I am used to advertising coming at me absolutely every way it possibly can. Of course there are the old fashioned methods such as posters, newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio and television commercials that have been around for decades and longer. I would imagine that more content on the internet and certainly the bulk of email traffic is actually trying to sell you something quite often spurious products connected to sexual performance that the vast bulk of users do not even want advertised to them let alone to buy. It almost seems that advertising has become a kind of end in itself rather than a way to increase sales of a company's particular product. The fact that there are awards for television commercials and I assume hidden within the industries themselves for all other kinds of advertising suggests that they have gone beyond simply being a tool to having become a form of art.
Keen-eyed readers or those listening very astutely to their screen reader will notice I have, as yet, not mentioned telephone advertising. Of course, you can now sign up to a service that removes you from the lists of permissible numbers to call. This saved us a lot of time and effort in our house, not only from calls from people but also from calls from machinery. It seemed particularly invidious that the company could not even bother to employ a person to bother us and left it to a machine; even the ten-year old boy who lives in my house, younger then, knew immediately when he answered the phone if it was about to play out some recorded message and would slam the receiver down with a curse. He was well trained in this as some scammers played on children answering phones to get them to call back premium lines. Perhaps a child should not answer a telephone but given he moved much faster than the other residents of the house and could get down the stairs fast enough to reach the phone before it rang off and without injuring himself as I tended to do, it was often down to him to answer it, especially as the answering service supposedly provided by BT proved so unreliable.
On mobile phones it is even worse because phones have two ways of getting messages to you, either by calling you up or texting you. I have owned a mobile phone since 1999 when one I was incredibly lucky to have one given to me as a present as I was living at the time in a house without a landline. It cost the phenomenal sum of £199 (equivalent to about £296 at today's values). I have only owned three handsets. One I left in a taxi and one broke down. From the initial gift I have stayed with O2 (or BT Wireless as it was up until 2001) and so have simply had the handset replaced. Currently I do not have a smartphone so I imagine I am missing out on third and fourth ways to advertise to me through my phone, i.e. by sending me the equivalent of television and internet advertisements to me over it. If I want to take photographs I use a camera; if I want to surf the internet, I use a computer. I have no desire to use a second rate device as phones tend to still be in these respects to do those activities. I realise that makes me an eccentric. Typically I immediately delete any advertising texts but one company I cannot stop advertising to me directly is O2 itself. I suppose as my long-time provider they have a right to contact me. However, what alarms me about their advertising, as the title of this posting suggests, is not that they try to sell me things but they go further and try to tell me how to live my life.
It is a recognised advertising technique that you encourage potential customers to feel they are buying into a certain lifestyle or even into a kind of elite through purchasing their products. Companies develop sub-brands to appeal to different sectors of their customer base separating them out by age or income, always by gender and sometimes by location. Advertising often sells a story, that if you have the item somehow you will be a different person. This is semi-spoofed/semi-replicated in the long-running campaign for Lynx deodorant and shower gel (interestingly the product is called Axe in continental Europe) which suggests one spray or dollop will make a man irresistable to women. In fact, buying a handbag will not make you any more popular or beautiful or successful, despite the advertising. It may signal to other people that you are of a certain wealth or taste and that may, in some rare circumstances, open up some social contact that you might not have previous garnered. The main benefit is that it makes you feel a part of a set of people that you want to associate with, even if the feeling is not mutual or at least to show you share common taste/attitudes/aspirations with those people.
Some advertising goes beyond the change being brought about by purchasing the product to saying that some people do not deserve the product unless they already lead a certain lifestyle. There are a couple of memorable ones of this style. One was the 2009 campaign from Phones 4 U which only offered particular deals to people who had 50 friends or more, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/11/phones4u-advertisement There was another one which I think was for Audi cars, but I might be mistaken as this was probably a decade ago. It showed a flash, brash stock broker type taking a test drive and then turning down the car saying it was not the car for him and the salesman agreeing, implying it was for customers with far greater taste. I feel I am facing the same kind of pressure from O2.
Just after Christmas I was telephoned by O2 to ask if I was happy with the service they provided. I said I was. However, that was not enough for them. They asked me why I was not using my phone more than I did. The man on the other end of the line said 'I can't believe you're not using the 10% discounts' and then asked me why I did not want additional texts or calls or a whole string of offers that they regularly text and also email me about. I then had to spend five minutes telling him that generally my phone is either switched off or without charge in it. I probably receive one to two calls per month on it and make even fewer. I probably send one text per month to my mother, one to the woman who lives in my house and one to my landlord generally when he has offered to cook me a curry. Thus, if I was suddenly offered 100 free texts it would most likely take me until 2015 to use them all. A lot of the calls and texts I receive are advertising. I do not have an active social life and have lost contact with almost all of the friends I had ten years ago. The ones I have prefer to email or even send postcards. I had to keep repeatedly saying that my mobile phone was far more a safety device for when my car breaks down or to confirm with my mother or my co-resident that I have arrived safely. Last time my car broke down the charge in my mobile was exhausted and I was compelled to use a phone box, something I have not done in probably a decade and was alarmed to find how much it cost.
What irritated me was that not only did I have to keep repeating myself, even though O2 knows how much I use my telephone from how much credit I put into it around £30 every 4-5 months. I was resentful that they were trying to get me to live some kind of different life in which I have many more friends and I call them regularly rather than struggling home exhausted to spend the weekend on domestic chores and sleeping. I half expected the caller to say I no longer deserved the phone I had because I was not living the appropriate life that their customers are supposed to have. I felt that I had to fight for the right to live the dull life that I have been dealt. Imagine the impact of such targeted advertising on someone like a teenager far less confident of their lifestyle or unable to see that actually in the UK in 2012 we have very little control over our lives. The woman who lives in my house who lives pretty much the same sort of life as me though she runs a company and has local friends, was similarly called by her provider and questioned about using her phone more. I guess the fact as an entrepreneur and yet has little need of the phone in this age of email and Skype, in order to do business may suggest why the companies are so tenacious and have no embarrassment in trying to press us to live what they feel is an expected lifestyle.
