This post is an update to the previous post today…
I definitely think I’ll have to consider the Data Protection request as one of the top dogs in this company I’ve been dealing with has just emailed me to say that they only had an email address for me from today. Despite the fact that
- When I signed up for their service I had to give an email address
- I included an email address in my letter of complaint
- One of their Customer Service people had emailed me to the email address I had given on my complaint letter not 4 weeks ago
Basically this senior person, sent me an email (and I won’t do a ‘Mulley’ on it and publish the email.. YET) which basically reads like “it’s your fault we couldn’t contact you because you didn’t answer your phone”, despite the fact that I have no voicemails (no answer, pissed customer, leave a voicemail to say you tried to contact them… common sense) or missed calls in my missed call log from this company in the past month.
Not a whiff of mea culpa about it at all… Which is just plain stupid from a Customer Service perspective.
Years ago I started my career in a call centre. We had an excellent external training consultant for a team leader course I did. He gave one piece of advice (and only one) about dealing with customer complaints… the customer may not always be right, but it’s suicide to try to make them feel they are wrong. I’ve tried to follow that mantra when dealing with customers in my day job (internal customers, project stakeholders, information consumers, managers, co-workers).
Apparently making people feel they are wrong just gets them peeved and then they go and write blog posts about their experiences that might get linked to your company.
And as for the Data Protection implication… they captured information about me and either had no use for it or have failed to ensure it is stored safely and securely as per their obligations as data controllers. Even if it is on paper in a filing cabinet it is governed by the Data Protection Act.