Serial Complainer

I have a vague memory of emailing Tesco some years back about problems with getting receipts from their ‘Pay At Pump’ system at the Dundrum petrol station. This landed in my Inbox today;

Your message

To: Customer Services

Subject: RE: Receipts from ‘Pay at Pump’ machines at Tesco Sandyford Petrol Station

Sent: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:52:10 +0100

was deleted without being read on Tue, 2 Sep 2008 14:05:25 +0100

So it took them a few days short of two years to delete my email. To cap it all, the Pay At Pump system has been withdrawn from service using some very amateurish sellotaped cards. Good job they are cheap, eh?

As a public servant, I get frustrated with a lot of bashing of the public sector going on over on askaboutmoney.com and to a lesser extent on boards.ie. This bashing often seems to be a knee-jerk reaction which verges on racism, as it picks on a particular group for no good reason and with little evidence. So it is nice to be able to report on a positive experience with a public service.

On the day before we were scheduled to fly out on our family holiday, my wife came rushing upstairs to tell me that our little girl’s passport had expired. An infant is given a 3-year passport, and those 3 years just flew by.

Our plans for a nice relaxing pre-holiday day went out the window, and we had a mad dash to the local chemist (get the photographs), the Garda Station (get the form signed), back home (get her PPS number), and into the Passport Office on Molesworth St on the Luas. The office was reassuringly busy, so it was nice to see that we are not the only idiots to leave things like this to the last minute.

Once we confirmed that they didn’t actually need to see the girl to process the application, my wife and child departed for the playground in St Stephen’s Green and I waited the hour or so required to get called to the counter. Unfortunately, we had to pay double the usual charge for a rush order. I was advised to return around 4.15 pm (just before the official closing time) to collect the passport.

We had a nice lunch in the new M&S cafe at the top of the Grafton St store, and I returned to Molesworth St at the appointed time. The collections area upstairs was fairly chaotic, with standing room only and a few cranky babies and many cranky adults. The staff had to shout through the security glass to get attention from their customers. Perhaps some kind of public address system is required?

Mine was one of the last passports to be ready that evening. While waiting, my attention was drawn to a female customer in her 50’s who was obviously the worse for wear. In my inexpert opinion, she was under the influence of heroin or some similar substance. Her speech was slurred and her movements were very unsteady. The staff were have some difficulties in getting a coherent response from her. She wasn’t being abusive or causing problems for other customers. Once she received her passport, she reckoned it was a good time and place to have a little snooze, and she lay down across the chairs to sleep. The staff behind the counter called up their on-site security staff, which consisted of two older guys in their 60’s.

I was hugely impressed with the absolute dignity and respect shown by the security staff for the lady in question. They gently woke her up, and engaged her in conversation about her forthcoming holiday to keep her attention. They ensured that she had all her shopping bags (including her new passport), and they lightly steered her to the exit. I’m sure that their manner was a major factor in ensuring that the situation was resolved without confrontation or violence, which of course was best for the lady and best for the organisation too. Terms like dignity and respect are not often used in connection with security staff, but they certainly applied in this case.

We returned from holiday to find that all the relevant paperwork had been returned by Express Post, though there was no particular urgency on our side. You don’t have to sign when Express Post is delivered, so this doesn’t give any extra security. In these times of government cutbacks, perhaps they could save a few quid by only using this facility where necessary?

When you visit the new O’Briens Sandwich Bar at Beacon Court.

We found ourselves without kids unexpectedly on a Saturday afternoon. I made several interesting suggestions as to how we might amuse ourselves, but I was overruled by plans for some shopping. We went to the new Beacon Court centre in Sandyford Industrial Estate. I understand the estate is now longer known as ‘industrial’ in deference to those who have shelled out huge amounts for overpriced apartments.