I am reminded a little of an episode of 'Doctor Who' in an alternate version of 2000s Britain in which everyone wears blue tooth kinds of ear pieces and consequently become programmed to behave in much the same way as their fellow citizens and are steadily being turned into cyber(wo)men. A mobile phone is useful, but I feel no compunction to live the way the company that provides it expects. I could not do so without a sudden injection of lots of friends. I do feel that I should not be rung up at regular intervals and have to defend my lifestyle choices so vigorously. I guess this is another element of the shift in service provision that I have noticed. It is no longer the case that 'the customer is always right' now it is clearly, 'the company is always right' in how they take and hold your money and how they tell you that you should be living your life. Hands off my personality!
Showing posts with label customer service. Show all posts
Showing posts with label customer service. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Saturday, 7 January 2012
The Trouble With Steam
This is not a posting about water above 100oC, it is about the online gaming service called Steam. Now, living away from home five days per week and lacking the money and the energy to go out at all, my laptop is my prime source of entertainment. As regular readers know I have long been a fan of the 'Total War' historical computer wargames. Unfortunately since 'Empire Total War' in 2008, even though you buy a disk to load the game into your computer, you have to subscribe to Steam to play it. There is no charge to subscribe, but it does inhibit game playing quite a bit and leaves me feeling resentful that many evenings I am unable to play a game that I have paid for. You can buy games that you download from Steam too and they sell numerous classics at a discount rate, I reconnected with 'Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines' this way and was able to play it without having to download the 23 patches needed to make the disk version work.
I can see why the Steam system was developed. It allows the company to advertise upgrades and extra content and they encourage you to buy other similar games. There is also an online community to connect with. There have long been options to fight battles in the Total War series online. However, given how unpleasant the bulk of people I have encountered through online gaming are, notably so many players of 'World of Warcraft' I have no desire to play with them. This blocks many of the unlockable achievements on the Steam system from me. I hate being compelled to become part of a community. I used to be a regular contributor to the online fora for Total War run by Sega itself and between being told I was utterly useless because I could not simply storm through each of the games on Very Hard setting by people unable to spell properly and having my comments censored by the company, I got very little joy from there either.
The key problem with Steam, though, is that despite having paid my £35 for the game, unlike in the old days with games like 'Medieval II Total War' or 'Rome Total War' simply having the disk is not enough to play the game. I have owned a copy of 'Napoleon Total War' since it came out and enjoyed it. There was a bug which meant that the game crashed about four years into the game time. However, there was a patch that resolved that. When I got a new laptop I reinstalled the game, but, of course, with the cyber attacks on Sega they had taken down the patch. Thus, when I try to play it through the Steam account I am compelled to have, it simply crashes as before. Steam are no use simply sending me back to Sega and anyone offering the patch now is in fact nothing more than a scam trying to infect your machine. Thus, through no fault of my own except upgrading my computer, I can no longer play the game.
A new problem has arisen over the Christmas period with simply accessing games. I have been enjoying the Rise of the Samurai scenario of 'Total War: Shogun 2'. However, just when I have my strategy planned of how to defeat the tough clan in what is a pretty challenging version of the game, I find that I cannot get into the game. I get time markers and then am told that the game is unavailable or has crashed. Repeated tries bring no joy. Again, I cannot play a game I have paid for. The £35 only bought me the occasional chance to play the game, not regular access to it. In addition, every couple of months there is some upgrade, some of them entirely spurious such as the one which made the opening screen which shows a 15th century Japanese castle, suddenly decorated with snowmen out the front of it, one holding a candy cane, something only invented four hundred years or so later, on a different continent. In addition, the downloads seem to make my computer forget that I have bought the game and it tells me it is unavailable. Initially the Steam staff again referred me to Sega, but then another told me I had to delete almost all the files and reinstall the game from Steam. This I do diligently every time. Again it is clear that paying my £35 has not brought the game to my computer, it has simply allowed me occasional random access.
I understand why, for commercial reasons, a hybrid online-disk system like Steam was created. However, in terms of customer service it marks a real retrograde step. If I buy a game I cannot be sure that I will be able to play it more than one or two evenings per week. In the old days, as long as the disk was not scratched, once I had bought it, I could keep on playing it repeatedly for years to come. The disk of 'Shogun Total War' that I bought in 1999 still works and I go back to it when I find for whatever reason I am unable to access its sequel.
This model of only be able occasionally to use something you have paid good money for seems to be the acceptable model. When I had BT internet they kept charging us month after month even though the internet connection broke down on a daily basis. Despite a very patchy service they wanted to charge us £120 to break the contract and a further £90 to remove their equipment. Since when did basic economics state that you have to pay for a service you might actually receive and pay even more to try to get out of that purchase of in fact sometimes nothing? Will it spread and I will go to the dry cleaners and sometimes find my suit has not been cleaned and then be charged more if I want to have it cleaned at another dry cleaners? Will I try and buy a burger and be told that they are unavailable at the moment and I have to come back an hour later for my fast food?
P.P. 04/02/2012
Steam has now deteriorated to the extent that I am unable to ever open 'Total War: Shogun 2' any more. Even before that I was encountering other problems with the games I have via the service. In the past month playing as different clans on 'Total War: Shogun 2' I have reached a certain date usually a round number like 1200 (if playing the 'Rise of the Samurai' add-on) or 1600 only for the game to crash. I have gone back to an earlier saved game and tried picking different options to see if that will spare me from the crash only to find it still happens at the set date.
I have also gone back to playing 'Napoleon Total War' and the Peninsular War add-on which looked very interesting. While I can still get into that game, it crashes the moment I attack someone or someone attacks me. I have tried finding a patch for this problem on the internet but Sega seems to have stopped all the genuine ones. The only ones advertised are in fact scams. So another game which I paid for and used to be able to play is effectively shut off from me and Steam seems to be doing nothing about it. The only response that I get is that I need to check my computer is suitable for the games. Clearly it once was, well, up until January, and now for some reason it no longer is, or as I suspect something is going wrong with Steam.
