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How Carphone Warehouse Regained My Trust
This post is a follow-up to the last, rather less complimentary one, Goodbye, Carphone Warehouse, You Lied and Cheated…
At 10am this morning – and it’s Saturday on a bank holiday weekend, you’ll note, I got a call from Sarah, a customer services manager at Carphone Warehouse. She gets Google Alerts for mentions of the company’s name on her Blackberry, and had picked up on last night’s post. Less than 14 hours after I published it. Shocked at my tale of woe, she’d called into the office from home to retrieve my records.
After confirming the details of my story, she agreed that a mistake had been made and apologised for the company’s failure to act this week. Two hours later, I received this email (slightly abridged):
Dear Mr Delaney
Further to our conversation this morning, I am writing to confirm that I have just credited your account with £473.46 which is the amount that is showing due to data charges.
[...] Should you have any concerns about anything [...] please feel free to call me on my mobile number at any time. [...]
I hope that our conversation this morning and these subsequent actions have gone some way to restoring your faith in CPW and that you will remain a customer for many more years to come. I also hope that you can now get on with the important job of enjoying your N95 and the bank holiday weekend.
Please call me or email me on this address should you have any more questions or should you need any more help.
Kind regards
Sarah
I am still pretty stunned at this turn of affairs, I have to admit, and my fingers are trembling. And I am frankly delighted at the company’s willingness to listen and respond using these channels. It leads me to several observations:
- The Internet makes everything really fast. I achieved more in 14 hours (none of which were during the work week, or even daylight) than a whole week of phone calls. I guess that’s bad news for organisations in some ways, because they have to be considerably more agile than they often are in order to keep up.
- Writing a blog is a good thing to do. I am not an especially noted person, even in the very narrow circles in which I move. But the blog and other social media allowed me to get a message out to the right people in a way that traditional forms of communication did not.
- Without the Internet, corporations are not likely to be very good at dealing with individual cases that don’t fit the standard pattern. I don’t blame Carphone Warehouse, in particular. I think it’s just the nature of modern corporations.
- However, Sarah at Carphone Warehouse – and people like her – are using technology to rehumanise their organisations. Give an empowered person Google Alerts and a Blackberry (and the willingness to look at those alerts on a Saturday morning) and you can totally change people’s perceptions, stem a potential PR disaster and restore faith and humanity in your organisation’s relationships with customers.
Anyway, I am also honour-bound to say that I have changed my mind since yesterday. Carphone Warehouse are actually rather good eggs and you should all go and buy some phones from them straight away.
Many thanks, too, to Huw, David, Helen, and Jana among others for your messages of support, posts and advice. The world is beautiful again.
[I agreed to keep Sarah's surname private, but if any of her managers at Carphone Warehouse pick up on this story, please reward her bountifully].
Possibly related:
[...] If you need the history – I had a big problem with the company (blogged here), which was resolved the day after I wrote a post about it on this site (blogged here). [...]
Very pleased to hear it…
[...] than 14 hours after writing his less than positive blog post, Ian received a phone call from a customer services manager from the company who had been alerted to the post through an email notification from her Google [...]
Happened upon your less complimentary post in a Google search about CPW/O2 customer service numbers – I find the fact that it’s still near the top of the search results quite ironic, as you have probably done them quite a bit of damage.
That said, I think you’ve missed the point when you praise them here and praise the Internet for being so awesome and fast. The reason behind their abrupt change of heart is summed up in the first para of this comment of mine – you created a potential negative publicity time bomb. Had you not been a person with an established blog, capable of commanding at least a little bit of the mighty Google’s attention, would they have given a second thought to you? I severely doubt it. It’s fine that they were nice to you in the end, but spare a thought for all the average people who don’t have blogs and hence have no way out of the horrible Kafka-esque maze of stonewalling and delays that all these companies construct to inflate their profit margins still further. And if you’re thinking these people should set up blogs in order to give themselves somewhere to complain, well, what kind of world is it where people have to do that? It’s ridiculous.
That said, I might just do it…
Interesting. What search term were you Googling Jeremiah?
My intention was to locate a phone number for someone who handles queries from people who set up their o2 contracts through the CPW – for some reason these people can’t simply use o2′s own customer service number. So I Googled:
carphone warehouse o2 customer service
Which I think you’ll agree is reasonably general. The post titled “Goodbye, Carphone Warehouse, You Lied and Cheated…” comes up as the ninth result.
Thanks for the comment, Jeremiah. I certainly had Google in mind when I wrote the original post and hoped that CPW were sufficiently web-minded to understand the potential damage I could do to them.
It would be very wrong of me to second-guess the company’s motives for rushing to my aid less than 12 hours after I wrote the post, though… despite a week of no help whatsoever on the phone.
Good luck with your own issue and keep me posted.
[...] NB: This story has a happy ending! [...]