you have it seems the sum put aside may have been £10 to accrue interest at 3pc, although the capital may have been more. Purely as a gesture of goodwill, Unilever has sent a cheque for £100.

Unilever probably got the better end of the deal, since £10 in 1940 would be worth nearly £1,400 today when comparing average earnings. Nethertheless, it was a kind gesture of goodwill towards a lady who probably believes she’ll be able to buy a new car with it

Sometimes such goodwill is merely a PR exercise or an attempt to head off bad publicity before it threatens to consume a business and the headlines. Occasionally the gesture is entirely altruistic with no hidden agenda. Either way it got us thinking – what’s the best gesture of goodwill you’ve received from a company? It might have been for shoddy service, damaged goods or an accidental punch in the throat.

Which companies have looked after you when they needn’t have done so? Are there any out there that don’t mind spending a little time and money to take care of their customers?

The Bitterwallet Worst UK Company of 2009 award is coming soon, and one of the minnows has made a big push for the big prize with some diabolical customer service aimed at Harj, a Bitterwallet reader.

Harj ordered some hair care products from the online store of Tops Hair Salon in Bolton a couple of weeks ago. When the goods hadn’t arrived, he enquired after their whereabouts in a nice, friendly way…

“Hi,
I ordered these items 8 days ago and still have not received them.
Just wondering if there’s any more information, how are they sent, is there any tracking numbers?
Regards,
Harj”

…to which the reply came…

“they will probably be at your local sorting office”

Okay, he thought, they probably won’t be, and Harj replied to Tops, explaining why…

“Hi,
If they were at the local sorting office I would have had a card through the door (like my 2 Amazon deliveries this week, which were also sent second class on Monday and have been received).
Was this just sent normal delivery second class? Any tracking numbers?”

This not-unreasonable piece of reasoning seemed to get their backs up at Tops Hair Salon, bringing forth this next email from them…

“when you stop talking to me like shit and ask nicely i will answer you, put as many fucking question marks as you like”

Oh. Oh dear. No need for that, Tops Hair Salon in Bolton. Fortunately, Harj was amused by the sour turn the conversation had taken and responded with…

“Haha ace customer service!”

That must have made him look like a clever twat, at least to whoever is in charge of emails at Tops Hair Salon in Bolton, as their next email read…

“clever twat, have the products and the money. you scrota”

We think they mean ‘scrote’ although we’re not completely sure. Sadly, Harj still hasn’t received the products OR any money, and has filed a Paypal dispute. Here’s hoping it gets sorted soon.

We would not recommend you bait Tops Hair Salon using the email address on their website. That would be wrong. Very wrong.

As we’re past the halfway stage of the year, it’s safe to say that it’s almost Christmas, which means only one thing – Bitterwallet’s Worst UK Company Of 2009 Award.

We’re not sure what became of last year’s winner, Setanta Sports, but as we ready ourselves for the spleen-venting season, The Times have compiled the top five companies who they receive the most complaints about to their Troubleshooter consumer affairs section.

There are no surprises whatsoever in the listing, which is as follows…

1:  BT

2:  ABBEY

3:  ALLIANCE & LEICESTER

4:  NAT WEST

5:  NPOWER

It’s a depressingly predictable list, but who’s been getting your consumer goat recently? Tell us the companies who you think should be up there and why. Maybe you’d even like to stick your neck above the parapet and act as an apologist for the gruesome fivesome listed above. Go on, it’s raining – it’s not as though you’ve got anything better to do.

If you’re an Orange customer and find yourself repeatedly clawing your own face off in frustration at their ineptitude, here’s at least one of the reasons why.

According to an anonymous source that contacted The Register, all of their call centres run customer service systems in Internet Explorer 6. The source, a support technician working in Orange’s Bristol call centre, claims the inability of IE6 to open multiple tabs in the same window and the plodding performance are causing major headaches for operators trying to deal with customer queries.

“If you’ve ever called Orange customer services and wondered why it takes so long to get served, it’s because most of the customer service representatives are battling a system that crashes and fails regularly and, because of using Internet Explorer 6, have to open about 10 separate pages just to deal with one customer’s issues,” the source whispered mysteriously to reporter Robert Redford.

Technicians have tried to resolve the issue by downloading Firefox and other browsers, but have been issued with a strict warning of a £250 fine per PC if they attempt to do so, leaving operators with no choice but to handle queries on a browser released in August 2001, when plenty of us were still peering at the web through modems.

No doubt the cost to Orange of rolling out an update across hundreds of machines will be a pretty penny, but better that than leaving customers the nagging feeling that operators are slow because they don’t care, rather than because they’re working on with a jalopy of a browser.

[The Register]