I can see why the Steam system was developed. It allows the company to advertise upgrades and extra content and they encourage you to buy other similar games. There is also an online community to connect with. There have long been options to fight battles in the Total War series online. However, given how unpleasant the bulk of people I have encountered through online gaming are, notably so many players of 'World of Warcraft' I have no desire to play with them. This blocks many of the unlockable achievements on the Steam system from me. I hate being compelled to become part of a community. I used to be a regular contributor to the online fora for Total War run by Sega itself and between being told I was utterly useless because I could not simply storm through each of the games on Very Hard setting by people unable to spell properly and having my comments censored by the company, I got very little joy from there either.
The key problem with Steam, though, is that despite having paid my £35 for the game, unlike in the old days with games like 'Medieval II Total War' or 'Rome Total War' simply having the disk is not enough to play the game. I have owned a copy of 'Napoleon Total War' since it came out and enjoyed it. There was a bug which meant that the game crashed about four years into the game time. However, there was a patch that resolved that. When I got a new laptop I reinstalled the game, but, of course, with the cyber attacks on Sega they had taken down the patch. Thus, when I try to play it through the Steam account I am compelled to have, it simply crashes as before. Steam are no use simply sending me back to Sega and anyone offering the patch now is in fact nothing more than a scam trying to infect your machine. Thus, through no fault of my own except upgrading my computer, I can no longer play the game.
A new problem has arisen over the Christmas period with simply accessing games. I have been enjoying the Rise of the Samurai scenario of 'Total War: Shogun 2'. However, just when I have my strategy planned of how to defeat the tough clan in what is a pretty challenging version of the game, I find that I cannot get into the game. I get time markers and then am told that the game is unavailable or has crashed. Repeated tries bring no joy. Again, I cannot play a game I have paid for. The £35 only bought me the occasional chance to play the game, not regular access to it. In addition, every couple of months there is some upgrade, some of them entirely spurious such as the one which made the opening screen which shows a 15th century Japanese castle, suddenly decorated with snowmen out the front of it, one holding a candy cane, something only invented four hundred years or so later, on a different continent. In addition, the downloads seem to make my computer forget that I have bought the game and it tells me it is unavailable. Initially the Steam staff again referred me to Sega, but then another told me I had to delete almost all the files and reinstall the game from Steam. This I do diligently every time. Again it is clear that paying my £35 has not brought the game to my computer, it has simply allowed me occasional random access.
I understand why, for commercial reasons, a hybrid online-disk system like Steam was created. However, in terms of customer service it marks a real retrograde step. If I buy a game I cannot be sure that I will be able to play it more than one or two evenings per week. In the old days, as long as the disk was not scratched, once I had bought it, I could keep on playing it repeatedly for years to come. The disk of 'Shogun Total War' that I bought in 1999 still works and I go back to it when I find for whatever reason I am unable to access its sequel.
This model of only be able occasionally to use something you have paid good money for seems to be the acceptable model. When I had BT internet they kept charging us month after month even though the internet connection broke down on a daily basis. Despite a very patchy service they wanted to charge us £120 to break the contract and a further £90 to remove their equipment. Since when did basic economics state that you have to pay for a service you might actually receive and pay even more to try to get out of that purchase of in fact sometimes nothing? Will it spread and I will go to the dry cleaners and sometimes find my suit has not been cleaned and then be charged more if I want to have it cleaned at another dry cleaners? Will I try and buy a burger and be told that they are unavailable at the moment and I have to come back an hour later for my fast food?
P.P. 04/02/2012
Steam has now deteriorated to the extent that I am unable to ever open 'Total War: Shogun 2' any more. Even before that I was encountering other problems with the games I have via the service. In the past month playing as different clans on 'Total War: Shogun 2' I have reached a certain date usually a round number like 1200 (if playing the 'Rise of the Samurai' add-on) or 1600 only for the game to crash. I have gone back to an earlier saved game and tried picking different options to see if that will spare me from the crash only to find it still happens at the set date.
I have also gone back to playing 'Napoleon Total War' and the Peninsular War add-on which looked very interesting. While I can still get into that game, it crashes the moment I attack someone or someone attacks me. I have tried finding a patch for this problem on the internet but Sega seems to have stopped all the genuine ones. The only ones advertised are in fact scams. So another game which I paid for and used to be able to play is effectively shut off from me and Steam seems to be doing nothing about it. The only response that I get is that I need to check my computer is suitable for the games. Clearly it once was, well, up until January, and now for some reason it no longer is, or as I suspect something is going wrong with Steam.
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
The Blank Face of Service Providers
These days what I am going to describe is such a common event that it seems weekly to fill consumer advice programmes on the radio and television and columns in the newspapers, without anything fundamentally changing. As this blog is about expelling thoughts and tensions from myself, I make no apology for running through the example that I have just had a brush with and added it to the millions of unheard cases that should be condemning so many service providers but they seem able to ignore with impunity.
The key problem of service provision in the UK is fixed contracts. They cover everything from rent to power and water to mobile phones and televisions and even services to those things such as mobile phone ring tone downloads. Of course, it is a given that if you can tie in a customer for a long period of time it is beneficial for your business. Their payments only marginally decline over time given the current low rate of inflation, but your cost per customer falls every month they are locked into you. The biggest cost to a company is the set-up so if you can spread that cost over a year, then it is better for you. We are supposed to be living in an era of consumer choice, but to a great degree this is a fantasy. There are numerous price comparison websites for all kinds of goods and services even telling you where you can get the best rate for your gas and electricity, but switching is made as hard as humanly possible.
Business over the past decade has recognised it can get away by having contracts that make it very hard for customers who want to leave. Again this stretches right from individual landlords right up to multi-national companies. Their ideal situation is when you are compelled to pay for a service you are no longer receiving. In my life I have been fortunate to encounter this only a few times, being expected to pay rent on a house even after other tenants had moved into it or it had been sold to someone else and to pay for a television service even when I had moved 190 Km away from the television to an area where the company does not provide a service. For a company this is an easy way to make money and if the customer simply stops paying you, well then, you hand it over to a debt-collection agency who wrecks the customer's credit rating and piles on additional charges. This is an excellent deterrent for the service providers who feel no guilt over taking money for no service. The story is such a common one of contemporary Britain that it must be known in every household. Yet what choice do we have? If we want energy to our houses, if we want to watch television, in many areas we have to sign up for such contracts, let alone if you simply want to rent a house. The options are limited and it is difficult to avoid getting locked in such a contract. Back in the 1980s this approach was reserved for time-share salesmen in Spanish resorts and was condemned in all quarters and yet by the 2000s such techniques have become mainstream for service companies.
