Letter to Orange (phone company)

A good friend of mine posted this on facebook after having trouble with his phone company. You've got to read this, absolute genius!

[i]My email to Orange -

I've already the little box that says “complaints”, so you know this isn't going to go well. Bit of a presentiment there. Foreshadowing they call it. A little subtle hint to set the scene for future events.

I've been an Orange customer for 10 years now. 10 and a half, even. Long time. Longer th
an a lot of marriages, and that’s not considering Kim Kardashian or Britney Spears. And the whole of that time, I've been giving you money, every month. Paying for minutes I never use. Never upgrading my phone on time, keeping it forever... let’s face it, I’ve been good to you. A lot of people, after ten years and a monthly allowance, would start to put pressure on you for special privileges and considerations (“uh... we’ve been together a while now, and I pay your way... uh, I think you kind of owe it me to, uh, you know...&rdquo😉, but I never did that. I’ve been a perfect gentleman about it. Ok, there was that one time I got 2 for 1 movie tickets, but that doesn’t count.

But now, after a decade of amicable silence... I hate you. Hate. And I don’t use that word lightly, when I say it I mean it. Very deeply, and very personally. You might expostulate that I don’t really mean that, but I do. Here’s why:
Last month, my mother came to visit me from South Africa. It was lovely, living on different continents I don’t see nearly as much of her as I would wish. Do live near your mum? Lucky if you do, if you don’t, you’ll understand what I mean when I say getting her to come and visit me in my new house (my first house! she helped with the deposit) was very special. It made me feel happy. What more does anyone want, than to feel happy? And so, while she was here, mummy dearest, myself, and my partner Kath went on holiday to the peak district for a week. Wow! The scenery! The little villages! A man could do a lot worse than to wax lyrical about the beauties of the peak district, it truly is God’s own country. And so, after a week away with my nearest and dearest, I returned home a happy man, buoyed by the beauty and splendour of the heart of England. Returned home happily to my own house, which made me happier still. There was a lot of happy.

Upon entering my abode (I take no small measure of pride that I don’t name it humble), I found a letter waiting for me, from my bank, Barclays. Now, usually when they write to me, it is usually a statement or an advert for a short term loan (pre-approved thank you, my credit rating is unblemished. Or, rather, was... {that is more foreshadowing right there}). But I could feel from the weight and texture of the contents that this was neither. Curious, I opened the letter.

It was not good news.

It informed me that my account was overdrawn, straight through my overdraft and into my personal reserve. I was shocked. Yes, I’d treated mother dear and Kath to dinner on several occasions, there being no shortage of pubs with excellent food menus in the peak district, but it’s not like we ordered desert! My heart pounding in my chest, and my head feeling like an uncorked bottle of champagne (bubbles, fizzy bubbles where thoughts used to be!), I raced to the interweb to view my account online.

I should probably point out at this juncture that I have been having trouble with stress in recent times. I have been exceedingly highly strung. Trouble sleeping, all that. It hasn’t been fun. It hasn’t been fun at all. Fortunately, I’d just been away for a week on a nice quiet holiday, eh?

Back to our tale.

I feverishly, and with no small amount of panic, checked my accounts. My affairs appeared to be in order. No mysterious payments to the bank in foreign climes after sharing my details with a delightful chap who needed a spot of help getting funds stolen from his father (a minister in the previous regime) out of the country. No payments to anyone out of character. I looked next at the sum of my payments. And here is where you enter my sorry tale. You charged me £1302 for my phone bill on direct debit. Now I really started to freak out. It wasn’t some fraudster abusing my acquaintance, rather it was the sober, reticent company with whom I had been engaged in financial matrimony these past ten years! I racked my brain. Had I called overseas? No. Had I used it excessively? Well, maybe a little surfing the net and such while away from a wireless connection, but still! Surely not? I raced to the phone to find out more and called you immediately.

Or rather, I tried to.