In need of some sustenance, we headed upstairs to where I was assured there was a new O’Briens Sandwich Bar. I was not certain if O’Briens would be open at the weekend, as I guess most of their business would be office workers in the estate. I was pleasantly surprised to meet a couple of free-standing signs showing ‘O’Briens - Now Open’ as we went through the complex. I was therefore very unpleasantly surprised to find O’Briens locked up for the weekend, despite the several ‘now open’ signs we had passed.

How can any new business expect to survive if they don’t walk in the shoes of the customer from time to time? Is it too much to expect that someone who must have invested a five-figure sum in setting up a franchise has enough customer focus to work out that you take in the ‘now open’ signs when you close?

Anyway, O’Briens steered us right into the arms of their competitor Munchies, and we had a pleasant snack in Munchies. Guess which outfit we will revisit on our next trip to Beacon Court?

I’ve been travelling round the country quite a bit in recent weeks. I use the train where feasible, partly to comply with corporate travel policies, and partly because it is just safer – I really don’t want to wake up with the car in a ditch by the N4 some late evening. One of the benefits of the train is the ability to do a bit of work on the laptop (such as composing this post) or grab a bit of breakfast en-route.

The Irish Rail breakfast is quite pleasant, and sets you up for a day’s work. I tend to avoid the ‘full Irish’, as it’s just a bit too heavy for me. Their vegetarian breakfast has eggs, mushrooms, hash browns, tea, toast and juice, for the princely some of €11. It’s not great value for money, but it does save the time of having to stop on the road for grub when driving.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the salt sachets that come with the breakfast are of the low sodium variety. Like quite a few Irish people of a certain age, I have problems with high blood pressure. Reducing your salt intake is one of the five proven methods of lowering your blood pressure, along with cutting out the smokes and the booze, taking more exercise and reducing stress. I don’t smoke, and I’ve never been a big drinker. I exercise regularly, via my cycle commute. I was never one of those people who pile on the salt at every meal before even tasting the food, but I had got into the habit of salting certain foods, such as eggs or chicken.

As it happens, I’ve weaned myself almost completely off the salt now in favour of pepper. However, it was still interesting to note that Irish Rail are providing low sodioum salt as the default (and possibly the only) salt. Lo-salt has about 1/3^rd of the harmful sodium to standard salt, so if you are still hooked on the salt taste, it is a far better option for you than standard salt. Cheers to Irish Rail for taking one small step to lower the blood pressures of our little nation.

I posted previously about NIB’s problem with duplicated transactions on Visa statements in April. At least one other Askaboutmoney.com poster encountered the same problem, so I’m assuming that it was fairly widespread. However, I admit now that I was somewhat overly critical of NIB in my original post.

I was correct in saying that NIB had duplicated transactions. Indeed, all the March transactions (which had already appeared on the March bill) appeared again on the April bill. However, I was incorrect in saying that the ‘balance due’ that appeared on the April bill was incorrect. In fact, my payment for the March bill was a few days late, so it didn’t make the April bill, which explains why the April balance was much higher than I expected. I guess my confusion around the balance was aggravated by mistrust arising from the obvious error on the transactions. I’m therefore happy to withdraw my claim that the information provided to me by the NIB call centre was incorrect. It was technically correct, though it would have helped if they had considered the possibility that late payments might cause further confusion.

I raised this issue with senior management in NIB, by taking an educated guess at an email address. I’m glad to confirm that NIB responded very promptly and took the matter very seriously. I had direct contact by phone and email with the Regional General Manager. They did a full reconciliation of my account in Excel and sent this out to me. They have also send on a non-trivial ‘goodwill gesture’ to compensate me for the time spent sorting out the issue on my side. My only outstanding criticism is that (as far as I can work out), they did not send out written notification to all affected customers informing them of this error. In my opinion, an error in a statement warrants a written response to all customers (not just those who are uppity enough to complain).

