At 10am this morning — and it’s Saturday on a bank holiday weekend, you’ll note, I got a call from Sarah, a customer services manager at Carphone Warehouse. She gets Google Alerts for mentions of the company’s name on her Blackberry, and had picked up on last night’s post. Less than 14 hours after I published it. Shocked at my tale of woe, she’d called into the office from home to retrieve my records.

After confirming the details of my story, she agreed that a mistake had been made and apologised for the company’s failure to act this week. Two hours later, I received this email (slightly abridged):

Dear Mr Delaney

Further to our conversation this morning, I am writing to confirm that I have just credited your account with £473.46 which is the amount that is showing due to data charges.

[…] Should you have any concerns about anything […] please feel free to call me on my mobile number at any time. […]

I hope that our conversation this morning and these subsequent actions have gone some way to restoring your faith in CPW and that you will remain a customer for many more years to come. I also hope that you can now get on with the important job of enjoying your N95 and the bank holiday weekend.

Please call me or email me on this address should you have any more questions or should you need any more help.

Kind regards
Sarah

I am still pretty stunned at this turn of affairs, I have to admit, and my fingers are trembling. And I am frankly delighted at the company’s willingness to listen and respond using these channels. It leads me to several observations:

• The Internet makes everything really fast. I achieved more in 14 hours (none of which were during the work week, or even daylight) than a whole week of phone calls. I guess that’s bad news for organisations in some ways, because they have to be considerably more agile than they often are in order to keep up.
• Writing a blog is a good thing to do. I am not an especially noted person, even in the very narrow circles in which I move. But the blog and other social media allowed me to get a message out to the right people in a way that traditional forms of communication did not.
• Without the Internet, corporations are not likely to be very good at dealing with individual cases that don’t fit the standard pattern. I don’t blame Carphone Warehouse, in particular. I think it’s just the nature of modern corporations.
• However, Sarah at Carphone Warehouse — and people like her — are using technology to rehumanise their organisations. Give an empowered person Google Alerts and a Blackberry (and the willingness to look at those alerts on a Saturday morning) and you can totally change people’s perceptions, stem a potential PR disaster and restore faith and humanity in your organisation’s relationships with customers.

Anyway, I am also honour-bound to say that I have changed my mind since yesterday. Carphone Warehouse are actually rather good eggs and you should all go and buy some phones from them straight away.

Many thanks, too, to Huw, David, Helen, and Jana among others for your messages of support, posts and advice. The world is beautiful again.

[I agreed to keep Sarah’s surname private, but if any of her managers at Carphone Warehouse pick up on this story, please reward her bountifully].