The thing that makes it even harder is that when you try to leave a contract even when it is coming to an end you face a blank wall. You find you cannot get the numbers for the company to cancel your contract. There are numbers of how to set up an account and in some cases I have had to pretend to be starting a new account just to get into the system and then be re-routed to the correct number for cancelling. Call centre staff are robots. They are locked into a pattern which means they can take no initiative, they can only simply take you down paths that their bosses allow and often this does not include cancelling contracts. Feel sorry for them, they are simply the human extensions of a harsh machine. The companies want you to give up, to keep paying for a service you are not receiving, that is great for them. I have not seen any analysis, but I do wonder how many millions of pounds are paid each year by people for services they no longer want or, in fact, in many cases can no longer use. Think about it, if many service providers need this 'free' money, how bad is their business actually doing? Of course few bosses in the UK run businesses to be successful and to thrive, they simply run them in a half-hearted fashion to generate enough cash to drain off for their bonuses. Back in the 1980s they said the average British company lasted 40 years, these days the average must be a lot shorter. As figures around leakages from water pipes have shown yet again this year, you can make huge profits pretending to provide a service and in fact doing it very poorly. The UK economy rewards inefficiency and poor customer service very richly.
So, what is the recent case in my own life that has triggered off my complaint today? Well, back in the early 2000s the woman who now lives in my house bought a TiVo, which was one of the first hard drive video recorders. They came from the USA and apparently 32,000 units were sold. You had a subscription with the company which sent downloads over the telephone to permit you to know what programmes were coming on. It had some novel features that later systems have not included such as the 'wish list' which meant that the machine recorded all programmes, for example, featuring particular actors or comedians or movies by specific directors. TiVo faced increasing competition in the UK once the Sky+ system was introduced. From 2003 TiVo stopped supplying their set-top boxes in the UK but there is a vibrant owner community and second hand market. Ironically the technology developed by TiVo was taken up by Toshiba and Sony and Sky bought out TiVo's service side in the UK, partly to eliminate even its ailing rivalry to their own system. You do not have to look far on the internet to find people singing the praises of the TiVo system and even people who dumped Sky+ in favour of it. Of course, Sky has the clout and TiVo is dying in the UK, it is the case of VHS beating Betamax again, in the UK the worst system always seems to win out. Fortunately Freeview boxes now come with a hard drive and this is all that is stopping the UK having another monopoly based on poor service and less sophisticated equipment. Sky the child of tycoon and manipulator of countries' politics, Rupert Murdoch, is always the worst company to allow to have a monopoly.
Anyway, coming back to TiVo, now handled by Sky. The box belonging to the woman in my house was second hand when she bought it back in 2002 and had had constant use in the seven years since (even TiVo fans said it was one of the older ones with capacity a fifth of the later ones). So back in April it broke down entirely and rather than persist with it she switched to a recordable Freeview box supplied by BT. Then she tried to cancel the subscription with TiVo/Sky. The customer service number has been disconnected and even searching the internet repeatedly for numbers all she could find was ones that connected her to Sky (naturally there is no physical address you can write to). Of course, that should have been simple, but if you ring Sky about accounts you have to enter a Sky account number, which, of course, being a TiVo customer and not a Sky customer, she did not have so her calls never even got near a human. Sky had not thought to write to TiVo customers to tell them of the changes or how they could contact people about their accounts; not even, quite surprisingly, to suggest they switch to Sky+ perhaps because they knew no TiVo user would willingly make a switch to a worse system.
The woman then simply cut off her payments to TiVo hoping they would just terminate her contract. This is where the fixed contract problem kicks in. She no longer has a TiVo machine (I threw in on the municipal dump for her) and has not downloaded any of their services for three months; since the machine broke she has been unable to do so. However, Sky keep demanding the payment and this has run up payment-refusal charges by her bank to her. In addition, knowing that such companies ramp up debts for unpaid bills quickly and then send in nasty people to collect, she was terrified, desperately searching the internet for some clue as to how to cancel her contract. Finally today, by pestering Sky customer services down phone numbers that do not need you to enter a Sky account number she was able to get a TiVo phone number and finally after three months effort stop the contract (or she hopes she has, we will have to see if this the case). She has had to pay up for the three months' bills outstanding, which are paying for nothing as she has received nothing at all in that period from the company, plus the charges levied by the bank. Of course, having a blank face, making it impossible to contact them, works in Sky's favour. All over the country people are paying for services they are not receiving and cannot get out of. This may seem like ingenious business but in fact dents consumer confidence and simply fuels bad business practices.
If I was in Peter Mandelson's position, I would have brought forward a raft of consumer protection legislation. In fact I would go back to Margaret Beckett, back in 1997 when she became the first Secretary of State for Trade and Industry under Tony Blair (Mandelson briefly had the role in 1998 before it went to Stephen Byers) and say that New Labour, with its consumer-focused, modern party attitude of the era of service sector industry, needs proper protection, especially as back in the late 1990s new areas of trade notably via the internet were expanding. All companies should be compelled to make it easier to extract yourself from contracts. They should be compelled to have physical addresses you can write to, in order to do this. No company should be allowed to charge for a service that the user can no longer access. There should be a limit on all fixed-term contracts, such as you should be able to get out of any contract with 3 months' notice. I know rental contracts that even if you give immediate notice you want to leave the house, you will have to pay for a further 11 months for a house that you are no longer living in and most often has other tenants in it. This set of measures would have made a nice punchy package of legislation for the new government to show the people of Britain it was on their side. It is not revolutionary and actually would have encouraged good companies. Instead bad, nasty, greedy companies have been allowed to come to the fore and the blank face approach is a key weapon in their arsenal in squeezing every last drop from consumers in return for poor service and in fact, increasingly, often, for providing nothing at all.