You see, I have never set up a telephone password. And yet, you are impossible to contact without one. Now, stop me if I’m wrong, but you’re a phone company. A goddam phone company. If there was one thing I could expect you to get right... I had to google a number, which I got from another website, from someone else experiencing difficulty phoning a phone company. (by the way – on this note your website also says your email isn’t available. In addition to being a phone company, what other services do you provide? Oh, that’s right broadband! I can’t email a broadband supplier. I can’t phone a phone company. But hey – on your homepage you advertise free email accounts through Orange! Maybe you should hook your staff up with that, you know, give ‘em some swag)

I finally got through, and worked my way through your staff, being handed about until I got a chap in billing called Andrew. Andrew’s extension is 61073, you can find him. He seemed helpful. He said that my monster bill was data charges, and that they were probably an error.As you can imagine, I wasn’t really satisfied with that, and I pushed for more detail. Under such duress, he confessed that even if I were on another continent, using my phone to download constantly, for a month, I wouldn’t have a bill that high. I breathed a little easier. Not much, because he couldn’t confirm officially that there was an error, but I felt a little better. He explained that he would need to speak to another department to find out what had happened. He undertook to do so, promising to call me within 24 hours. He then gave me his extension number,m should I wish to speak again. Godspeed Andrew on ext 61073 said I. I then, on his advice, contacted my bank and invoked the rite of payment immunity on the payment in question. Have you ever done that? Trust me, calling your bank and sorting that out takes quite a while!

The next day, 24 hours came and passed with no word from Andrew. Now, I mentioned that stress thing earlier? I’m also a bit obsessive/compulsive. If someone is meant to call and they don’t, I get really on edge. REALLY on edge. Still, I waited until exactly 26 hours had passed before calling (waiting by the phone the whole time. You ever been in love as a teenager? All the dramatic agony of will they call/ won’t they? Hours spent by the phone, trying to will it to ring? Well, I waited for Andrew. I waited in vain. Like the proverbial watched boil that never pops, I waited. Then I got tired of waiting and called him).

He screened my call. He wouldn’t speak to me. He simply told your receptionist to tell me he hadn’t heard back from the other team and he would call me when he did. Now, I may be an old fashioned gentleman with solid Georgian values, but I think anyone considers this type of response rude. If he has time to explain it to the bloody receptionist, he’;s got time to explain it to me. I was irked, I was most grievously irked. Have you ever tried to call a girl you liked and then had her mother tell you she wasn’t there, when you could her her telling her mother to say that? It was like that. And just like all those girls, he never called me back. Don’t it just break your heart? I felt cheapened and used.

Need I point out, at this point, how utterly you ruined my day? My week? All my stress, right back, panicked and worrying. All that, and the important thing is, it’s your fault. Yours. You made me feel that way. Why? Why would you do that?

Now, we fast forward until today. I like to imagine pages of a diary flipping past and in a stiff breeze while I say that, it’s quite an evocative image. Here we are, exactly one month later. I got home from work, opened the door to find post waiting for me. “oho!” I though “what have we here?” A letter for the previous owner of the house, a letter for Kath, and a letter for my good self from that veritable institution, Barclays. It didn’t feel like a statement. It didn’t feel like a pre-approved loan offered to me exclusively because of my exemplary credit history. It felt like a letter telling me that some numpty, that some incompetent dolt, had once more charged me in error, taking so much money that I was through my overdraft and into my personal reserve. Again. Once more, panic slithered into my breast. Panic... and resignation. Do you want to know what the letter was?


It was a letter telling me that some numpty, that some incompetent dolt, had once more charged me in error, taking so much money that I was through my overdraft and into my personal reserve. Again.

Do you want to guess this errant charge was from? Don’t bother sir/madam, I’ll flat out tell you: it was you. YOU.

Well, that plain down took the jam out of my donut. I lost my happy thoughts. Once more did I google your number. Once more did I call your customer services representative. Once more, the first person can’t answer the question and has to put me through to someone else, keeping me on hold an inordinate amount of time. Time is money they say. Well, I should quite like to be paid my hourly rate for all the damn time I’ve spent on this issue! You have taken that time from me, and I will never get it back! You have taken my happy from me, and I will never get it back! You have taken the very jam from my donut and that I do not want back because it would be unhygien...

cont/...

