Every year I have reported on my worst Customer Service experiences, this is a summary of my bad experiences in 2018. I seem to report the same companies year in year out who aren’t able to get their act together or at least don’t learn lessons from previous experiences. I’m not sure why that is, maybe they just don’t want to listen to clients or they are too big to be able to pull themselves together.
When it comes to Customer Service my expectations are as follows:
- Preferably I can resolve any issues via self-service through a website/online account.
- If I have to reach out to a company I expect that:
- I only have to call them once
- I don’t have to keep chasing them for an answer
- I don’t have to escalate to social media, or even worse the Better Business Bureau, to get them to do something about the issue
Sounds easy huh? Not for some companies.
Kaiser Permanente
I stopped doing business with them 18 months ago when we moved from the US to Canada. I had many awful experiences with them when I was a customer I was so pleased to be shot of them. All of a sudden this year I started receiving sales emails from them despite telling them to never contact me again. Of course, they don’t have any business in Canada so I reached out to them to find out why they had started contacting me and asking them to take me off the mailing list. This episode went on for many weeks trying to get an answer from them to the extent that I had to report them to the Better Business Bureau. They finally responded to the BBB comment but not only did they lie but didn’t answer the questions I had. So, the issue was never resolved but hopefully, they got the message and won’t ever contact me again.
HSBC
Again, another company who we consistently having issues with, the UK is much better than Canada and the US.
We closed our accounts in the US as we experienced some racism from one of the Virginia branches. We tried for over a year to get a safety deposit box here in Canada. We went to multiple HSBC branches, some had availability and some didn’t. No one ever seemed to be available to take us through the “sign up and approval” process, not sure why we had to go through that, didn’t have that workflow with any other banks. So, this went on and on with promises of a call back’s and more, it never happened. Finally, we escalated to a manager who we were dealing with about something else. She tried to be as helpful as she could but it took weeks for her to get something going too by which time we were so fed up and dragged down by the process we just had to say we’d take our business elsewhere. This should have been the simplest thing to resolve and I’m not sure why it was so difficult for them.
Hostgator
I used to host my website with this company and had multiple problems, in particular with downtime. I had so much back and forth with them I was never getting really helpful answers. They charged me for something they shouldn’t have done but fortunately they did resolve that, not without a bit of aggravation, but it was thankfully put to rest. I just think this company take on more than it can chew with the number of customers on shared hosting plans that many sites fall over despite not reach the limitations of the plan they signed up for. I’ve never come across a friendly and helpful person in this company, I wonder what the work climate in there is like.
Telus
Earlier this year Telus tried to sign us up for their cable package but there was so much confusion over the plan they were offering we decided not to go ahead. I believe this was mainly due to Telus agents, companies that act on Telus’ behalf to sell plans. We wanted to see details of the plan in writing with terms and conditions, I thought this was reasonable before signing up to anything. This was not forthcoming from anyone, even Telus told us this wouldn’t be available until after we had signed the contract. I found all this terribly bizarre and they wouldn’t supply me with what I needed to make a decision so we didn’t go ahead. It could have gone better for them. We have encountered some of Telus’ own salespeople at various events, to say they are aggressive is an understatement, although I do appreciate the company sponsoring so many good community events. There was one issue I had with them which was resolved very quickly, maybe they are improving?
Summary
It could have been worse, I know many people who are going through far worse issues with companies that I have, so I am thankful most of these are just annoyances rather than something more serious.