Cab said:
And you're using that as an example of how typical companies handle customer relations?
Of all of the companies I have ever dealt with in any way for any thing at any time, none come close to Dixons for ineptness and poor customer service, nor do any come even vaguely close for an incapacity to deal with complaints.
It'll have gone massively downhill since it got took over by Crapita.
Fortunately I left just before that, in 2002.
But if you'd have got a letter through to me then you would have got good customer service. If you'd have written a good letter, and explained your case correctly, and had actually bothered to write properly, then you would have got what you deserved.
But, and I'm not saying this is the case with you, but the problem a lot of the time is that people's definition of 'customer service' is 'getting what I want'.
For instance one of the most popular thing I had to deal with is people wanting a refund for their coverplan (after sales warranty). A lot had a genuine story about how they'd no longer got the item and could they please have a pro-rata refund. Yes, no problem.
But a lot would get on the high horse from the word go, were 6 months in, and would launch into an epic diatribe about how they were 'mis-sold' it and wanted a full refund of everything they'd paid for it from day 1. No, sorry. They got politely told to bugger off.
I did also have sympathy with any tales of being messed around by engineers and would be fairly trigger-happy on the '£20 gesture of goodwill' button, and I would also be fairly good at spotting cases where somebody had something that had had to be repaired multiple times and would normally be fairly trigger-happy on the 'refund/replacement' button.
When I've had a complaint with Barclays bank I could find someone with board level access to help deal with it.
You haven't though - you've had a response from someone who *
says they've got board level access.
When I've had complaints with Virgin Media I could resolve those with some difficulty, but I could at least resolve them; the letters addressed to board members did facilitate a far faster and more efficient response than I was otherwise able to obtain.
Do you lose anything by addressing letters to the CEO of any reasonable company? Of course not.
No, but do you *
seriously think* that board members actually spend all day reading customers' letters? Extrapolate it to the whole country - if you address letters to board members - you're no different to anybody else, lots of other people do as well. So therefore they get thousands of letters a day addressed to board members.
They just have an 'executive post' team to handle these letters. In my experience, this is just the slightly more experienced ones out of the normal customer service advisors.
All you need to do is to send it by registered post so they can't deny having received it, and set out your demands of what they are legally obliged to do. And then if they don't do it, you sue. You shouldn't need to plead with them, or appeal to their better nature - because companies generally don't have any.
