Three strikes…
A Ray Darcy Show listener sent me a mail about 3 Mobile which sounded wearily familiar. She’s been a customer of the company for years and pays her bill by direct debit. Here’s what she wrote:
“Due to an oversight, which I accept was my fault, a direct debit of €83 wasn’t paid in October. Five days later, the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend, 3 rang my mobile four times, left several voice messages and sent text messages. In work the following Tuesday (I’m a nurse in a nursing home) I was told 3 had also rang several times. I was livid. I’d been a good customer and it was the first missed payment. I rang 3 and arranged to pay through internet banking. I asked that my work number not be contacted as the nursing home phone is needed for essential calls, not my personal business. Not less than five minutes after sorting it out with 3, I noticed another missed call from them on my mobile and another voice mail message. Then the work phone rang. It was 3.
“I explained the situation and how I’d sorted out the payment. I thought this would be the end of it but, a few days later, a text I tried to send wouldn’t go. I tried to make a call and was diverted to 3 customer services where I was told that my account had been suspended due to non-payment. They said online transactions took three working days and my service would not resume ’til the payment hit their account. I had not been told this when I spoke to them earlier in the week and had been told that internet payment was acceptable so my service wouldn’t be affected. I was so angry, I enquired about suspending my contract. I was informed that to cancel my account I would have to pay my contracted bill amount of €80 ’til my account ends on the 26th of March 2010 or make the full payment of €400 immediately.”
3 spends a lot of money on marketing and promoting its offerings, which it prices very keenly, but everything it does on that score counts for absolutely nothing if this is the way it treats its customers. And this is not an isolated story or the first time I have heard from listeners of the Ray Darcy Show and readers of The Irish Times describing how they have been badgered and bullied by 3 employees over late payments. It is so short-sighted that it absolutely beggars belief, it really does.
People miss payments all the time for one reason or another. Maybe she had overspent last month or maybe a big transaction had hit her account the day before the 3 payment was due, so the account had insufficient funds – what ever reason – these things happen. It is, however totally and utterly unacceptable for a company to respond in this fashion. And so amazingly counter-productive. If I was a potential 3 customer and I heard this story I would think long and hard about switching to them - I really would. It is just so incredibly rude to pester and badger someone in this fashion four days after a missed payment.
What normal, decent companies do in circumstances like this is they write to you in the first instance, usually along the lines of ‘Oops, you’ve missed a payment – never mind these things happen. We’ll take a double payment from you next month.’ And then you pay and that’s then end of it.
Instead they rang her mobile repeatedly on a Saturday, rang her place of work repeatedly over the course of a weekend. Then they said they would take her work number off their system. But didn’t. Instead they rang her again on it. They agreed a method of payment – and bear in mind we’re talking about €83 here – and then because that payment took three whole days to makes its way from her account to 3’s account they disconnected her.
As she said to me, she is “an honest hard working person and not paying bills is not a habit I am in. I rectified the mistake as soon as I could. I was mortified that this had happened but was equally disgusted in the way I was treated. I was made feel like a criminal.”
She was so annoyed that she said she wanted to terminate her contract and was told that to end it early – it’s due to run until next March - she would have to pay them 400 quid. She said she was not up on her rights and had no idea how to try and get some compensation or apology for her treatment. She said she was never once given the opportunity to speak to a manger and felt her hurt, annoyance and complaints had fallen on deaf ears.
Well they haven’t fallen on deaf ears any more. I contacted the company with a number of questions.
I asked for the guidelines issued to “customer care staff” on how to handle situations like this. I asked if the company thought it was appropriate to repeatedly call someone on their mobile and at their place of work demanding payment and was this typical of the way 3 did business? I asked why was the listener’s phone disconnected despite her being in constant contact with the company over the single missed payment and I asked if the phone company could give listeners an assurance that it would discontinue, with immediate effect, this policy of making repeated calls to mobile phones, home phones and work phones.
To be fair to 3 it held its hands up immediately. The company accepted that it was unreasonable to have contacted her so often and over a bank holiday weekend after her first missed payment in two years.
A spokeswoman said that as a result of this story 3 had launched an immediate review of its guidelines. The spokeswoman said steps were now being taken to change its policies on customer contact regarding late payments. In addition, it made a commitment not to call customers on bank holiday weekends and said it had reduced the number of calls a customer will receive. She also said it has put in place re-training for its customer service agents on handling issues of this nature
Incidentally, the customer was offered 3 months free line rental and a phone upgrade by way of apology.
1:25 am
I will never use or recommend ‘3′ to anyone. I had much the same problem. it took me 2 months to cancel a mobile broadband account. I hadn’t even used the thing for over a year!
I called them numerous times and they were extremely unhelpful and left me feeling stressed and humiliated. Plus they stated that i had to wait 30 days to cancel an account and that I would still be charged accordingly.
Then after I cancelled the Direct Debit I got requests for 2 months payment. Even after I finally got a sympathetic ‘I know how you feel’ from a representative, I still got a letter from NCO, their debt collection agency. So I have paid the €44 today and i am furious at the way I was treated. I was a customer of theirs for over 3 years (no pun intended), having had a mobile phone also. I firmly believe companies now have the upper hand due to people’s fear of prospective damage to their credit rating and this is the only reason I paid.
Shame on you ‘3′.
Comment by Paul G