Boo Scottish Power (my new electricity supplier) for charging me much more than I think you should

Yey Scottish Power for letting me book a callback at a specific time. I hate calling customer service lines, being held in a queue, being told you’re a valued customer (funny, it never feels like that at the time) and everything taking forever

Boo Scottish Power for starting my callback with a pre-recorded message – ‘This is a call for, a valued customer. If you are, a valued customer, please press 1. If you need to get, a valued customer, we can wait’. I was logged into my account when I requested the callback so presumably you know my name. If you can’t have a real person to start the call (and why not? That would be so much nicer) at least pretend more effectively that you care and run my name through a fancy text to speech system (like my bank who for some reason pronounce my name as Jonah). If you’re going to use a generic message you should record the whole thing, this one clearly had the words ‘a valued customer’ dropped in really badly throughout.

Double boo Scottish Power for asking me for my account details when I got through to a real person. Like I said, why can’t you link your callback system to my account so you know who I am, my account details and could even have a go at pre-empting my question? I’m happy to verify my details so you know I’m not some overly helpful mugger who stole my phone but then wanted to sort out my billing issues for me, but the guy who dealt with my call had no idea who I was.

Yey Scottish Power for actually being very helpful on the phone, your staff redeem your awful automated and fake niceness with genuine friendliness and concern.

The moral of the story is, if you’re going to think of people as valued customers (which you should), you should actually treat them like that and do your best to be useful and genuine rather than just telling them they’re valued.

End of rant