At some point, the company for which I took calls increased their monthly bills across the board in order to harmonise prices. Some people paid an extra pound, some paid £2. Everybody was notified several months in advance, primarily by email but also by txt and post, and was given the option to leave without an early termination fee if they didn’t want to pay the extra money.
For some time, we got frequent calls from people asking why their bills had increased. 99% of them either accepted it or opted to cancel, some even remembering that they had received some sort of notification but had ignored it.
Five months after the prices went up, I got a call from somebody whose bill had gone up by £2 per month. At this time, I incorrectly believed that the company had only sent emails. I’m Me and the Angry Woman is AW.
AW: Why has my bill gone up?
Me: Ah, yeah, the bills went up across the board at the end of December. We sent everybody emails to advise them of that.
AW: Email? Nobody uses email any more! Social media has replaced email!
Me: No, email is still widely used…
AW: No! It isn’t! Social media is what people use! Nobody checks email!
Me: That’s not true. Lots of people, myself included, check email every day.
AW: No they don’t! You have to tell me when you’re increasing your prices!
*Me: We did, in the email sent to the address you gave us when you signed up. If you choose to ignore our notification…
AW: No! Nobody uses email! People use social media! This is illegal!
Me: No it isn’t, email is a perfectly acceptable method of communication.
*AW: It’s not, because nobody uses email! You have to use a method people actually use!
At this pont she demanded to speak to a manager. I told the TL on duty the situation, and she said to just credit AW the £10. AW was quite happy with that and even decided to stay with the company, even though the deadline for leaving with no ETC had not yet passed. She never quite said the company had to use Facebook to tell her about such private financial information, but that’s what she implied.
As a coda, when I discussed this with some co-workers, a fellow phone monkey told me about a guy who, upon being told that he had been sent emails and txts about unpaid bills, sincerely asked why the company didn’t try to get him on WhatsApp.
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