Of course, this is not even a 'what if?', it is a fantasy, it was never going to happen. Blair only got into power with the backing of Rupert Murdoch and Murdoch's reward was to not to have to face any legislation that would have hampered the intimidationg business practices his company seems to relish. How close Blair and Murdoch were has often been revealed, for example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jul/23/newscorporation.rupertmurdoch
Even as prime minister Blair was flying out to address Murdoch's News International as if he was a private citizen that you can hire for after dinner speeches rather than leader of a country. Do not even get me started on how Murdoch has more control over legislation in the UK than the average government minister: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/murdoch-set-to-back-blair--for-a-place-in-his-boardroom-409652.html
You could tell that no minister under Blair would go anywhere near true consumer protection with such a businessman who loves underhand business approaches in such a strong position in regard to the British political scene. Thus, twelve years on, millions of UK citizens are suffering from being manhandled by service companies that feel it is fine to take money for services they are not providing and to make it so difficult for customers to escape from contracts. This is not going to change in the UK while politicians are so shackled to unscrupulous business people. Ironically Murdoch does not like David Cameron, because Cameron inherited his wealth rather than made it himself. Trapped between the interests of inherited wealth and wealth through hard-pressure techniques, the average British person is simply something to be squeezed into debt. On this basis there is no choice at all at the next election, neither of the leading parties will do anything to help you as a service consumer.
The key problem of service provision in the UK is fixed contracts. They cover everything from rent to power and water to mobile phones and televisions and even services to those things such as mobile phone ring tone downloads. Of course, it is a given that if you can tie in a customer for a long period of time it is beneficial for your business. Their payments only marginally decline over time given the current low rate of inflation, but your cost per customer falls every month they are locked into you. The biggest cost to a company is the set-up so if you can spread that cost over a year, then it is better for you. We are supposed to be living in an era of consumer choice, but to a great degree this is a fantasy. There are numerous price comparison websites for all kinds of goods and services even telling you where you can get the best rate for your gas and electricity, but switching is made as hard as humanly possible.
Business over the past decade has recognised it can get away by having contracts that make it very hard for customers who want to leave. Again this stretches right from individual landlords right up to multi-national companies. Their ideal situation is when you are compelled to pay for a service you are no longer receiving. In my life I have been fortunate to encounter this only a few times, being expected to pay rent on a house even after other tenants had moved into it or it had been sold to someone else and to pay for a television service even when I had moved 190 Km away from the television to an area where the company does not provide a service. For a company this is an easy way to make money and if the customer simply stops paying you, well then, you hand it over to a debt-collection agency who wrecks the customer's credit rating and piles on additional charges. This is an excellent deterrent for the service providers who feel no guilt over taking money for no service. The story is such a common one of contemporary Britain that it must be known in every household. Yet what choice do we have? If we want energy to our houses, if we want to watch television, in many areas we have to sign up for such contracts, let alone if you simply want to rent a house. The options are limited and it is difficult to avoid getting locked in such a contract. Back in the 1980s this approach was reserved for time-share salesmen in Spanish resorts and was condemned in all quarters and yet by the 2000s such techniques have become mainstream for service companies.
The thing that makes it even harder is that when you try to leave a contract even when it is coming to an end you face a blank wall. You find you cannot get the numbers for the company to cancel your contract. There are numbers of how to set up an account and in some cases I have had to pretend to be starting a new account just to get into the system and then be re-routed to the correct number for cancelling. Call centre staff are robots. They are locked into a pattern which means they can take no initiative, they can only simply take you down paths that their bosses allow and often this does not include cancelling contracts. Feel sorry for them, they are simply the human extensions of a harsh machine. The companies want you to give up, to keep paying for a service you are not receiving, that is great for them. I have not seen any analysis, but I do wonder how many millions of pounds are paid each year by people for services they no longer want or, in fact, in many cases can no longer use. Think about it, if many service providers need this 'free' money, how bad is their business actually doing? Of course few bosses in the UK run businesses to be successful and to thrive, they simply run them in a half-hearted fashion to generate enough cash to drain off for their bonuses. Back in the 1980s they said the average British company lasted 40 years, these days the average must be a lot shorter. As figures around leakages from water pipes have shown yet again this year, you can make huge profits pretending to provide a service and in fact doing it very poorly. The UK economy rewards inefficiency and poor customer service very richly.
So, what is the recent case in my own life that has triggered off my complaint today? Well, back in the early 2000s the woman who now lives in my house bought a TiVo, which was one of the first hard drive video recorders. They came from the USA and apparently 32,000 units were sold. You had a subscription with the company which sent downloads over the telephone to permit you to know what programmes were coming on. It had some novel features that later systems have not included such as the 'wish list' which meant that the machine recorded all programmes, for example, featuring particular actors or comedians or movies by specific directors. TiVo faced increasing competition in the UK once the Sky+ system was introduced. From 2003 TiVo stopped supplying their set-top boxes in the UK but there is a vibrant owner community and second hand market. Ironically the technology developed by TiVo was taken up by Toshiba and Sony and Sky bought out TiVo's service side in the UK, partly to eliminate even its ailing rivalry to their own system. You do not have to look far on the internet to find people singing the praises of the TiVo system and even people who dumped Sky+ in favour of it. Of course, Sky has the clout and TiVo is dying in the UK, it is the case of VHS beating Betamax again, in the UK the worst system always seems to win out. Fortunately Freeview boxes now come with a hard drive and this is all that is stopping the UK having another monopoly based on poor service and less sophisticated equipment. Sky the child of tycoon and manipulator of countries' politics, Rupert Murdoch, is always the worst company to allow to have a monopoly.
Anyway, coming back to TiVo, now handled by Sky. The box belonging to the woman in my house was second hand when she bought it back in 2002 and had had constant use in the seven years since (even TiVo fans said it was one of the older ones with capacity a fifth of the later ones). So back in April it broke down entirely and rather than persist with it she switched to a recordable Freeview box supplied by BT. Then she tried to cancel the subscription with TiVo/Sky. The customer service number has been disconnected and even searching the internet repeatedly for numbers all she could find was ones that connected her to Sky (naturally there is no physical address you can write to). Of course, that should have been simple, but if you ring Sky about accounts you have to enter a Sky account number, which, of course, being a TiVo customer and not a Sky customer, she did not have so her calls never even got near a human. Sky had not thought to write to TiVo customers to tell them of the changes or how they could contact people about their accounts; not even, quite surprisingly, to suggest they switch to Sky+ perhaps because they knew no TiVo user would willingly make a switch to a worse system.
