Bad Customer Service: Resolving It?

End of season special. After the article about parents and children in a social setting I wanted to follow up with this, similar article, but about poor service from companies.

Does anyone else have real issue with bad customer service experiences? If so, what do you do and what is considered fair for the customer? For example recently I had two absolutely terrible experiences from Uber and Ryanair; one of which is resolved and one of which is still under dispute, due to what I believed to be unacceptable service to me.

The first issue I had, was that I got an Uber back from Euston station to where I live in Hale Barns as it had been a long day and I didn’t fancy the hassle of getting back on the train. All in all, the journey cost me about £600 which was absolutely fine but my problem was with the Uber driver himself. As I am sure we can all appreciate on such a long journey, this driver wanted his tip which would have been a significant amount of money to him.

I typically tip around 35% and I am unaware if my Uber history would’ve shown this to him but he really was pushing to get it, which is fine but I felt he came across as a bit fake and annoying. Continually kept talking to me about things like his kids, asking me about my family etc really irritated me when all I wanted to do was listen to my playlist. It felt like he was just talking about anything for the sake of his tip when in reality I wanted to be left alone.

After I got back to Manchester I decided to contact Uber and ask for my money back on the basis that I had not had a good experience and it, in my opinion, fell far beneath the standards Uber set when delivering a good experience to their customers. If someone continually talks at you for the best part of 4 hours about nonsense and you have to keep pausing your music to talk back to them, then that is not only inconvenient for the customer but also can cause anxiety and irritation.

Anyway I use Uber a lot but they wouldn’t give me a refund. Now I fully accept it was a long journey however I felt like I wasn’t being listened to by the customer service department. After a bit of back and forth with them I decided to escalate it. They stopped replying to my emails and I really couldn't be bothered with another LiveChat session.

What I ended up doing instead was contacting my card provider AmEx who not only listened to me properly but took into account what I said. By the way I must say AmEx always deliver super customer service and I highly recommend them. Luckily as a long time Platinum card holder they charged the fee back under section 75 and I got a full refund. The whole thing was smooth and fast, unlike the customer service or experience from Uber.

The second issue I have is with Ryanair but that’s still under dispute and I will go into it another time.

Does anyone else ever pull companies up about underwhelming service? If so what do you consider fair and what do you do when a company won’t listen?


Admin pls multi-board