2011-06-13

Fed up

Well, still no new hot end, so no toy to play with.

Loads of work to do.

Yet another talk on IPv6 on Wednesday (World IPv6 forum in London).

And what is going on these days with some people. I had one customer demanding like £700 because a router was posted a day late, another demanding a refund because he did not notice or report a fault on a line for a year (actually, looks like he just had the router turned off, not a fault), another that did not bother to cease a line and paid his bills for a year and now wanting money back, and then one that had annex M installed a few days late (our fav telco messing up again) wanting loads of compensation.

We know people make mistakes, which is why we go to some lengths to define things in the terms like installation dates not guaranteed, and "prove you asked us to cease" but we'll give you a receipt when you ask, etc.

Yet still I have to deal with people being silly and just trying it on. That is just depressing. We do not normally have any of this crap, and now I have several at once. Arrrg!

Fair enough, if we messed up (and one I think we may have, shipping a router a day late) - but not like £700 compensation for a £20 router FFS. We make it clear if we don't ship on time you get the shipping costs free. We say what happens if we do screw up, in advance, and then we try hard not to screw up...

When people are nice, we are nice, and usually compensate people even when we don't have to.

And none of these are consumers. Makes me wonder if we are heading to a recession again. Businesses finding any excuse (even made up ones) to complain?

Oh well, proper rant. I feel better now.

17 comments:

  1. "I had one customer demanding like £700 because a router was posted a day late" - a day, tell them to get over themselves. I'd love to see them take that one to small claims court though...

    "another demanding a refund because he did not notice or report a fault on a line for a year" - I don't think it's possible to refund IQ points. However I do think if you didn't notice a problem, then there isn't a problem.

    "another that did not bother to cease a line and paid his bills for a year and now wanting money back" - And I have a flux capacitor for sale. However paying a bill is a fairly good indication that you want and use a service, so tough.

    "and then one that had annex M installed a few days late (our fav telco messing up again) wanting loads of compensation." - I'm sorry, they want compensation on an ADSL2+ line (not fiber, we're talking about a standard bleedin' broadband line) over a Mbit of upload for a couple of days? LOL. (Wow if their data transmission is that super critical they must have loads of lines)

    It sounds like the law of averages has served you a few people that are (and I'm not sure how to say this) a bit special...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am unsatisfied with your rant and blog, I demand compensation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Special" is the word that came to mind, yes.

    I know we can mess up, and I am happy to offer fair compensation when we do - but this lot are driving me spare right now.

    Thanks for the support.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ah, 1, blogs come with a money back guarantee :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. The annex M one was live streaming video from royal wedding. With a lot of work we got all the lines annex M for the event even. It was a lot of work. They even used the lines on the event. But who uses ADSL for commercial TV streaming FFS. That is fiber installs 3 months before hand normally!

    ReplyDelete
  6. The fault one started arguing the fault was not visible for them, so we should have noticed! I pointed out that if they could not tell there was a fault it was clearly not service affecting so why are we talking!

    ReplyDelete
  7. The one that had a day delay on a new router may have gone away. He said that a free router was not acceptable compensation, so I invoiced him for it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. As for one that ceased a line - we really try hard to cover this. We know you get stupid cases of people paying bills without checking and make it part of the terms that you have to show you asked us to cease, but in return we always provide a receipt (order confirmation). Lets see what happens.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Ooh, I bought a router from you last week and was kind of hoping you'd dispatch it in time for me to get it weekend but you didn't.

    Still, I'm looking forward to my £700 compensation now, it never occured to me to claim that until now :P

    ReplyDelete
  10. My TARDIS hasn't turned up. You said you posted it Friday, I had a business need for it on Friday so that I could travel forward in time and get the Euromillions numbers and then back to place my winning ticket. Please provide me £60m within the next 7 days.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I demand compensation because your blog set large numbers of cookies without asking me to opt in. £700 should be just right I think. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  12. I will of course demand £700 compensation from A&A if the BT guy coming to install my FTTC tomorrow doesn't like the mug of tea that I make for him. Upgrade the comp to £900 if he insults the selection of biscuits that may be made available also!

    ReplyDelete
  13. "My TARDIS hasn't turned up. You said you posted it Friday" my tardis turned up a week before I ordered it, result!

    ReplyDelete
  14. WRT the Annex-M issue, the phrase "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine!" springs briskly to mind.

    ReplyDelete
  15. The Rev. was having a stream of complaints so I understand his frustration at my failure to notice that we were being billed (electronically) and paying (by DD) for a service provided to a building we moved out of over a year ago! - I only invited you to consider a credit in part (as you were paying for the line - if BT had been billing us for that line we would have noticed straight away). Your techs confirmed the service was being billed on a line that "had been ceased" so I would have hoped you might have informed us. Saying "I don't need the hassel" and "read the T&C's" and "report you for Fraud" and find "Directors personally liable" etc. just seemed a bit overkill to me at the time. I'm not pursuing my £1500 waste of money over last year but I just thought that as some of that was "free" money to the ISP (9 units of Broadband/mth not used) you might have felt comfortable refunding it perhaps. No big deal Adrian - not worth getting too excited over. Complaints are all part of business and in fact provide useful feedback and direction in providing an ever improved customer experience. Rant over! lol.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Maybe the usage stuff could be credited. I was having a lot of hassle that week.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated purely to filter out obvious spam, but it means they may not show immediately.

Hot tubbing...

I have a hot tub, it came with the house over 3 years ago. Managing a hot tub is complicated, and expensive. The expensive part is the power...