The woman then simply cut off her payments to TiVo hoping they would just terminate her contract. This is where the fixed contract problem kicks in. She no longer has a TiVo machine (I threw in on the municipal dump for her) and has not downloaded any of their services for three months; since the machine broke she has been unable to do so. However, Sky keep demanding the payment and this has run up payment-refusal charges by her bank to her. In addition, knowing that such companies ramp up debts for unpaid bills quickly and then send in nasty people to collect, she was terrified, desperately searching the internet for some clue as to how to cancel her contract. Finally today, by pestering Sky customer services down phone numbers that do not need you to enter a Sky account number she was able to get a TiVo phone number and finally after three months effort stop the contract (or she hopes she has, we will have to see if this the case). She has had to pay up for the three months' bills outstanding, which are paying for nothing as she has received nothing at all in that period from the company, plus the charges levied by the bank. Of course, having a blank face, making it impossible to contact them, works in Sky's favour. All over the country people are paying for services they are not receiving and cannot get out of. This may seem like ingenious business but in fact dents consumer confidence and simply fuels bad business practices.
If I was in Peter Mandelson's position, I would have brought forward a raft of consumer protection legislation. In fact I would go back to Margaret Beckett, back in 1997 when she became the first Secretary of State for Trade and Industry under Tony Blair (Mandelson briefly had the role in 1998 before it went to Stephen Byers) and say that New Labour, with its consumer-focused, modern party attitude of the era of service sector industry, needs proper protection, especially as back in the late 1990s new areas of trade notably via the internet were expanding. All companies should be compelled to make it easier to extract yourself from contracts. They should be compelled to have physical addresses you can write to, in order to do this. No company should be allowed to charge for a service that the user can no longer access. There should be a limit on all fixed-term contracts, such as you should be able to get out of any contract with 3 months' notice. I know rental contracts that even if you give immediate notice you want to leave the house, you will have to pay for a further 11 months for a house that you are no longer living in and most often has other tenants in it. This set of measures would have made a nice punchy package of legislation for the new government to show the people of Britain it was on their side. It is not revolutionary and actually would have encouraged good companies. Instead bad, nasty, greedy companies have been allowed to come to the fore and the blank face approach is a key weapon in their arsenal in squeezing every last drop from consumers in return for poor service and in fact, increasingly, often, for providing nothing at all.
Of course, this is not even a 'what if?', it is a fantasy, it was never going to happen. Blair only got into power with the backing of Rupert Murdoch and Murdoch's reward was to not to have to face any legislation that would have hampered the intimidationg business practices his company seems to relish. How close Blair and Murdoch were has often been revealed, for example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jul/23/newscorporation.rupertmurdoch
Even as prime minister Blair was flying out to address Murdoch's News International as if he was a private citizen that you can hire for after dinner speeches rather than leader of a country. Do not even get me started on how Murdoch has more control over legislation in the UK than the average government minister: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/murdoch-set-to-back-blair--for-a-place-in-his-boardroom-409652.html
You could tell that no minister under Blair would go anywhere near true consumer protection with such a businessman who loves underhand business approaches in such a strong position in regard to the British political scene. Thus, twelve years on, millions of UK citizens are suffering from being manhandled by service companies that feel it is fine to take money for services they are not providing and to make it so difficult for customers to escape from contracts. This is not going to change in the UK while politicians are so shackled to unscrupulous business people. Ironically Murdoch does not like David Cameron, because Cameron inherited his wealth rather than made it himself. Trapped between the interests of inherited wealth and wealth through hard-pressure techniques, the average British person is simply something to be squeezed into debt. On this basis there is no choice at all at the next election, neither of the leading parties will do anything to help you as a service consumer.
Monday, 7 May 2007
UK Utility Companies - cash vampires of Britain
This post in some ways picks up from my earlier one 'This is the Age of the Train' which looked at the major problems anyone trying to use trains in the UK faces. I read an article yesterday about screw-ups on the computer system which mean if you have bought a card to give you discounts, say for travel in a region, you actually end up paying more!
Well, leaving trains aside for the moment, I am going to turn to utility companies. By this I mean electricity, gas, water, sewerage, telephone, broadband, cable and satellite television providers. Throughout the 1980s in line with the policy of privatisation all of these services which had been state or local monopolies were either privatised in themselves, e.g. British Telecom the state telephone provider became BT, the private company or their services were taken over by a combination of such companies and others that had been set up as private companies, for example, where I live with have Southern Electric (who also now supply gas) which was once a state-run regional electricity provider and Utility Warehouse which was established as a private company. The idea was that moving away from state monopolies would introduce competition into the system and this would reduce prices to consumers and mean that those providing the best service would win out. How wrong the theorists proved to be. Rather than any decent company taking over services we seem to have gathered together the most arrogant and avaricious people on the planet to provide us with our essentials.
If I had been writing this post 1-2 years ago I would have been even more indignant as in those years gas and electricity prices were rising two or three times per year, often at above 10%, so triple the level of inflation, and actually pushing that inflation higher because utility bills form such a part of people's monthly expenditure. All the companies, good and bad, have been making profits of millions of pounds and finally are bowing to pressure and lowering the prices, but as yet they still have a long way to go to their previous levels. In 2002 23,000 UK households had their utilities cut off. It was estimated that 1.4 million could not afford to put money in prepayment meters for their electricity and gas; 1 million homes had had their telephones disconnected and 4.7 million households were in debt to water companies (these are households not individual, so, say a family of 4 is affected in each case we could be looking at almost 20 million individuals affected because they or their parents cannot pary). Obviously a lot people appearing in these figures are the same people, but these are old figures and with prices rising since then, I imagine close to 1 in 10 of the households (many of these will be single elderly people, but many others will be families). These items are not luxury items, they are essentials for health and wellbeing. You can argue that telephone is not essential, but what happens if you are an elderly person who slips up, how do you get help? How do apply for a job when you have no number for employers to call you back on?
