When I was growing up, say in the fifties and sixties, the maxim amongst retailers and public facing organisations was “the customer is always right”. But in the modern world it’s as if this has been turned on it’s head to “the customer is an idiot”.
OK, the modern world is a complicated place with almost every appliance having a computer in it somewhere, with a rudimentary interface, international symbols, and incrementor buttons; the public access to the company’s help and support is often through poorly designed web sites, and menu driven telephone systems, so I understand that “the customer is always right” is now a fairly unrealistic proposition.
I’m now retired after a 40 year career in IT, some of it in product support, and I know that at least 50% of the time, the customer is wrong. They didn’t read the manual, or they’re labouring under some misapprehension, or sometimes yes, they’re idiots!
None of which excuses Orange for some of my recent exchanges with them.
My wife has a Pay’n’Go arrangement with them going back 6 or 7 years. She almost never uses her mobile for making calls; she has it mainly for use around the house on the home Wi-Fi network, and occasionally for meeting up in shopping centres when she and I have different agendas. Her contract with Orange only required that she topped-up her SIM card maybe twice a year.
On a recent hospital visit, I’d dropped her off and drove away to look for parking. She was going to call me when she needed picking up. But after an hour or so, I was getting concerned and eventually drove around to where I’d dropped her, and found she’d been standing there for 45 minutes. She’d tried phoning me, only to find she had no credit.
So a few days later, I made a trip to the Orange shop to find out what was going on and they looked at her phone and said “she has mobile data turned on”. I realised that she had recently got a new phone, where mobile data must have defaulted to ‘on’. But then I said “her contract doesn’t include data, so I don’t see how this matters”. The woman I was talking to thought about it for a second, and agreed with me, and suggested that I call the Orange helpline number, and ask for our credit to be refunded.
So I called the helpline, described the situation and asked for a refund. The guy spoke to his manager, came back and said “sorry, we can’t give refund… it’s your fault for having data switched on”. Explaining that actually, this was their error because it was a ‘calls-and-SMS only contract’ was like talking to a brick wall. So because we’d at least diagnosed the problem, I gave up on the lost credit.
Over the next few weeks, my wife was getting almost daily SMS messages showing that her credit was still going down. We had holidays and guests, and the Orange shop was a 45 minute drive away, so it was a few weeks later that I went back to the Orange shop. Described the problem, and this time was told they couldn’t help with Pay’n’Go customers… I had to call the helpline.
So I finally steeled myself for the inevitable argument. Eventually got through, and explained how we thought the problem was fixed, but apparently it wasn’t. The guy took the number and disappeared for a few minutes. He came back and said “yes the problem is you must have had mobile data turned on”. I again explained how this was the case several months ago, but this was fixed. He then said in a way suggesting that gritted-teeth, passive-aggressive style of speech they adopt, said “I’ve already said that this is not possible. You must still have had data turned on”, but he did say he’d turn it off at his end, and reimburse the latest credit of €5. Digging my heels in, I said “I can guarantee that data has been turned-off since our first visit to the shop, the problem is at your end, and I need a refund of all the credit that we’ve lost. Anything else is legalised theft”.
He spoke to his manager, and came back saying “No. It’s your error… we’ll refund just the €5. If you don’t want it, I’m going to put the phone down”. Well because of this borderline arrogance, Orange still have two problems:
- The Pay’n’Go arrangement my wife is on clearly does permit mobile data, even though it’s not part of the contract.
- Under such a scheme, if mobile data has been turned-on at any time, turning it off doesn’t necessarily fix the problem.
The customer support staff of Orange and companies like them, have this naïve faith in their company’s infallibility. They are conditioned to reject the notion that just occasionally, the customer may be right, and as we’ve seen will sometimes go one step further and even call the customer a liar.
Well, this customer also remembers.