But you still took it. Fie, fie upon thee! I bite my thumb at you!

I did speak to a chap called Kumar on ext 38133, who was polite and very sympathetic. He seemed a good egg and I will not hear a word spoken against him. After much undertaking and holding, he seemed to discover the cause of the problem and assured me it would never happen again. He advised me to once more call Barclays and entreat them to indemnify me against your insidious charges. (Which I did) He told me he has taken detailed notes of my concerns, frustrations and the behaviour of this “Andrew” villain.

Unfortunately, he is unable to send me, in writing or in email, any confirmation that this matter of incompetent serial billing is over. And I want that. I want it very much. It was also his sad duty to inform me that, as a result of my contract, I am unable to get out of my contract with you until January 2014. So will I have to?endure the ineptitude of your billing department every month? Surely, such ungentlemanly and uncouth behaviour warrants the termination of the contract to the prejudice of the offending party? It would appear not, unless I pay a break fee for the privilege of your frankly unacceptable behaviour. I am stuck with you, no matter how useless you get. It seems to me that you have breached our agreement in repeatedly causing me unwarranted stress, anxiety and bank charges but no! It is like I am locked in prison, like Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption, waiting to be forced to wait for that time of month where I have to work in the laundry and the bad men come and Morgan Freeman wishes he could say that I got away. He wishes he could say that. (in this analogy, your billing department are the bad men). Sir/madam – I feel royally screwed. Positively tupped in a fashion most unseemly, in a manner most unwarranted and to which I wanted no party.

You ruined my day. Twice. Seriously, would you put up with this type of service from someone you did business with? Answer that question honestly, I dare you. Every day is precious. We only have a limited number of days in this world, and you have ruined two of mine. You have stolen part of my life and I will never get it back.

What I want, is a written assurance that this will never happen again, with an explanation of what has happened and how it has been fixed. Email is fine. I want the £44 in bank charges I have had to cough reimbursed to me. I want money off my bill or some other sweetener/incentive – if I had this service in a restaurant I would refuse to pay and rightly so! Why should you be immune to the penalties of unsatisfactory service?

I also want details of under what circumstances I can terminate our relationship and see if anyone else can do a better job. I believe they can.

And, for his broken promises, I want a picture drawn by Andrew of a dinosaur surviving the meteors because goddamit I want my happy back in my life and I would like it if the dinosaurs survived.

Those five things will go some of the way towards making me feel better, but be warned – I trust you not. Not anymore. As Mr Darcy said in Pride and Prejudice – my good opinion once lost, is lost forever. Yeah, I quoted Jane Austen, I’m still a man, I’m just classically educated.

I would appreciate an acknowledgement of this missive at your earliest discretion. A full response will take time, I can accept, however I shall be vexed in no small measure if I do not receive, from a human, some acknowledgement that I have taken the time to write to you .

Luke

Originally posted by Marinkatomb
cont/...

But you still took it. Fie, fie upon thee! I bite my thumb at you!

I did speak to a chap called Kumar on ext 38133, who was polite and very sympathetic. He seemed a good egg and I will not hear a word spoken against him. After much undertaking and holding, he seemed to discover the cause of the problem and assured me it would never happ ...[text shortened]... ve, from a human, some acknowledgement that I have taken the time to write to you .

Luke

That's long indeed!!

I'm with orange, it's not a great company. Maybe none of them are!

I don't know if he knows; if your friend has no joy with Orange he can contact ofcom, but he needs a 'dead lock' letter first.

http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/tell-us/telecoms/adr/

Originally posted by yo its me
That's long indeed!!

I'm with orange, it's not a great company. Maybe none of them are!