I am comfortably off, I have a job that pays £8000 more per year than the national average, and yet I find it tough to pay my utility bills. There are issues that are not simply about the cost, but about the whole behaviour of utility companies. The first is paying in advance. Now on my gas, electricity, water and sewerage (and for some reason in my town we have separate water and sewerage companies and whilst elsewhere my sewage removal charges have been 10% of my water bill, in this town, for some reason they are 108%) I am assessed for my likely usage and have to pay in advance. For gas I am now paying for the next three months gas that I have not even used yet and in fact given that summer is coming and we run to very ecological/economical rules in my house I doubt we will use that much. So 3 months' worth of money for supplies I am unlikely to use until the Winter, is now sitting in the gas company's bank account gathering interest. The same happens with the telephone company for 1 month in advance (I am not going to name the names of the companies as the principle applies to all of them, if someone can tell me a UK company that does not behave like this, I am happy to name them. Bascially if you live in the UK you will find your utility providers all do this, the details may vary, it might be 1 month or 3 months in advance, but the behaviour is the same).
The additional problem with all this, is that not only do they hold your money for things they have not provided you yet, they always over-assess how much you are going to use. When I lived alone I was always assessed as if I was a family. In one month the water company in Milton Keynes sent me three different paying in books with different amounts as they could not make up their mind about me. This means when I leave a town I each company has to pay me back a lot of money, e.g. £100 (€145; US$ 200) from the phone company, £134 from the gas company, when I left Milton Keynes and of course they are in no hurry to do this. What do the companies do with the money? Invest in other ventures, hotels are apparently popular investments for water companies at a time when leakages in the UK are at 25% on average compared to 14% in France and 10% in the Netherlands. You cannot stop leakages but the UK water companies are lax in tackling them and would prefer to put bans on water usage. We should be economical in our usage of water for the sake of the planet, but how can I be economical if a quarter of the water I am paying for in advance has gone before it reaches my house?
The final element which makes the utility companies such a burden on British people is their lack of customer service. Again, there have been some changes. The big uproar has been about moving telephone call centres to places like India. Much of the charges set against these have simply been on racist grounds, but that misses the entire point. It does not matter where a call centre is located if the person on the other end of the telephone cannot help you; it could be in a building in the same street as your house and still not do the job. I will just outline some of the problems. First you have contracts which tie you in for months or years. You have no choice over these, you have to take what is offered. I move house on average every 16 months, and typically I am still paying for utilities at the old house for 1-3 months after I have left it (and by then there are other occupants also paying for the services); for this cable television (compulsory in Milton Keynes, where, as a new town television aerials were banned) is the worst. Telephone companies especially ones providing mobile (a.k.a cell phones in the USA, handies in Germany) 'phones are also bad.
The next thing is if you have something wrong with your service. The new companies just supply the commodity and are not responsible for how it gets to your house; e.g. BT actually oversees all telephone cables in the UK; Transco oversees all gas pipes no matter what company actually provides your telephone or gas. So often if the fault is technical the provider cannot help. The company who provides the link, the pipe or whatever will often charge to check if it is something they are responsible for or not; BT charge £160 (€233; US$320) to do this.
Aside from all that, whenever you call a utility company as with all interaction on the telephone these days you have to wait and wait (if your employer lets you call during the day) and press a combination of buttons and then keep repeating your story to different people. Do not believe what you are told. The people in call centres do their best but are poorly trained and have to navigate a maze of rules that are often confusing to everyone. Moving to a new house, we booked two weeks in advance to have our telephone connected, but arriving there it had not been and it was not for a further six weeks, so eight weeks in total. The previous occupants had left without telling any utility company; their telephone had been paid for by their employers and in the end we had to contact those employers and tell them to stop paying for it (the occupants had gone to the USA) before we could have our phone connected. Now, this problem had been apparent to the phone company immediately and on all of the times we had phoned, we had been given conflicting advice each time ranging from 'you have no phone line running to the house', 'the phone line does not belong to us', 'you can be connected in 28 days' to 'you can be connected this afternoon'. The work to be done was lodged each time and encountered an error but no-one contacted us to tell us what was happening. Of course in all this time we were paying for a service we did not have. This is one small example, do not get me started on the gas and electricity for which two separate companies tried to bill us for our usage.
The household I live in is robust and patient and has jobs that allow you to take time out to sit on the phone for a couple of hours; many people in the UK are not so lucky as us. We are all faced by very slow service, an arrogance that we should know precisely what to do (do not ask me to explain any of the bills, they are bewildering and I spent 9 years at university), and if we do what they ask they are not obliged to provide us with a service; even one we are paying for in advance.
The UK government wanted Britain to be the leading country for broadband coverage and in the early 2000s it seemed that that was possible. Now, however, it is clear that the UK is lagging behind countries such as South Korea, not only in the percentage of the country covered but in the speed of the service provided. Why is this? It is not that there is no demand for broadband, it grows daily, it is because the companies are more concerned every last pound out of consumers and tying them into such difficult contracts that they cannot upgrade or transfer. Privatisation was supposed to promote competition and thus efficiency, instead the UK has large cartels working to the lowest common denominator. Not only is their utter greed and absolute arrogance holding Britain back from developing to meet competition, it is also haunting the lives of the bulk of the UK population and in millions of homes denying them basic supplies.
Well, leaving trains aside for the moment, I am going to turn to utility companies. By this I mean electricity, gas, water, sewerage, telephone, broadband, cable and satellite television providers. Throughout the 1980s in line with the policy of privatisation all of these services which had been state or local monopolies were either privatised in themselves, e.g. British Telecom the state telephone provider became BT, the private company or their services were taken over by a combination of such companies and others that had been set up as private companies, for example, where I live with have Southern Electric (who also now supply gas) which was once a state-run regional electricity provider and Utility Warehouse which was established as a private company. The idea was that moving away from state monopolies would introduce competition into the system and this would reduce prices to consumers and mean that those providing the best service would win out. How wrong the theorists proved to be. Rather than any decent company taking over services we seem to have gathered together the most arrogant and avaricious people on the planet to provide us with our essentials.
