Bad Customer Service Awards 2022

Every year I do a review of my customer service experiences for the past 12 months. 2022 has been a particularly bad year.

This year’s winners in my Bad Customer Service Awards are:

First OnSite
Redbubble
Skip The Dishes

These are my experiences with the companies I’ve had to deal with:

Beezer

This company in Scotland never responded to a GDPR request I sent them. What is GDPR?

Costco

I had ongoing difficulties with their pharmacy with lost prescriptions, not being able to get through to them on the phone and general confusion in their back office. Their excuse was “we are the busiest pharmacy in Canada” which just doesn’t work with me, I don’t like being bullshitted to.

However, since they’ve finally put their service online, it makes life much easier as there is less face-to-face connection.

First OnSite

This is a restoration company here in British Columbia, I wrote about them here.

This company clearly was the worst of 2022 but I did come to the conclusion that restoration companies are rip off’s, they don’t actually do much, charge a lot of money, and just organize other companies to do the work. Clearly, it would be cheaper just to approach those companies ourselves and do our own project management.

HSBC

A branch manager in the UK is supposed to reach out to me and I still haven’t heard anything. I think I can forget that one, suspect they don’t really care about me.

The sale of HSBC Canada to the Royal Bank of Canada is quite concerning, I wrote about this here.

Redbubble

If only…! If only I had read the reviews of this company prior to ordering from it. The most telling one is on the Better Business Bureau website which states:

Pattern of Complaint: Redbubble came to BBB’s attention in July 2010. A review of complaints was done in November 2022. Based on BBB files the company has a pattern of complaints. The pattern found is complainants state they receive no response when contacting customer service to resolve issues. BBB is in the process of reaching out to Redbubble to address BBB’s concerns and will update the profile accordingly.

I ordered a couple of products from this company, but they never arrived within the promised time. The company’s customer service is non-existent taking a week to respond which is totally ridiculous for the amount of money this company makes. Their CEO just tweets from Australia taking his dog for a walk along the beach while the company is in a state of collapse.

People I had connected with mostly ordered via PayPal and they just reversed their charge rather than wait any longer for the company to respond. Others, who paid by credit card, opened fraud cases with their bank.

I found out, regarding my order, that Redbubble just sat on the parcel not passing it to the courier for weeks even though they said it had been shipped. This company thinks little of its customers and is lying to them too. It’s a shame for the artists concerned so hopefully, they can find a different way to connect with those who want to buy their products.

Skip The Dishes

I ordered food via their app and got a message to say it had arrived. The driver never ensured it got delivered to the right address and of course, they left it somewhere else.

I got on their app’s customer service which was just an awful experience. The rep must have been answering several at the same time and just wasn’t responding. When they did respond they could only answer in copy/paste messages, obviously from their call centre database, which was painfully annoying. In the meantime, we were looking at every house down the street to see if we could find where the driver had left the food. After almost 45 minutes of trying to get a response from their customer service, they eventually said they would provide a refund for what I asked for, however, given the erratic nature of the person I was texting I went on Twitter the next day. Eventually, they did return the money but what a complete nightmare dealing with them. At the end of the day, I wish I just had beans on toast for my dinner, I felt sick to my stomach to eat what I actually ordered.

I deleted my account and will never use them again. Most likely these companies are ripping off restaurants too and I feel better going there myself to pick something up.

SkyNews

They discontinued their worldwide service to many countries. Obtaining information from their customer service was worse than pulling teeth. However, looking back, I don’t really miss them.