Customer Service - they only want our money!

by Paul
(UK)

We have a shop, and purchased an expensive till system to help us manage our business, stock, finances and website.

It works well for us, and we've even supplied the company with testimonials. That is until something goes wrong.

On Saturday ( busiest day ) the entire system fails, we phone support, who only work Monday to Friday. That's right, this is a business built on supplying till systems to small shops.

We phone at 9.00 on Monday morning and at half past twelve call again to be told, we've emailed you the paperwork that you need to sign and fax back to us, and then you need to call us back to pay for the engineer to be sent out to you. All well and good, but the till system ( which hadn't worked since Saturday morning ) was also our internet and email.

We pointed that out.

They had a system and they were sticking to it. Phone calls got my wife out of a meeting, to download, sign, fax and return, for her to receive an email from "Customer Services" to say "call us to pay". Why didn't they take the money at 12.30? Well because the form had to be signed first.

The engineer duly arrives ( which is a plus ) and identifies the problem, you've guessed it we have to go through the whole process again, they had to email the form to be signed and faxed back. Once the form had been received then we had to call to make payment, even putting us on hold to make sure the form had been received.

When did the form become more important than the customer?

My wife pointed out to the accounts person ( she's like that ) that we were very disappointed about the service, and how the process was not friendly for people whose entire system had failed.

They said they would let someone in "customer services" know. We've heard nothing.