Why The Carphone Warehouse and Orange made me see red!

06 June 2008

Nothing ticks me off more than bad service, except bad service that costs me money. Which is why I won’t be shopping in the Carphone Warehouse again and I will never be on an Orange network!

Let me begin at the beginning. Hayes Major lost his phone. I was surprising calm about this and after a suitable period of searching/ blocking the SIM card, we went to get the phone that he had his eye on as a replacement. We bought it at The Carphone Warehouse, adding an extra £10, in cash, for phone credit, so that we can call all his friends to tell them his new phone number.

Only he couldn’t.

The Carphone Warehouse will not put credit on a new pay-as-you-go phone for EIGHT working days! Even the UK’s banks have shaped up and can transfer funds quicker than that now. How much interest does that bring in, I wonder? I certainly would not have bought the phone if this had been mentioned at the time of purchase.

In its efforts not to help the company’s press office and customer service departments cited the Data Protection Act as a reason why it could not discuss the account with me. I had to put my son on the phone. They would rather flannel a 12year old with “it takes eight days…because it just does” to explain why he was £80 down and still without a (working) phone. The company insists that it is not an issue before eight days have elapsed. All we have to do is call on the eighth day if the phone is still out of action and they will fill in a form on my son’s behalf. Gee, thanks.

Frustrated with the Customer Service department, I thought I would ask the manager of the branch from which the phone was bought. Here is a staggering example of the way customers are treated. The answerphone message told me that the staff are busy and “to call again”. No offer of a callback, not even automated acknowledgement that “Your call is important to us, you are 118th in the queue, do you want to hold?”

This eight-day wait ruse, unique to The Carphone Warehouse is because it says it might lose money if a phone is returned within the 14-day return period. Apparently, the company is duty-bound to refund the credit completely, even if the customer has used part of it. Except The Carphone Warehouse has a policy of no returns on Orange phones bought in-store…Which left us where we started but £80 worse off.

And now on to Orange. Their Indian call centres also have a jolly wheeze to get rid of pesky customers they can’t be bothered to help. Operators either offer to call back after consulting a supervisor to get you off the line [they don’t call] or put you on hold “to speak to a supervisor”. There are no supervisors working in Orange’s Indian customer service centres! All I was able to find out is that the phone is not registered in my son’s or anyone in the family’s name. “But I have an invoice that says it’s his,” I hiss, but the Data Protection Act means they can [won’t] help find out why it is not recognising his name. [We finally established that The Carphone Warehouse had printed out a receipt with the wrong phone number on it, which was registered to someone in Plymouth…Great help - thanks.]

I did manage to speak to someone in the UK call centre who, using the SIM, gave us the correct phone number, activated the phone and Hayes Major is up and running – hurrah! Although The Carphone Warehouse and Orange have cost us the equivalent to the cost of his phone in the first place – plus heartburn!

The lesson I can pass on to you from this frustrating experience is: put the phone down straight away if you get through to Orange’s India call centre. And walk past The Carphone Warehouse - no run past it - when phone shopping!

Have you got any horror stories of outrageous business practices, weighted in favour of the supplier not the one paying the money? Have you come up against a farcical customer service ethos? Have you fallen foul of outrageous, and costly, excuses that defy technological advances or logic? Do tell!


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