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Arnold Clark - took a deposit on a car sale from me, then found the repairs needed to the vehicle made it a non-profitable sale for them, so refused to sell me the car - then wouldn't give me the deposit back.
Stratstone Mercedes sold me a car with a full warranty, then when there was an issue refused to honour the warranty as the vehicle didn't have a full MB service history. Trading standards popped in on their way past and all was miraculously resolved in double quick time.
Hate car dealers
Another vote for Vodaphone - their refusal to allow my terminally ill Mother in Law to cancel the phone contract she would no longer be needing ended up the subject of a report on the regional TV news.
Disgusting
Superstar Components! And BT...
E.ON, for hounding and threatening to take us to court and have baliffs come round etc, for the thousands of pounds that we owed. They had my wife in tears about it, as I was away for 4 months in Oman.
Best thing about it, they didn't provide our energy and hadn't done for just under 4 years!! I must have called them well over 20 times about the situation, to which I was told "yes, it's sorted now".
Absolute bunch of clueless morons (I would use a much stronger word here).
British Gas for not being able to deal with some-one moving house
AA for charging me to let them know that I've moved address (funnily enough the charge for changing address was remarkably similar to the value of the decrease in premium....)
Barclaycard Not only are they massively patronising, they can't be bothered to have an actual person be patronising, and use a machine to remind you how little they care...
British Gas (the only place that billed me my bill twice AND billed me someone else's bill too)
British Gas (the only place that answered the phone with "Oh FFS, not an another punter, yeah what do you want... sigh")
yup BG can be +2 since they deserve to be above BT
Natwest Bank - absolutely useless at banking. and absolutely useless customer service (apart from the kiwi girl when I called at 2am once).
My local Council.
I was a month behind, apparently, on my Council tax, just £120 in arrears (I owed £240 total out of £1200 for the year), so they issued a Court Summons.
I rang them, and said I'm pretty sure I am up to date with you.
They said no, you have been late for the last few months, and was behind from the previous year, so we are taking action.
I had to pay an extra £70 for the Court Costs.
6 months on, I get a letter from the Council saying I have been credited £140.
I rang, and they were reluctant to say the reason, eventually the person said the money had inadvertently been put into another account, so it looked like I was behind in my payments.
But they had found it now, so it is now OK, and I would be in credit for a month or so.
"What about the Court fees you charged me for?"
Well, you were in arrears then, so we had to issue a Summons.
"But I was only in arrears because of your incompetence"
Well we didnt know that then did we, so we have to charge you for the summons.
It took numerous calls to get them to acknowledge that I wasnt behind in my payments, nor should I have been issued with a Summons. It took 6 weeks to get the Summons fee back, even then, they wouldnt issue a cheque, it had to come off my Council Tax.
Eon here, for charging a huge sum on leaving them and still holding onto it.
And O2 for stealing my additional data on billing date. They have at least listened and since changed their wording, but it's still wobbery. It's going to be a satisfying call when I cancel.
On the 'will never spend a single penny with them again list' for customer service:
EE
HA Fox Jaguar
Currys/Comet
On the 'will never spend a single penny with them again list' for poor products:
Mercedes
Peugeot
As if there weren't sufficient car dealers named on here already... Border Cars. Fail to do work correctly, then lie about whether work was needed, then ignore you, then spin you along hoping you'll go away all the time spinning platitudes about how important their customers are, then magically admit that they never did the work in the first place.
And don't bother contacting their MD as the issue will eventually get sorted by your own perseverance rather than by anything involving him actually deigning to respond directly to one of his valuable customers. And yes, I did get some money back.
Come on, seriously, no one?
Yodel.
Dealing with them is beyond bad customer service, it's like being in a weird experimental emotional torture version of the Truman show.
First Utility are atrocious but they've gone from my life now.
They continually failed to take money off me and allowed huge bills to build up. I thought the money was going out of the joint account but they kept refunding it in odd amounts I didn't keep track of.
Eventually the bad debt team will miraculously discover your number that they claim they don't have and call you for payment. I presume the regulator enforces that they're not allowed to set up a payment plan that you can't afford and they're obliged to ask weird loaded questions "Can you confirm that this payment is affordable to you Sir?".
Well I couldn't really, it was going to make me overdrawn so I said so, but he wouldn't let me set up a payment or off the phone until I agreed with him. Atrocious company and now I'm with OVO thanks to a referral from STW.
BG after almost 15 years. Had boiler serviced next week went to USA with work, mid-week got the phone call that the boiler was flooding downstairs, called out BG, was on the service plan thing. Engineer said " yep, that's buggered, if you had our service plan we'd cover that and it would never have happened because we'd have spotted the issue early." Oh good says exOH we have the service plan. "Ah" was the reply, "You see service hasn't been carried out as per the schedule, so not covered".
Turns out i called the engineer out a couple of weeks too early, so not to plan, so not covered.
Yodel, British Gas & Santander top my list
Utter shite
Indiset are working at it. Washing machine broke three weeks ago, visited two weeks ago to fix, broke again after first wash. Finally came back out today, second engineer reckons first guy never bothered to fix the major problem. Needs to order parts, can't tell us when they'll be available or able to fit them.
