Dear Mister Elliot,
Can I call you Mike? No? Now Mike, your role is Head of Credit and Collections at 3, so you may think this letter doesn’t matter to you. It does. Keep reading.
Here’s the deal. If Three is to continue providing customer support via email through the Three website, then at the very least Customer Services should acknowledge any emails they receive and deal with any issues. That’s what customer support is.
Specifically, if Three is going to offer email as a legitimate way of contact for issues such as contract cancellation – as stated in Three’s terms and conditions – then once more, Customer Services need to read the emails and act on them, not ignore them and deny all knowledge of their existence. If an operator asks a customer to re-send the email, then somebody really should reply. Really.
(By the way, in all our collective time of working on Bitterwallet, none of us have ever seen a more impenetrable set of terms and conditions offered by any business – a two page PDF document featuring over two dozen pages from a booklet. Staggering.)
Mike, these issues are not strictly your concern, but given how the failure of Customer Services must provide plenty of business for you, I thought I’d let you know. What is relevant to you, Mike, is this:
If Three is going to attempt to contact a customer during daytime hours, then failure of the customer to respond to a phone message your operator left with an 8 year-old child is not really an excuse to push an account to a collection agency.
And when a customer responds to the letter you signed, by sending a letter recorded delivery, one that contains all the correspondence they sent to Three by email in the past two months, have the decency to have a note put on their account. If you’re going to threaten people with adverse credit ratings, act when they attempt to put things right.
There are probably many reasons why Three has such a poor share of the mobile market. Treating customers like dogshit, even if they don’t want to give your their custom anymore, really can’t be helping matters. You’re putting your name on these letters, Mike. Do something about it.
Cheers,
Paul