I don't know if he knows; if your friend has no joy with Orange he can contact ofcom, but he needs a 'dead lock' letter first.

http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/tell-us/telecoms/adr/

Companies don't want their customers contacting them by email or by phone because that's a hassle for them; what they want is a direct debit. Broadband suppliers are the worst; I am changing mine from AOL/talktalk to John Lewis, a decision based on the accessibility and quality of their service team. AOL/talktalk are retards of the lowest order and I have wasted hours and hours of good life trying to extract some miniscule level of service from them. No more.

To cancel my account with AOL took over 40 minutes on the phone being passed from person to person; eventually I was put through to someone claiming to be "customer retention and loyalty". After making me several "incredible offers", "retention lady" was bemused at my closing statement that I would not be staying with them even if their pathetic offering was free for the rest of my (now much shortened) life.

If you manage to get average service nowadays, you have done well. Never purchase on price.

Originally posted by divegeester
Companies don't want their customers contacting them by email or by phone because that's a hassle for them; what they want is a direct debit. Broadband suppliers are the worst; I am changing mine from AOL/talktalk to John Lewis, a decision based on the accessibility and quality of their service team. AOL/talktalk are retards of the lowest order and I hav ge to get average service nowadays, you have done well. Never purchase on price.

This is why I have a limit on the auto-payment amount for the phone. And I should go back to manual payment of other bills that don't have the limit feature.

I can completely empathize with the Orange customer but in all honesty... his letter was so long, drawn out, and rife with sidebar anecdotes that I'm certain the Orange employee who opened it, got about 1 paragraph in and discarded it. It was obviously well-thought out and I have no doubt about the customer's sincerity.

My biggest frustration with cable/utility/insurance/ISP companies today is they force you through a long sequence of button-pressing while you listen to this annoying-as-hell automated voice, only to have to hold for another 15-45 minutes to get a live person on the phone.... who then has to transfer you to someone who can actuallly help you which requires another half-hour of holding.

It's as if they try to wear you down so you evenutally just give up. Nothing makes my blood boil more than going through those scenarios.

Originally posted by divegeester
Companies don't want their customers contacting them by email or by phone because that's a hassle for them; what they want is a direct debit. Broadband suppliers are the worst; I am changing mine from AOL/talktalk to John Lewis, a decision based on the accessibility and quality of their service team. AOL/talktalk are retards of the lowest order and I hav ...[text shortened]... ge to get average service nowadays, you have done well. Never purchase on price.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
My ISP is pretty responsive by phone. Even if they weren't, they have offices in town.

My worst experience with customer service was Hewlett-Packard. I had a hard drive fail after only a couple months on a new laptop, and it took MONTHS of calling and waiting on hold and calling and waiting on hold and being assigned to a 'case manager' that never had hang up on people or slam the door in their face. Now, after about the 3rd 'no', I do.

Originally posted by sumydid
Ha... I remember an experience with HP. This was a long time ago but I bought a HP monitor. The warranty on it was 6 months. I didn't buy the extended warranty. Just before the warranty expired, the monitor died. I called them and went through the crap you are talking about. The case got milked for about 2 or 3 weeks until finally the warranty expired ...[text shortened]... mbarrassed when I realized how immature I acted. Never got my monitor replaced, either. 🙁

Originally posted by SwissGambit
My ISP is pretty responsive by phone. Even if they weren't, they have offices in town.

My worst experience with customer service was Hewlett-Packard. I had a hard drive fail after only a couple months on a new laptop, and it took MONTHS of calling and waiting on hold and calling and waiting on hold and being assigned to a 'case manager' that never had ...[text shortened]... hang up on people or slam the door in their face. Now, after about the 3rd 'no', I do.

Originally posted by divegeester
Poor service has turned me into an ogre; my wife cringes when I'm on the phone to people.

The problem in the UK is trying to set up a payment system without using direct debit; most companies won't let you because it puts the customer back in the driving seat. Here if you set up a direct debit it cannot be cancelled as the provider can re-open it and continue to take funds out of your account. Most people don't realise this.