Dear Carphone Warehouse,

We used to have it so good. I’ve been a customer for about four years, and you’ve never put a foot wrong until now. You found me good deals and gave me good advice on tariffs and handsets. But I’m not sure our relationship can recover after this week. Having memorised all your hold music over the period, might I suggest ‘we have got to get it together, now’?

The Story

I was phoned on May 12th by Gareth Whittle from your outbound O2 sales team to tell me I was due an upgrade. Splendid, I said, what have you got? After much wrangling, we agreed on a Nokia N95 8GB, albeit for five pounds more a month than the price you published on your own website (I see you’ve fixed that now). The £35-a-month deal would get me a free handset, more minutes and texts each month than I’d use all year, and most importantly, unlimited data. You promised to send it the next day and I’d have 14 days to try it out. “What if I have any problems, Gareth?” “Oh you can call me on extension 4443220″.

Lo and behold, it arrived the next day — modern logistics can be so wonderful — and I eagerly starting testing all the new functions — it’s a lovely piece of kit. I’d have liked a qwerty keyboard, but figured I could get a bluetooth job from you later. The camera is excellent and using 3G for the first time was a rush.

The Sting

It’s now seven days later and I phone my wife — but who’s this on the line? “This number cannot be dialled — please hold while we put you through to customer services”.

I hold — and it actually turns out to be your finance department.

“Mr Delaney — you have an outstanding bill for (circa) £500. Would you like to pay by credit card?”

“What!!! But I’m on unlimited data — the guy told me.”

“Ah, that doesn’t actually start till the 26th May.”

“But I didn’t know that? How would I know that? You sent me the phone — why would I imagine I couldn’t use it yet?”

Gareth did tell me that the contract ‘rolled over on the 26th of each month’ (his exact words, as I recall — whatever that means). But he didn’t tell me that meant unlimited data didn’t start till May 26. He certainly didn’t warn me about using the Internet before May 26. I had assumed (oh, silly me) that it was the previous 26th, if I agreed to the deal — this was an upgrade, after all. And how would I be able to test the phone in the 14-day cooldown period otherwise? It seemed like common sense that the upgrade began when I received the phone.

I’d made a horrendous mistake. But there’s also been some big communication errors on your part. Of course, you’ll understand and rectify that, won’t you? We’re all human beings, aren’t we? And it’s not as though back-dating the contract by two weeks will cost you any money.

Turns out the lady I’m speaking to can’t actually do anything. I am put through to customer services. They tell me that the sales department concerned has to investigate the problem: their hands are tied. I ask them to put me through to Gareth on extension 4443220, but it turns out he lied to me about that — no-one I am allowed to speak to can make that call. Outbound sales don’t have any accessible phone numbers.

I get put back through to customer services. I ask to speak to a manager. I am put through to a manager at customer services. Turns out he can’t actually call anyone more senior — or Gareth — they are only allowed to send emails. This fact makes me wonder about how seriously you take customer services? Not to worry, though. I’m assured my incident has been escalated and I will receive a call from your sales department within the next 72 hours to resolve the problem.

72 Hours Pass

…And there’s no phone call from your sales department. More lies, then. I call my new friends Craig, and then John, at your Warrington customer service call centre. They both re-escalate my case. I am at three levels of escalation now. I need oxygen, I am so escalated, but evidently not sufficiently so to get anyone from sales to call me. And no, they really can’t put me through to anyone more senior, they assure me that more ‘VERY URGENT’ notes have been added to my case. (Craig and John are nice guys, by the way, being Manchester lads like myself. Useless, in this case, but nice). Apparently, I’ll get a call within another 72 hours.

But hang on. My 14-days’ grace period will expire by then. Walking away from the contract is the only thing I’ve got to trade with, if your people don’t agree that I wasn’t properly informed on the terms of the deal. I talk to Craig and John again and they — very kindly — answer my requests about doing this and tell me I can walk into a shop tomorrow and explain the situation and hand back the phone. And that’s what I’m planning to do — I have to, because the rest of your company might understand the science bit, then.

The Science Bit

• Current disputed bill = ~£500, which I intend to resist paying, and I think I have a reasonable case.
• Value of the contract we’d agreed = 18 x £35 = £630, which I agreed to happily pay. But now I won’t be doing that. You are down £130, at best. Nice move, slick.
• Value of the next ten 18 month contracts after that which I would have signed up for = £6300, or so. You’re down another £5800.
• By the way — value of positive word-of-mouth recommendations from me (which I have given in the past) = at least two or three other customers, maybe more = £12,000+.
• Adverse recommendations word-of-mouth from me (which I will definitely give) = at least -£18,000, since I’ll be very vigorous about that.
• Adverse value of this blog post/facebook/twitter/etc. and the others I’ll publish to your reputation and your bottom line = unknown, potentially enormous.

The Sequel?

I genuinely hope that my next blog post will be entitled ‘How Carphone Warehouse Regained My Trust’. But that really is up to you. You are a communications company — surely you are a listening brand, as well? Oh yes, one more thing — the ‘Feedback and Complaints’ button on your site doesn’t work at all. Shame, that.

Best,

Ian Delaney

[Readers — want to help? This account combines several more phone calls to make it less boring.

As well as the phone exchanges above, I emailed the text of this post to the chairman, press office and enquiries addresses at Carphone Warehouse in order to give them a chance to do something.  No response, obviously, from any of them.

If you have been similarly disgruntled, cheated and trodden upon by telecoms giants, and Carphone Warehouse in particular, you might like to link to this post (or digg and delicious it) and help damage the company’s bottom line by spreading the word. Make a stand, people! You’re welcome to take the text as well, providing you attribute it. This is not about popularising this blog: my post rate should show that isn’t a factor here.

Legal advice is also very welcome, as are recommendations of UK mobile suppliers who care about their customers. Most welcome of all, though, would be a response from the company itself.]

It’s about how we all lie online in terms of the way we present ourselves, or rather, that we’ve been lying about ourselves for an awful long time — how we feel, how we feel about our partners and jobs, our height, weight and age, for example — and this hasn’t changed just because technology has speeded up. According to psychologists, we tell between six and 200 lies a day in order to socialise (‘I’m fine’), for play and fun, to hide misbehaviour, feel safer, feel private, feel better about the world for ourselves and to try to be more popular. There are lots of good (and bad) reasons to dissemble.

Lying is a bad thing for society, of course, as every major religion agrees. Though, on second thoughts, our culture does allow for things like white lies, keeping secrets and preserving our privacy, all of which are seen as good things by-and-large but which normally involve deception. Our actual practice means that deception is implicit to our social existence.

New information technologies that attempt to insist on personal transparency don’t really fit with our lying culture or our biological needs. There are conflicts between our cultural practises and our cultural ideals, and while we can work round those in meatspace, dealing with machines tends to expose those conflicts. (“Date of Birth?” on the registration screens of a service is a good example.)

Twitter, according to Bell, is about making an art out of confabulation. The construction of a lifestyle we present is both a biological necessity and a work of art in its entirety. On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

I haven’t seen this subject addressed before and found the presentation fascinating. I am troubled by the idea that transparency is coming to be seen as a moral necessity. It’s like the web 2.0 equivalent of Daily Mail readers saying, “you wouldn’t object to CCTV if you had nothing to hide.” As individuals, hiding, privacy, confabulation, imagination and play are pretty important to mental health, I think. This is one reason why people are very concerned about who they let into their Facebook circle of friends. Facebook insists on people using their real names and thus makes it impossible to hide different circles and different personae from each other, the way you can offline. Facebook makes it impossible to lie, and that is arguably mentally damaging.