Terrible customer service is driving me mad | BBC Radio Solent's Lou Hannan

I’m not sure if it’s just bad luck or a sign of the times but I seem to have spent every spare minute I’ve had over the past month listening to hold music while trying to get problems resolved.

Eight months after moving into a new property I’m still battling with a utility company to get an account moved over but the latest problem involves a fridge I bought three months ago that had a fault from the moment it was switched on.

So I thought I’d share the hilarious yet somewhat frustrating responses I’ve been getting from the company that made it.

First of all, an engineer had to come out to ‘fix’ it.

This involved a day off work to wait for said engineer as the company could only give me a window of 7am – 8pm for the visit.

Why do they do this? Do they think no one has a job?

Five minutes after he left, the fridge went wrong again.

Cue the same scenario again only this time, the engineer brought and fitted a spare part.

Guess what? He leaves the house and the fridge goes wrong again.

Rather frustrated, to say the least, I call up the company again to spend 43 minutes on hold to be told I have to book another engineer appointment.

When I pointed out that I can’t keep taking days off to wait in for someone and why do they not just replace the fridge, I was interrupted and asked if I had a washing machine?

Somewhat perplexed, I enquired why, to then be told the company had an offer on 12 months of washing machine cleaner, did I want to buy it?!

I have friends who work in call centres so understand the pressures operatives face but really, is there any chance of simply listening to the caller, understanding what they’re saying and applying some basic common sense?

In this situation, I asked to speak to a manager and was told ‘we don’t have anyone here, we have to give you an email address’.

The good news is, at least the window for the engineer’s visit has reduced from 7am – 6pm!

AGH!