If I had been writing this post 1-2 years ago I would have been even more indignant as in those years gas and electricity prices were rising two or three times per year, often at above 10%, so triple the level of inflation, and actually pushing that inflation higher because utility bills form such a part of people's monthly expenditure. All the companies, good and bad, have been making profits of millions of pounds and finally are bowing to pressure and lowering the prices, but as yet they still have a long way to go to their previous levels. In 2002 23,000 UK households had their utilities cut off. It was estimated that 1.4 million could not afford to put money in prepayment meters for their electricity and gas; 1 million homes had had their telephones disconnected and 4.7 million households were in debt to water companies (these are households not individual, so, say a family of 4 is affected in each case we could be looking at almost 20 million individuals affected because they or their parents cannot pary). Obviously a lot people appearing in these figures are the same people, but these are old figures and with prices rising since then, I imagine close to 1 in 10 of the households (many of these will be single elderly people, but many others will be families). These items are not luxury items, they are essentials for health and wellbeing. You can argue that telephone is not essential, but what happens if you are an elderly person who slips up, how do you get help? How do apply for a job when you have no number for employers to call you back on?
I am comfortably off, I have a job that pays £8000 more per year than the national average, and yet I find it tough to pay my utility bills. There are issues that are not simply about the cost, but about the whole behaviour of utility companies. The first is paying in advance. Now on my gas, electricity, water and sewerage (and for some reason in my town we have separate water and sewerage companies and whilst elsewhere my sewage removal charges have been 10% of my water bill, in this town, for some reason they are 108%) I am assessed for my likely usage and have to pay in advance. For gas I am now paying for the next three months gas that I have not even used yet and in fact given that summer is coming and we run to very ecological/economical rules in my house I doubt we will use that much. So 3 months' worth of money for supplies I am unlikely to use until the Winter, is now sitting in the gas company's bank account gathering interest. The same happens with the telephone company for 1 month in advance (I am not going to name the names of the companies as the principle applies to all of them, if someone can tell me a UK company that does not behave like this, I am happy to name them. Bascially if you live in the UK you will find your utility providers all do this, the details may vary, it might be 1 month or 3 months in advance, but the behaviour is the same).
The additional problem with all this, is that not only do they hold your money for things they have not provided you yet, they always over-assess how much you are going to use. When I lived alone I was always assessed as if I was a family. In one month the water company in Milton Keynes sent me three different paying in books with different amounts as they could not make up their mind about me. This means when I leave a town I each company has to pay me back a lot of money, e.g. £100 (€145; US$ 200) from the phone company, £134 from the gas company, when I left Milton Keynes and of course they are in no hurry to do this. What do the companies do with the money? Invest in other ventures, hotels are apparently popular investments for water companies at a time when leakages in the UK are at 25% on average compared to 14% in France and 10% in the Netherlands. You cannot stop leakages but the UK water companies are lax in tackling them and would prefer to put bans on water usage. We should be economical in our usage of water for the sake of the planet, but how can I be economical if a quarter of the water I am paying for in advance has gone before it reaches my house?
The final element which makes the utility companies such a burden on British people is their lack of customer service. Again, there have been some changes. The big uproar has been about moving telephone call centres to places like India. Much of the charges set against these have simply been on racist grounds, but that misses the entire point. It does not matter where a call centre is located if the person on the other end of the telephone cannot help you; it could be in a building in the same street as your house and still not do the job. I will just outline some of the problems. First you have contracts which tie you in for months or years. You have no choice over these, you have to take what is offered. I move house on average every 16 months, and typically I am still paying for utilities at the old house for 1-3 months after I have left it (and by then there are other occupants also paying for the services); for this cable television (compulsory in Milton Keynes, where, as a new town television aerials were banned) is the worst. Telephone companies especially ones providing mobile (a.k.a cell phones in the USA, handies in Germany) 'phones are also bad.
The next thing is if you have something wrong with your service. The new companies just supply the commodity and are not responsible for how it gets to your house; e.g. BT actually oversees all telephone cables in the UK; Transco oversees all gas pipes no matter what company actually provides your telephone or gas. So often if the fault is technical the provider cannot help. The company who provides the link, the pipe or whatever will often charge to check if it is something they are responsible for or not; BT charge £160 (€233; US$320) to do this.
Aside from all that, whenever you call a utility company as with all interaction on the telephone these days you have to wait and wait (if your employer lets you call during the day) and press a combination of buttons and then keep repeating your story to different people. Do not believe what you are told. The people in call centres do their best but are poorly trained and have to navigate a maze of rules that are often confusing to everyone. Moving to a new house, we booked two weeks in advance to have our telephone connected, but arriving there it had not been and it was not for a further six weeks, so eight weeks in total. The previous occupants had left without telling any utility company; their telephone had been paid for by their employers and in the end we had to contact those employers and tell them to stop paying for it (the occupants had gone to the USA) before we could have our phone connected. Now, this problem had been apparent to the phone company immediately and on all of the times we had phoned, we had been given conflicting advice each time ranging from 'you have no phone line running to the house', 'the phone line does not belong to us', 'you can be connected in 28 days' to 'you can be connected this afternoon'. The work to be done was lodged each time and encountered an error but no-one contacted us to tell us what was happening. Of course in all this time we were paying for a service we did not have. This is one small example, do not get me started on the gas and electricity for which two separate companies tried to bill us for our usage.
The household I live in is robust and patient and has jobs that allow you to take time out to sit on the phone for a couple of hours; many people in the UK are not so lucky as us. We are all faced by very slow service, an arrogance that we should know precisely what to do (do not ask me to explain any of the bills, they are bewildering and I spent 9 years at university), and if we do what they ask they are not obliged to provide us with a service; even one we are paying for in advance.
The UK government wanted Britain to be the leading country for broadband coverage and in the early 2000s it seemed that that was possible. Now, however, it is clear that the UK is lagging behind countries such as South Korea, not only in the percentage of the country covered but in the speed of the service provided. Why is this? It is not that there is no demand for broadband, it grows daily, it is because the companies are more concerned every last pound out of consumers and tying them into such difficult contracts that they cannot upgrade or transfer. Privatisation was supposed to promote competition and thus efficiency, instead the UK has large cartels working to the lowest common denominator. Not only is their utter greed and absolute arrogance holding Britain back from developing to meet competition, it is also haunting the lives of the bulk of the UK population and in millions of homes denying them basic supplies.
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