Is it just me or do you find that dealing with big companies generally means less service, longer phone calls and more hassles? I recently purchased a new car and with the deal came 6-months free comprehensive insurance. Excellent, I thought to myself, that’s more money saved. I have had no accidents in that 6 months and my no claim bonus of 5+ years has remained intact. But 6 months passes very quickly and before I knew it, the time to pay for car insurance was upon me once more. Now, with everything else that is going on around me at the moment, I just did not have time to do the whole compare prices exercise, so I opted to stay with the same car insurance company and avoid any hassles.

Big mistake it seems! Again, because of all the problems we are going through right now, I decided to pay by monthly instalments and therefore, have the money at hand for more important things, like looking after Anja and making sure she has everything she needs/wants. So, all the forms were filled in and a direct debit authority signed. I then forgot about it and got on with life. Simple. That is, until the date came where the money [a 2-month payment of $120.00] was to be taken automatically from my bank account. And here the fun began.

Instead of taking out the 2-month instalment, they decided to take the whole yearly payment [close to £500.00]. So, obviously a phone call was in order. Meanwhile, another quick check of my bank account to make sure I had all the details correct and another shock was waiting for me. Not only had they taken out a year’s payment but now another full year payment as well. So, instead of the anticipated £120.00 direct debit, I was hit with close to £980.00 being withdrawn. Now maybe to some people this is peanuts, but to me, it is enough to hurt. I am just really lucky that I have access to a healthy overdraft which covered this amount.

To cut a long story short, it has taken me the best part of two weeks to get my money returned to me. After several [as in lots] of phone calls, and having to deal with the first line of defense – the low paid telephone droids who all say exactly the same thing as they read from their prompt sheets time after time, I finally decided my patient approach was not working. So, I mentioned the Office of Fair Trading and this automatically shifts you up a notch and you become a Level Two complaint. This says a lot about a company in my opinion, that they actually have different levels of complaint.

And I have to mention something here that really annoys me when dealing with any company like this – the way they all refer to other departments as ‘them’ and ‘they’. Passing the buck. The way I see it, whoever you are talking to on the phone is the representative of that company and the royal ‘we’ should come into play.

So after two weeks, my money is now safely back in my account. But the issue is bigger than this. How do we, as mere customers, fight against this kind of behaviour? Some desk clerk makes a blunder like this and our whole lives can be affected. It can have huge ramifications. Even in my case, this money needed to be elsewhere and it is two weeks late for them now as well. So bank charges come into play as well, let alone credit ratings and bank security issues.

They promised to send me an apology letter and even some flowers. Surprise, surprise – neither have arrived.

How would you deal with this? And how can we stop it from happening again? Changing companies is not necessarily the answer, because they are all as bad as one another. Does anyone have a solution or as customers, are we just too small in this world now to have any means of fighting back?

Update: Sorry about all the typos in the original [I should check my posts more thoroughly] – fixed now.

Anyway, I received an apology letter this week and some flowers too, on Saturday.  That was nice, not a whole lot of point, but at least they tried and it is appreciated.

And then on Friday afternoon – another person from Accounts phoned and wanted the money back again! I couldn’t believe it, but then they explained – they had refunded the money to me 4 times! I felt like saying, ‘no, you cannot have my bank details again’ , but just couldn’t be bothered after the whole thing had finally finished.

And amazingly, they had their money back out of my account again by the following morning. To think, it only took them over two weeks to do the same for me.

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