'Refunds or goodwill gestures declined'
'This should never have got to me'
'Why don't chief executives care more?'
'Companies are making it harder to complain'
'Business leaders don't often know what's happening'
'Don't judge companies on number of complaints'

Do you have a financial anxiety, dilemma or quandary? Ask Jessie Hewitson, veteran money journalist and editor, and financial agony aunt for The i Paper. Here, Jessie looks into a complaint from a reader regarding a holiday booking.

'Refunds or goodwill gestures declined'

Reader Geoff Green asks: “My wife and I frequently holiday with TUI, and have been doing so for very many years. Recently, my wife was looking at a holiday on her phone to Sicily, then I logged into my iPad and thought I was looking at the same package. I paid a £416 deposit. On receiving confirmation a few moments later, I realised I had booked the hotel only (and not including the flights and transfers). My wife immediately went onto the chatbot and eventually managed to connect with someone who suggested we contact the office in the morning, which I did. I was advised that we couldn’t add flights and transfers to this booking (I’m not sure why?) and that the only way around this was to lose our £416 deposit and rebook the entire package paying another deposit of £120. I proceeded to ask Customer Services for some sort of refund of deposit, or at least a gesture of goodwill, which were both declined. I still fail to understand why flights and a transfer could not have been added to the hotel room, but no-one has explained why.” (REUTERS/Peter Nicholls)

'This should never have got to me'

Jessie responds: “I emailed TUI and they rolled over straight away, and have fully refunded you. The total absence of them arguing the toss just underlines how this should have never got to me in the first place. Your letter made me think about how the problems we experience with customer service feed into the notion that Britain is broken. I spoke to Martyn James, a leading expert in consumer rights. He believes that standards have never been lower in the 20 years he has been working in the industry. He explained that even with all his knowledge, a recent experience with a company left him crying ‘angry tears’.” (Photo: Tim Goode/PA)

'Why don't chief executives care more?'

Jessie continues: “Your situation is a good example of why people end up crying angry tears. Not only had you got in touch with the customer service department, but you had written to someone senior, and it wasn’t resolved. TUI was contacted for comment about this, but did not respond. I asked Martyn why large companies that make healthy profit margins with reputations to protect treat customers so badly? And why don’t chief executives care about it more?” (Photo: PA/Steve Parsons)

'Companies are making it harder to complain'

“Martyn puts it down to two reasons. One is the law of unintended consequences. The world of business is a far more regulated place, with many laws in place to protect consumers that didn’t exist 20 years ago. This is generally a good thing, only it can mean companies focus on these specific laws and don’t feel they have to do other things. So standards can be raised in narrow areas, but lowered in others. Another unintended consequence is around complaints. There is now a requirement among some industries to publish the number of complaints a company receives. This is then benchmarked against competitors. And what has happened as a result? Many companies have made it harder to complain. It’s one reason why intensive sleuthing is often required to discover a company’s phone number or email address, if they exist at all. There is no suggestion that TUI has done this.” (Photo: Nuthawut Somsuk/Getty)

'Business leaders don't often know what's happening'

“We now have a perverse situation where companies that score ‘badly’ in the customer complaints data may actually be doing the right thing. They are allowing customers to speak to them when things go wrong. And those that don’t are coming out better. As for why business leaders don’t focus on all of this more, in Martyn’s experience, the people running these companies don’t always know what is going on. ‘They pay lots of money to consultants who say what they want to hear, and run surveys saying 83 per cent of your customers think you are amazing,’ he says. ‘And so these chief executives can be genuinely shocked and hurt when I tell them that their customers hate them’. What customers want is pretty simple: to be able to speak to a human easily, to be listened to and for someone to consider what they are saying reasonably. We understand mistakes happen, but what bothers us most is when we take the time to speak to companies and are met with total indifference.” (Photo: Tetiana Lazunova/Getty/iStockphoto)

'Don't judge companies on number of complaints'

“Martyn James’ solution is that we stop judging companies on how many complaints they receive, but how they deal with the complaint, including the ease with which you can speak to a human being. If all CEOs were to spend a day a month answering customer service calls, that would help too. Of all the many intractable problems the country is facing, it feels like customer service is a relatively easy one to solve.” (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA)