Persistence Pays Off

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had to take my mobile phone into O₂ For repair. At the time, I was told it would be about four working days. Sure enough, a package arrived the following Thursday –  a day early. I was impressed. At least, I was impressed until I opened the package. My Motorola Razr XT910 had magically transformed into a Samsung Galaxy S2. I was no longer impressed. Indeed, I was extremely angry.

The letter that came with it explained that as my handset was going to take longer than expected to repair, they had swapped it out. Fine if that is the problem. However, I expect a swap to be the same make and model. I do not expect a completely different machine that I had never ordered and never agreed to pay for.

A quick call to O₂‘s call centre didn’t help over much. The repair centre had made the decision and the best that they could do was send me back to the shop. So back to the shop I went. There I was advised that as the Razr was an obsolete model, that would explain the swap. I reminded them that the XT910 was a current model. As I subsequently discovered, O₂ no longer provide or support this handset, so that’s why the swap. Not good enough, I told them. I brought in a Razr and a Razr is what I want back.

The supply chain was bereft of Razrs so we hit an impasse. “Why not,” I suggested, “give me my handset back?” It seemed a reasonable request –  after all, that was what I wanted in the first place.

Some folk when I told them about it thought I was getting a good deal –  the Samsung, they said, was a desirable machine. Maybe so, however, it is not what I entered into a contract for and O₂ were palming me off with a reconditioned, second-hand handset not of my choosing and expecting me to continue paying the full price I had agreed for my Razr. So, no, it is not a good deal. Not a good deal at all.

The manager at the shop phoned me and told me that he had a workaround. He suggested that as I had been given a handset I didn’t want, I should sell it back to them and use the funds to buy a Razr. He quoted a price and by shopping around, I could get a new Razr for that. So, yeah, I could go with that one. At least, I could until I got to the shop and he realised that the repair center had sent me an S2 and not, as he thought, an S3 upon which he was basing his quote. That changed the dynamics somewhat. It changed them by a £100 shortfall. “Okay, he suggested,” I’ll get them to send you an S3, so that you can sell that.”

As I expected, the response was short and negative. Corporate were unwilling to do anything that might alleviate the situation. I called the repair centre myself and was told that the shop would have to fill in an escalation form or nothing could be done. My phone had been sent to the Excel Centre, so was long gone –  presumably to be refurbished and sold on.

So it was back to the shop. The shop decided to try again for the S3, which I felt was probably pissing in the wind. I was right, it was. My patience was rapidly running out and a formal complaint was looming on the horizon. If I did that, then I would be looking to cancel the contract as I did not agree to the unilateral variation following the issue of a handset I neither requested, nor wanted.

So there I was, in the shop at my final impasse before ripping up the contract. “All I want,” I said, “Is my phone back. You don’t have to find me a new one, you don’t have to swap it and you don’t have to faff about with exchanges. Just fix my phone and give it back to me. It’s a simple enough request.”

To be fair to the manager in the shop, he understood and sympathised. So, he decided to try the Excel Centre and see if he could get my phone back. The following Tuesday he called me to tell me that my phone was awaiting collection. They had checked it over and it was working just fine.

So, you wonder, just how hard was it to get right the first time?

There are a couple of morals to this tale;

Firstly, if there is a problem such as the repair being more complex or taking longer than anticipated, a call to the customer to explain the options goes a long way to smoothing out the problem. I would have been happy to wait for my phone to be repaired.

Swapping out an item without prior agreement with the customer is a surefire way to upset that delicate relationship. I was in no mood to accept a replacement under any circumstances following such high-handed treatment. The basic principle of customer service is to see to the customer’s needs, not what is most convenient for the supplier.

And, despite piss-poor customer service on the part of the the organisation, one individual in that organisation managed to turn a bad situation around. I ended up with what I wanted eventually, despite the best efforts of the organisation to thwart me.

Finally, patient persistence really does pay off. I didn’t get angry, I didn’t rant, rave or swear. I just calmly and politely stood my ground repeating what I wanted all along and wasn’t going away until I got it.

And finally, finally, just providing the customer with the service he asks for in the first place makes life a whole lot easier for everyone –  but that is far too simple, it would seem.