I was at the opening night of Bruce Springsteen’s recent series of Irish gigs. I’ve seen Bruce live four or five times now (as far back as Slane in 1985). The first Seeger Sessions gig at the Point a couple of years back was an amazing night, but it’s great to see The Boss back with the E-Street band. The guys genuinely do seem to enjoy themselves on stage (or else they are very good actors).

Thursday night’s gig was a little ropey at the start, as the band focused on material from the recent Magic album. This isn’t Bruce’s strongest album by a long chalk, and the crowd didn’t really get engaged until some of the old favourites came out about 45 minutes into the gig. It was great to hear ‘Because The Night’ which I haven’t heard Bruce doing on stage before, though I think I still prefer the Waterboys live version of this song merged with ‘The Pan Within’ from Glastonbury 1986. The crowd really got on board for the old classics, including 10^th Avenue Freeze-out, Badlands, Born to Run and my personal favourite, Thunder Road, with all that talk of graduation gowns and Chevy’s screaming down the tracks.

Any why the hairdryer reference in the title, I hear you ask. As the camera for the big screen focused onto Roy Bittan (long-time E-Street piano/keyboard player), I noticed that he had a hairdryer mounted at the end of a drainpipe running over the piano keyboard. It seems that Roy needs to keep his fingers warm on stage (maybe a symptom of the average age of the E-Street band members), and keeps the hairdryer running to pump hot air out while he is tinkling the ivories. It seemed like a bit of a mickey-mouse solution for a multi-million dollar enterprise, but I guess it works for Roy.

Can’t wait for Tom Waits at the Ratcellar….

See below for the text of a self-explanatory email sent this morning to my NIB personal account manager. It’s not so much the original error that bugs me (though it is quite worrying when your bank can’t put together a correct statement). It is their failure to recognise that this was a serious error which justified a serious response to all affected customers.

I’m very annoyed at how NIB have mishandled an error on my April visa statement. My annoyance is not so much around the error that occurred, but at the misinformation given to me about the error and the failure to correct the error.

When my April statement arrived, I noted that it seemed higher than usual. I didn’t have time to dig into this at the time, so my wife spent an hour or so checking the transactions. She noticed some transactions which had already appeared on the March statement. On further investigation, we realised that 60 transactions which had already appeared on the March statement were duplicated on the April statement. I noted that both statements were headed ‘Statement No. 24’.

I phoned the NIB call centre to check this out. The customer service agent told me there was a known error in the April statement, but that the balance due (as shown on the front page) was correct, and that was the amount that I had to pay. My wife was convinced that this was not the case, so she spent a couple of hours meticulously checking off each transaction and calculating a balance. She told me that the balance due was not correct. Given that I had been informed by your agent that the balance was still correct, I then had a dilemma – should I believe my wife or NIB?

Regrettably, I felt it was unlikely that NIB would have given misinformation to your call centre agents, so I had to check the data for myself. I downloaded the relevant transactions from eBanking myself, and spent a couple of hours over this weekend cross-checking each individual transaction. The attached spreadsheet shows the relevant transactions, marked to show which statement they appeared on. After checking each transaction, I found that the balance shown on the front page of the statement was indeed incorrect, by a factor of some €1,200 in my case.

I rang your call centre again on Saturday. I was given the same incorrect misinformation again (that the balance on the front page was correct). I told your agent that this was not the case, and she promised to get someone from the branch to call me on Monday. I am extremely disappointed to find that some 3 weeks after the statement has issued, NIB does not appear to have taken this incident seriously enough to get to grips with the facts of the situation.

Given that NIB has been all over the news and through external investigations in the past over issuing incorrect statements, I don’t think it is unreasonable of me to ask the following of NIB;

• Please issue a correct April visa statement,
• Please issue a written apology to all customers affected by this error, and advise them of the correct amount due in good time before the payment is due,
• Please investigate to identify who failed to follow up correctly on this error (failure to ensure that corrected statements were issued, failure to notify affected customers, failure to give correct information to call centre) and take appropriate steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again,
• Please compensate my wife and I for the 4-6 hours of our valuable time that we have spent poring over Visa statements to analyse the NIB error.

