What’s your worst customer service experience?
Posted by bellabanjsk@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 36 comments
I’ll go first…
I bought a house bed for my son from Roomix in February, a delivery comprising of two boxes, a base (box 1) and the corners and roof (box 2), which arrived in early March. It turned out they’d sent two bases by accident, and since then they’ve sent a second completely random bed base, and now they’ve sent the replacement roof some random address the other end of the country. Chasing them is now a full time job, and if my son didn’t want this bed so badly I’d 100% be just doing a chargeback. Argh!
Not sure I’ve ever found a customer service experience so infuriating and drawn out, but I’ve never had a flight issue to deal with… so hit me with it. Your worse customer service experience - name and shame!
txe4@reddit
Turfed out of business class at the gate and marked as a disruptive passenger (I wasn't) because the staff didn't like the look of us. In the pre-eu261 and ADR days; now-a-days I would be dancing for joy at the compensation that would be due.
Anything involving a letting agent as either landlord or tenant, abysmal. Lying incompetent scum.
Anything involving car rental if you aren't a frequent flyer with the scheme, hard sell for fraudulent insurance basically every time.
Scaffolders and plasterers, coked-up arseholes with the organisational ability of a potted plant.
Vitality Health Insurance - phone calls answered by people who literally could not speak English. Nothing done when it was supposed to be. Clearly and cynically designed to make it impossible for sick people to deal with and make claims.
Anyone or anything connected with Manchester airport, the grimmest shithole I have ever flown through. Makes Birmingham New Street seem like a palace.
jimicus@reddit
Anything involving transport, then?
I can understand that.
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
Oh actually you’re dead right on car hire. They love to suddenly find dinks and scuffs on the car that were there when you picked it up - like the fraud Olympics. So glad I’m not in the US ‘RE health insurance - my god I bet they’ve got some stories.
Dazz316@reddit
Years ago I got notified from the bank saying I'd hit my limit and was being charged X amount. I checked my account and had 100's more in my account that was required for the transaction.
I printed out my statement an went to the bank the next day and spoke to one of the girls. She just kept repeating that if I had it the limit that those were my charges and there was nothing that I could do. I kept showing her I had more in my account than was required for the transcaction, she didn't listen and I may as well have been speaking to a robot. Well eventually she got her supervisor, who did the same thing. Eventually got a manager who listened, but said there was nothing he could do. I had to accept the charge.
Nooooo. You've charged my like 30 quid (or whatever it was) for like a £15 transaction when I have a few 100's in my account. I was young back then and rolled over quite easily but for some reason I found the courage to hold my ground and refuse until the fixed the error. Despite the manager saying there was nothing he could do, the heavens apparently opened up and he manage to waive the fee.
I still can't beleive 2 people were just so pigheaded to not listen. It just seemed so simple to me, it wasn't even close to the limit and I had plenty of money in my account.
jimicus@reddit
You had three people who wouldn’t listen. The manager just figured it was easier to refund you £30 as a “goodwill gesture” than to have you in the branch all afternoon embarrassing them.
Dazz316@reddit
Yeah it was just utterly ridiculous. It was just such a simple and easy to see problem, not like my math was off and it was like £42 transaction with £49 in my account but I had a £12 pending fee. Plenty left. It was infuriating.
jimicus@reddit
I don’t know if they still do, but historically banks processed their transactions overnight in batches. And these batches were processed in order.
The order was debits. Then charges for going overdrawn. Then credits.
So you could literally go overdrawn at 01:00 in the morning, get charged £30 for the privilege at 01:30 and have your salary paid in at 02:00.
And that would cause exactly the situation you described.
Dazz316@reddit
Nah, plenty plenty in my account. Not like close to the mark or I'd only been paid the previous day.
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
Infuriating when people are incapable of their own critical thought.
EyeAware3519@reddit
Virgin Media. Do I really need to expand on that?
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
Haha no! I have heard lots of really terrible things about those guys. Amazed they still have customers?
jimicus@reddit
For years, the speeds they offered were several times faster than anyone else.
That’s becoming less common with fibre to the premises.
