Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
Just watched my recording of yesterday's Rip Off Britain.
A VM customer found that VM had been taking an extra Direct Debit from his account for £8 per month for the last three years, leading to a total overpayment of £272.
He was messed about for some time before VM offered him a 50% refund 
When he called to accept the offer (I wouldn't have accepted it, but perhaps he just wanted to get the issue resolved), incredibly, he was told "that offer has now expired"
It's not known if he asked for the matter to be escelated, but he was eventually refunded the full amount of £272 after the BBC consumer programme intervened.
I've also been chatting on the phone today to a friend who works in a mobile phone call centre. Amongst the things we discussed was why people have to do the annoying press 2, press 3, press 5 etc thing.
I said that I assumed that it was to direct each particular type of query to someone who specialised in that area. He said that he didn't know why they did this as all types of calls ended up being routed to the same team of people anyway!
Does anyone else know the answer? All I can think of is that it's to give the impression that the customer is progressing through the system in order to get their call dealt with, when in reality it's just a stalling tactic to give CS staff more time to clear any existing calls that they are currently working on. |
Some points:
Operative 1 in your story will have had the authority given the complaint made to offer 50% back.
Operative 2 will not have.
Some higher level of complaints team dealing with the BBC will have had the authority to have paid the whole sum back given the PR involved of the BBC running the story. Indeed, the outcome (should the story air), will make Virgin look slightly incompetent but not unreasonable, which for £136/272 (however you look it) is a bargain compared to the story airing with an unhappy customer £272 out of pocket.
The organisation I worked for certainly dealt with complaints drastically differently depending on whether it was from an individual, a media company on behalf of the same hypothetical individual, or an elected official on behalf of that same individual. Rightly or wrongly, most companies want things dealt with first time at minimum cost.
Similar to how I phoned Sky to cancel and got offered 20% off, then called by a further team offering me 40% during my 30 days, and got further called after my 30 days with an even better offer but sadly I'm under contract with Virgin now. Each level had different amounts of discretion they were entitled to offer depending on how serious they thought I was.