Over to you….

As a commuting cyclist in Dublin, I spend quite a lot of my time complaining at car drivers for their lack of consideration for cyclists. A colleague joked recently that my 25 minute commute was extending to 1 hr 25 minutes with all the time taken up lecturing drivers.  I don’t get aggressive (except under the most severe provocation) but I am trying to improve the driving of south Dublin drivers, one driver at a time.

I’ve taken to reporting clear and obvious breaches of the law to the Garda TrafficWatch line (1890-205805). I found that complaints to the local station weren’t taken seriously. They would scribble details on a yellow post-it, which I just know was going straight in the bin as I left. With the TrafficWatch line, details are logged on computer by the call centre operators, and then referred to the local station. I get the feeling that the local station are held accountable for following up each case, so I normally get a callback from a Garda within 1-2 weeks (though sometimes the callback is within hours).

I’ve picked one particular offence at one particular location, and I report every instance of this offence, every time I can catch the car’s reg number. After months of frustration at the repetition involved in having to go down to the station to give a statement each time, I’ve finally managed to get the Gardai engaged on the particular problem. The Garda inspector of the Traffic Corps unit has got onto Dublin City Council (off his own bat, not at my suggestion) and got the road signs improved in this area. He is arranging for the council to do an electronic traffic survey to get a real understanding of the scope and frequency of the problem.

Fair play to the Inspector for taking this so seriously, and doing his bit to protect the safety of cyclists in Dublin.

I’ve been a Meteor bill-pay customer for a couple of years now, since O2 refused to subsidise a handset upgrade. I pay my bill via direct debit to my Visa card. I was therefore quite surprised to get a text from Meteor last week reading;

Your account is now overdue. Please make payment within 48 hours through any bank Post Office or Meteor Store to ensure continued service. Meteor Credit Dept.

I called them to see what was up, and they explained that (just like EazyPass), my credit card had expired some months back, and they hadn’t bothered to keep an eye on this. The girl took details of the new expiry date over the phone, and then had to take details of the card again to repeat the missed payment.

What is extremely annoying about cases likes this is that this was a completely preventable customer experience. If Meteor were to review their direct debit customers monthly to see who’s credit cards are coming near expiry, they could call or text customers proactively to get the updated details. Wouldn’t this be some much more pleasant than the snotty ‘overdue’ text shown above? I think it’s time to give O2 a call again.

I was in the UK last week for a conference. Some interesting customer service issues arose.

I found myself in a small time about 15 miles from Gatwick with an hour to kill before the conference started. The town would be comparable in size to maybe Balbriggan or Greystones. I dropped into a Wetherspoons group pub for some tea and toast about 9.30 am. I was amazed to find that the pub was very lively at that hour of the morning, and got even more busy while I had my breakfast. The vast majority of punters were quite elderly, who were obviously attracted by the option of a cheap breakfast (GBP £3.00 for a full English) and a bit of company. There were a few mums with pre-school kids around too. I didn’t see one alcoholic drink at all. Maybe if the Irish pub trade did a bit less whining about the ‘damage’ that the smoking ban and drink-drive legislation is doing to their businesses, and a bit more provision of services that their customers actually want, they might find a lot more customers in their pub for a lot more of the working day.

On the way back home, I stopped off in one of the big-name chain hotels near Gatwick to get some grub (and to kill some time) before my flight. I just couldn’t face airport food! I had a fancy burger and a glass of wine followed by a latte. It was a bit expensive, coming it at GBP £21.00. I was particularly peeved that the host declined my entreaties for a voucher for their wifi network. Apparently, these are only given to residents. I was also midly peeved that the comment card/survey form which came along with the bill was really for overnight residents (’was your bed turned down’), when I was clearly ‘just a walk-in’. I gave them a severe talking-to (via the comment card of course).