NoodleDoodlesocks@reddit
They've always been really helpful here when I've had to contact them. Haven't had to do so in a while, mind you.
Dazz316@reddit
Years ago I left virgin. I was moving back to Aberdeen from Edinburgh and they hadn't put any services in Aberdeen yet. So when I tried to leave and explained where I was moving to, they didn't even try to keep me. They ended things and the customer service was totally fine.
We arranged for an engineer to come out a day or two before I left and moved out. He didn't show. I called and they said something came up, and that I had to stay in and wait on a day the following week. I explained I won't live there anymore. The person said I had to be there, I explained I'm not waiting all morning outside a house I don't live in anymore. I tried giving them my new address, but they had no engineers that way and wouldn't pick up from there. (In hindsight I could have given them to someone I knew but it didn't register at the time, surprised they didn't say). I even offered to walk it to a Virgin Megastore but that didn't fly.
Went back and forth a bit. They said if I wasn't available to return it they'd charge me the full amount for the kit. I explained I am available, they can come get it from me anytime they want, they were the ones who didn't come get it at the time we both agreed. They said they'd get back to me, they never did. i had the equipment buried in some boxes for ages before chucking them out.
MeesterMartinho@reddit
Also my worst experience with CS. Absolute fucking wasters
MilitantSheep@reddit
Bought a wardrobe from Bensons in the Boxing Day/New Year's sales, delivery and assembly was included but contracted out, the company will be in touch when they have a date but it could be a while as the manufacturer makes them to order in Germany. OK whatever, we don't mind waiting.
They get in touch by text in February to say they'll come out in two days time, please reply yes or no to accept or decline. Side note- I am a nurse, my rota is planned out a couple of months in advance and I can't just take a day off at short notice unless someone agrees to swap a shift with me, which isn't always doable. I was working that day so I tried to find a number to speak to them and arrange something but there wasn't one. No trace of a phone number for them online and the text came from a number you couldn't call. I replied no and hoped the next date they offered I'd be available. I wasn't. This went on for ages with me eventually going through Bensons to get this company's phone number and then them telling me that there was nothing they could do and I had to just keep declining unsuitable dates until they offered me one I could take. They refused point blank to work with me to find a suitable date.
Eventually they came out in April but one panel was damaged so they left the wardrobe in pieces in the corner of the spare room until it got replaced. Cue another few weeks of the whole bloody circus again and we finally had it built in June but they damaged an internal panel (very minor, a cosmetic scratch really and I didn't care at all) so they would have to replace that panel too but in the meantime everything was usable.
By the time this new panel arrived Bensons had stopped working with them altogether and it was another company entirely who rang me this time to ask when they could come out and sort it- the guy who came said 50% of his jobs since starting had been fixing the first lot of cowboys' mistakes.
Vampirero@reddit
I did volunteer work years ago with a charity shop that shall not be named.
This is probably from the other side than most people will be describing but a poor distraught American (I think?) woman rang up wanting to donate furniture after her husband died. She absolutely could not understand that we couldn't accept this furniture for a perfectly legitimate reason, much as I tried to explain to her in as many ways as I could, that we couldn't accept it.
She just kept crying and repeating herself on the phone. I didn't really know what to say to her. My manager was no help and just let me deal with the situation.
JeffSergeant@reddit
Aviva car insurance. The company is not really one company, but 5 different companies in a trenchcoat, none of the departments can see each others systems, and the call centre people are clearly not allowed to go off script on pain of death.
Sea-Still5427@reddit
A business one with BT. I discovered they'd failed to add phone lines they had been charging us for for months. Got nowhere with CS. Eventually one (trying to be helpful) gave me an email address for the CEO's office. They sacked him for it.
I wrote again pointing out the irony of getting rid of the one person who genuinely tried to help a customer. They reinstated him. He immediately explained the insider top secret compensation process, and a week later I received a payment that covered our wages bill for the month.
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
What a rollercoaster. I’ve heard bad things about BT ripping off old people too, lovely company it seems.
