Terry Prone: The customer is not always bright — but a rapid response keeps everyone happy

My need, in this instance, is for them to retrieve the €2,000 I paid into an account my payee used to have in Ulster Bank. That account is now defunct. The contractor contacted me in puzzlement when I didn’t pay up, pronto. Normally, I’m pretty good for paying up, pronto.

None of the 1, 2, 3, 4 options the cold voice offers includes “retrieving money that you, like an eejit, sent to the wrong place” but I pick one more or less at random and wait for the hundred years it will take before some call-centre person answers and makes me prove I am the moron who did what I did. 

When pick-up happens within 45 seconds, I am so surprised, I nearly cut Garret off, Garret being the person at the other end. Once he’s sure who I am, I tell him what I’ve done. He doesn’t seem impressed by my incompetence, telling me the €2K will bounce back out of a defunct account into my own account and possibly already has. 

No, I tell him, with the absolute certainty of the pig-ignorant. 

Maybe scroll down through the last couple of days, he suggests. I roll my eyes and obey. 

There it is with a little plus sign out front. 

I unroll my eyes and tell Garret he’s wonderful. He laughs. Imagine. A call centre human who laughs. I turn off the phone, bowled over by the problem being solved in maybe three pleasant minutes, when — expecting the worst — I had my irritation cranked up to the top level in advance.

Just as irritation goes right back down, courtesy of Garret, a begging letter drops into my inbox from The Guardian. 

Now, I pay to consume Guardian content. Yet they continue to send these awful crawling missives describing me as their “supporter". I’m not their supporter, any more than I’m the supporter of The Telegraph, to which I also subscribe. The difference is that The Telegraph takes my money and leaves me the hell alone, whereas The Guardian in its twee little way begs me for a few minutes of my time in order to beseech me for money to help it maintain its general wonderfulness. 

If they keep it up, I’m going to unsubscribe. I’m a reader or a consumer, not a supporter.

Taking a punt on BT  

I don’t tell The Guardian any of this because I’m too busy sorting out Brown Thomas. During the pandemic, I did the most massive cleanout of my house. Seen as how I was stuck in it, I figured I’d have a go at being  Marie Kondo. 

Out went all the leaflets describing how to use long-gone kitchen gadgets. Out went guarantees for those gadgets. Out went Christmas cards I may have kept in order to work out who they were from.

Then I came upon a small fawn-striped folder, recognisable as what Brown Thomas gift tokens used to arrive in before they went to a card and about five times more packaging to make sure the recipient understands just how valuable the gift they are receiving is. 

Inside, £65 in old money. Very old money. These were from 1995. 

The small print said they were invalid from the following year. However, when I mentioned this in the media at the time, someone from BT, I think from PR, amusedly conveyed the fact that the company would be delighted to honour them. Which is what you’d expect of a classy department store.

Be more like Nordstrom

It’s not about the cash or expiry date, it’s about building a customer relationship. 

Like the story told of the customer care manager in Nordstrom in the US, who, when a customer complained about a faulty tyre, immediately refunded the purchase price. When a colleague pointed out that Nordstrom don’t sell tyres, the customer care guy smiled. 

He could prove the customer wrong, he pointed out, or use his discretion to pay money the store didn’t owe them, thereby reinforcing the relationship with the customer and ensuring they’d spread good, rather than bad comment about Nordstrom.

Mamma Mia, it's BT again

Earlier this month, I proffered the elderly gift vouchers in part payment for a purchase in Brown Thomas. A manager rejects them, opting instead for my credit card.

Afterwards, I go on the BT website and draw the contradiction to their attention by email, attaching pictures of the vouchers. After a while, I get a response which asks me when their people communicated with me (no clue) and which store I’d recently visited. Why it should matter which store I was in eludes me, but I respond. I get an answer within seconds and am encouraged until I discover it’s asking me to rate how they’re doing.

"Bit premature, lads" is the answer the form doesn’t permit me to tell them.

Then I remember that it was their PR people who had been positive about my vouchers, so I send them that information.

This comes in response:

“Dear Terry, Thank you for your reply and for sending on the further information.

“I have now sent your details over to our PR team for their attention, for them to follow this up.

“We will be back to you as quickly as possible with a resolution, however, please note that due to the bank holiday weekend, it may be next week when we hear back form them. We will be in touch as soon as possible.”

Cat among the pigeons

It was at this point I discovered that one of the cats had eaten my lunch. Serves me right for leaving tuna fish salad out on the kitchen surface, but its theft removed my natural affability, so I sent this note to the customer care woman.

“No insult to you — this must be the system you work within — but it’s ridiculous.

“Why’s it gone to PR? To find and name whatever unfortunate said the vouchers would be honoured? What’s the objective here — to make a customer happy or track whoever was originally nice to the customer?

“For €65?

“Have a good weekend and forget about this whole deal.”

Just as I pressed SEND, the cat, which had already ingested its own lunch before laying waste to mine, threw up. Which, in fairness, wasn’t Brown Thomas’s fault, even if it briefly felt like it was.

I put away the vouchers, feeling sorry for the customer care person fronting this miserable bureaucratic response. Clearly, she doesn’t have the discretion to do a Nordstrom job.

Or — to give him his due — the job BoI’s Garret did.