Just to update, they still can't tell me when they can fix it but if they can't fix it within 28 days I should get a new washing machine.
Except it's 28 days from yesterday, not 3 weeks ago when I first called them.
On One. Lots of companies are bad, not that many companies are actual thieves.
Oh and Carrick Yamaha in Edinburgh, same reason. It's been a vindictive pleasure of mine to cost them business over the last 15 years or so, I got up to about £50000 though it's a while since I've had a scalp...
Vodafone - they are now the most complained about mobile operator:
Care of Ofcom's brand new [url= http://www.ofcom.org.uk/mobile-coverage ]realworld coverage mapping tool[/url] we can all see why they get so many complaints about coverage.
Canada
yes the whole of Canada
such complete incompetence on a daily basis
****ers
New entry from HMRC.
On an automated voice recognition thing.
'Our call centres are very busy today. Please hold if you wish to wait for a representative or call back later'
'Please tell us why you are calling us.....'
'Please confirm you are calling about your tax code.....'
'What is the problem with your tax code.......'
'You may be able to answer your query on our website......'
'Please continue to hold to speak to an advisor.......'
etc.
For about 15 mins. Followed by.
'I'm sorry, all our advisors are busy. please call back later' <CLICK>
Why do i have to go through telling them what i want to speak to them about before they can tell me they aren't going to speak to me anyway!!!!!
I'm going against the grain of the 'good customer service' thread and nominating
Appliances Online [url= http://ao.com/ ]http://ao.com/[/url] for poor customer service. Most people recommending them on the basis of being cheap and delivering on time...that's not what I call customer service, the true test is when things go wrong.
I made the mistake of paying for 'installation' from AO.COM . The delivery guys were very rushed and didn't take much care in the installation. They put a small rip in the kitchen lino floor and didn't admit it until I pointed it out. Also they didn't bother removing the protective film off the machine so once installed under the counter with parts of the film already peeling I had to peel as much as I could with finger tips / pincers to make it visually acceptable.
Despite the delivery guy taking photo's of the rip (once pointed out before he legged it) , not any apology. 'Customer Service' once I chased them sent a standard form demanding conditions such as 3 quotes for repairs, limited number of days etc and still no apology, and clearly just want you to go away. They won as I gave in as getting 3 quotes for a small tear seemed over the top and I really would have been happy with a token refund of installation. Still living with a tear in the lino though which. I doubt I'll shop with them again but definitely would not pay for 'install'
And another for Virgin media. Beyond belief.
Virgin Media, again, could they be catching up?
I actually felt sorry for the poor woman on the phone who had to try to tell me that it was my antivirus that slowed things at weekends.
Vodafone here a long time ago. Threatened court action to collect overdue account, even though I terminated the contract in the VF shop six months earlier.
Followed by Talk Talk, who also advised on sending balliffs, court action to collect overdue account, even if it did stand at £0.00 on the statement.
Virgin Media for being crap. 3rd Modem in 6 months now. Lets see how long this one works for.
Southern Electric.
We were having gas from them. Our meter was changed, I took photos of the old one before it was removed and of the new one going in, (maybe a kind of sixth sense of what was about to take place). 3 years of DD and me supplying meter readings meant that suddenly I was presented with a bill for £1800. They'd managed to register my new meter to a shop round the corner and wouldn't take my photos of the meter readings and the serial number on my meter as mine. Months of phone calls and arguing until I escalated to a senior manager, she then excepted my evidence but then tried to bill me for 3 years gas at today's price, not the price it was when I used it. They reckoned I owed about £300, I worked it out and was pence out when they finally excepted the correct meter readings.
Talk Talk.
Numerous faults with broadband. Very slow speeds, intermittent service, constant dropping out. Was told that the line from the pole to the house maybe at fault so I should climb the pole and string up a new line and that would fix it. This by a second line technical support bloke, based in India. 😯
BT - talk about a shambolic service. The arse most certainly doesn't know the elbow.
VSO - the 'agency' that now do visa service for India. Also gets a vote for the worst website and online application process ever devised.
Sigma sport in kingston at the moment, I'm close to going mental at them....
virgin media for managing to piss off a long term customer, threaten legal action but turn out to be shiter at that than they were at customer service.
suffolk council, suffolk coastal district council planning officers and my local parish councillors for being a bunch of DM reading halfwit bigots.
BT
Virgin Media
Ryanair for me
HMRC for me too.
"We've changed your tax code to account for the £3000 underpaid tax we recently told you about."
Did you? Did you really tell me about it? Did you *^%#.
Another vote for British Gas.
I will never ever entertain using them ever again after the total balls-up they made of everything when I moved into my first house.
Daily letters from them welcoming me to BG, asking for my first meter reading, demanding that I paid anything between £0.00 and £1500 for unpaid/overdue bills, offering me their service packages...
All I wanted to do was pay a final bill and leave them, how difficult could that be?!
Elite Garage Caterham
Kwik Fit Eastbourne
Birch wood Ford Eastbourne
All tried ripping either me or the wife off, along with a good deal of incompetancey/sharp practice.