Sea-Still5427@reddit
Like British Gas, Royal Mail and the railways, culturally they still secretly believe they have a monopoly and you should wait on them, not the other way round.
No-Problem-1354@reddit
The other was my energy company sending me guidance on how to budget better because I couldn’t afford their 350% increase to my monthly direct debit
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
That was nice of them 🙃
Mysterious_County154@reddit
Curve Card in late 2024
I was out one Sunday and my phone started going crazy with transaction emails from Curve. I had completely forgotten I had a Curve Card, I only ever signed up for it because my card wasn't working on Google Pay for whatever reason. Eventually Lloyds fixed the issue and I stopped using Curve around late 2023
Checking these emails, the transactions were for a hotel in London via a booking site called "Agoda" for £300, £400, £600 etc. I thankfully had my card frozen at the time so the transactions didn't go through, I further stopped this by contacting Lloyds and getting them to block any transactions with the CRV* identifier
I contacted Curve support, it took them 3 days between replies (A Financial company should NOT have support this slow) and they just replaced my card in the end. Which the replacement card also had attempted fraud on it for ChatGPT subscriptions. This makes me think there was an internal breach at Curve. I had only ever used my Curve Card via Samsung Pay which uses a virtual card number for every transaction. The physical card they give you never left my house either
It took 3 months of contacting them to get my Curve account closed because I kept getting constant error messages. Never again, fuck Curve. I know I didn't actually lose any money but the fact i could've really scared me
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
Never heard of them but this is ridiculous! Can’t believe they haven’t been shut down with that kind of fuckery
Mysterious_County154@reddit
They are owned by Lloyds now
Wonder if Lloyds would be as helpful as they were back then if this were to happen to me now
RaneBera@reddit
One particular experience peeved me off was me I noticed my credit card had some charges in Canada so I phoned up about the fraud.
The person on the other end decided to have a go at me because I hadn't reported it immediately (was a credit card I checked roughly bi weekly). She was being snarky AF as if I had personally shipped my credit card to Canada for someone to buy lingerie with.
What still lingers is my reaction. I called from my noisy office, had a lot going on, and all I could do was mumble "erm...ok...no problem". How I'd love to go back and just say "actually...MAYBE WORK ON IMPROVING YOUR CARD SECURITY INSTEAD OF HAVING A GO AT YOUR CUSTOMERS YA F'ING D'HEAD..."
No-Problem-1354@reddit
The council tax refusing to bill me as they said they had no proof I live at my address.
Who calls up and asks to pay another person’s council tax 😂
FatalCakeIncident@reddit
I had the opposite. Edinburgh Council has no verification system in place, so when a new landlord bought the property beneath mine and registered for council tax with my door number, they accepted his payment and closed my account. Top work.
jimicus@reddit
I’ve got quite a few, but I think the worst was when I told TV licensing my mum had died - and three weeks later they sent one of their standard threat-o-grams.
I wrote the most stinking email to the CEO of Capita. And a week later some smarmy git from TV licensing called me up regarding this and informed me my mum had only died two days after they sent the letter. Even though he had her death certificate in front of him.
I hope the whole damn organisation suffers from gangrene of the penis.
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
I’d never heard of that sort of revenge curse but I like it a lot.
Arseholes!
AnyWalrus930@reddit
Having worked in the call centre for NTL when I was a student, I view any bad customer service I receive as karmic justice for the terrible customer service I dished out.
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
Haha that’s a very zen way to view things. I wonder what I did in a past life 🤔
roxywalker@reddit
Had a furniture store ship the wrong sized headboard and frame. We measured and realized that the headboard was a Queen and the frame was Full sized. For whatever reasons when we called and spoke with sales managers they insisted we were crazy and had no idea what we were talking about. Finally, the owner agreed to send workers over to measure. They confirmed the pieces were mismatched and then the owner insisted we probably “switched them out”.
By then, we were furious. We had gone back and forth for weeks and they were doubling down like we were scammers. My husband lost it and in the end they credited back the price of the headboard.
bellabanjsk@reddit (OP)
So annoying isn’t it! Seems furniture shops are prime culprits for this sort of ridiculousness.
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