Take the experience of one reader recently. She had a problem with her, yes – you’ve guessed it! – mobile phone network.

Very briefly, the story goes like this. Our reader had finally decided to switch providers from Orange to O2 because there was only a very poor Orange signal at home. She jumped through all the various hoops required to retain her number and organise the switchover.

As the big day approached, she was informed that there would be a charge to unlock her existing Orange phone so that it could be used with the new O2 SIM card. Rather than waste £20, she decided to buy a shiny new O2 phone and put the money towards that.

No sale

On the day before the switchover, her first attempt at buying the phone from the O2 website was thwarted – there was a problem authorising the transaction – so she followed the instructions on screen and contacted telesales instead. Big mistake! The sales agent, although initially helpful, also had a problem getting the transaction authorised, and tried to put the sale through several times seemingly without success.

The conversation went something like this*….

‘There must be a problem with your card. Are you sure you have funds in your account?’

‘Yes,’ he was re-assured. ‘I have checked the account online.’

‘We only have your word for it,’ he told his prospective customer.

‘Tell, you what, let’s try another card,’ responded our reader.

Same problem.

Fraud prevention

Shortly after our somewhat frustrated reader had put the phone down – having finally been informed by the O2 sales agent that there was a ‘problem with the IT system’ – and resigning herself to making a special trip to the local O2 shop, she received a call from NatWest Premier Banking Services.

‘There seems to be some unusual activity on your account. O2 have put four identical transactions through on your debit card. Here are the authorisation codes; you will have to contact them if you want to reverse them.’

An additional phone call established that a further transaction had also been put through on another credit card. Then began three days of trying to establish with various parts of O2 whether the money would be taken – even though the order for the goods had not actually been completed – and, if so, when it would be returned.

‘We’ll put the money back in your account in three days, madam’ was the initial lame response from O2.

Help yourself

‘No, you’ll put it back today, given that not only have you failed to confirm my order and are not planning to despatch any goods, but you have also put through five separate charges to my cards. How about I dip my fingers into O2’s bank account and help myself five times – and then I’ll give it back to you on Friday?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, madam!’

‘Well, that’s what you’re saying you’re going to do to me.’

‘We only have your word for it, madam.’

‘But I’ve given you the bank’s authorisation codes for each transaction. Can I speak to a manager, please?’

‘I’m sorry, there are no managers available.’

‘Well get one to ring me back, please.’

Power of the press

Predictably, no calls were returned. So our reader contacted ModernSelling.com to see if we could help. We tried the traditional route of outlining the problem to the press office – after all, they’re trained to respond promptly to journalists. We rang one number and emailed two senior managers in Telefonica’s (O2’s parent) communications department. We have still not had a response several days later. (So, you’ve had your right of reply and you blew it – Ed!)

No names

The saga ticked on for a couple of days as our reader was bounced between various customer service – or lack-of-service agents as the O2 set-up was proving to be – and sales. After much more hanging-on on her brand new mobile (bought from a very sympathetic real human being in the Exeter O2 store), our reader was eventually called back and offered a number of free minutes’ airtime in compensation, and given the fax number of an O2 manager to send the bank authorisation codes to so the story could be checked out properly.

‘Could I have a telephone number so I can speak to this manager (We’ve left out her name to spare her blushes – Ed) as there is a lot of very sensitive personal banking information involved and I’m worried about fraud, having been contacted by the fraud-prevention department of my bank in the first place.’

‘Sorry madam, it’s not our policy to give out telephone contact numbers.’

And then, yes, once again you’ve guessed it, absolutely nothing – and no free minutes showing up on her account either! With no response either from the press office we were somewhat flummoxed. What next – the complaints department (only in writing), the telephone industry watchdog, a consumer advice programme?

Threaten to leave

Then, our reader had the ingenious idea of contacting the department which deals with terminating accounts. What a difference! Suddenly the customer becomes important – an individual again.

‘But madam, why do you want to leave the fabulous O2 family?’

‘Because you’ve charged me five times for a phone you say you have not sold me.’

Excuses

Then the excuses started:

• ‘It must be a problem with NatWest.’ – ‘No, it was a problem with O2’s systems, I have been told already.’
• ‘You should have spoken to such-and-such a part of O2.’ – ‘How I’m I supposed to know the internal workings of your organisation when I can never speak to the same person twice, the managers are unavailable, and they don’t return phone calls, faxes or emails? Why, anyway, is it down to me as a customer to have to fight my way through the darker recesses of your organisation when it is your mistake in the first place and you have taken my money – five times – without actually selling me anything?’
• ‘You were dealing with an outsourced organisation, not O2 itself.’ – ‘I don’t care who runs your call centres; they’re all branded as O2 and you need to sort your internal systems out.’

Eventually, after a bit more of the same repartee and our reader informing the customer services agent that she would now actually like to start receiving some customer service, she escaped from the tentacles of the O2 bureaucracy with an assurance that the money would not be taken from her account, a few hundred free airtime minutes in compensation, and a grudging apology.

Customers are a nuisance

A few hours later, she also received a call from an ill-tempered manager who had been the recipient of the original fax, but only after she had been emailed by her colleague in the terminations department prompting her to respond.

‘I was going to call you later on this afternoon.’

‘But I faxed you yesterday and made it clear that the matter was urgent because it was a fraud issue.’

‘I’ve already apologised, what more do you want?’

‘It would be nice to know that you’re going to take a look at how you might improve your systems so that this doesn’t happen again….’

Lessons to learn

So what lessons can O2 learn from this? They are numerous:

1. Don’t blame the customer for your own mistakes.
2. Don’t blame the customer’s bank (or any other trusted supplier) for your own problems, especially when it’s the bank’s duty to guard against fraud.
3. Don’t assume the customer must be in the wrong without checking – in this case it was an O2 system fault not a lack of funds in a customer’s account.
4. Don’t pass the buck and try to blame different departments within your organisation – they’re all working under the same brand so far as the customer is concerned.
5. Welcome new customers and help them find their way around your organisation.
6. Don’t assume that lower-spending customers will always stay that way. Our reader works for a global management consultancy out of a home office and says she might well be in the market for future services – broadband being an obvious one. In any case, treat customers as individuals not faceless units to be farmed.
7. Don’t wait until the customer is so p*ssed off that they want to leave before you begin to offer proper customer service.
8. Don’t under-estimate the power of customer advocacy. In the case of our reader, the two other members of her household are existing O2 customers: at a stroke, O2 has transformed them from advocates into unhappy customers.
9. Engage with your customers and prospects: don’t hide behind voicemail and do be responsive. You can always gauge the quality of an organisation by the way it deals with people and handles complaints.
10. Ensure that issues are resolved by closing off loops properly.

Systemic problems

It’s clear from the saga related above that many of the problems within O2’s sales and customer service departments (both internal and outsourced) result from systemic and policy issues. Staff are hampered in the way they do their jobs by poor management, while managers hide behind no-names policies, voice-mail and other barriers that prevent them from having to deal with members of the public.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to talk to any member of O2’s or Telefonica’s press office or management team to discuss these issues, because we have so far not received a reply to any of our approaches. So a resounding jeer and a firm two-fingered salute goes to O2 this month, not so much for slipping up in the first place but for the utter indifference from the customer service and salespeople involved, along with the complete lack of response from the company’s press office.

Disclaimer

*Before O2’s lawyers get too frisky, yes, we acknowledge that the quotes in this comment are only paraphrases of the actual telephone conversations that took place between O2 representatives and our reader, and are simply for illustrative purposes. You will, of course, have recordings of all the actual conversations that took place to confirm that they were far worse!