BT tops my list of 2015’s most annoying companies for its call display fees

It’s time to hand out my festive prizes to those companies that have annoyed you most this year.

Top of the tree – in terms of number of complaints – was BT. At the start of the year hundreds of you wrote in after discovering you were needlessly paying out for what you assumed was free call recognition on your home phones.

When you contacted BT to complain after we alerted you, the company compounded the problem by inconsistency, with some readers getting refunds and other being refused. Reader Michael Bryant’s comment summed up my own feelings. “Their response strikes me as ridiculously convoluted and indicative of no clear policy,” he said.

The company eventually attempted to clear things up, telling me: “BT customers can get Caller Display free by signing up for the 12-month free Caller Display offer, which also renews their line contract. Customers can renew their free offer after 12 months to continue to receive it without charge.”

Is that clear? If you haven’t read it closely I reckon it means you need to sign up for the free caller display every year, which means you probably need to do it now to avoid being unfairly charged again.

By June, the communications giant was trying to sneak through another unexpected charge. It wrote to its broadband customers who’d got used to getting BT Sport for free to tell them: “If you do nothing, your BT Sport Pack will cost £5 a month from 1 August.”

John Haigh’s response was typical of readers. “For any organisation to send an email ‘notifying’ me that they will start taking money from my account unless I tell them not to is alarming,” he said. I agree. We’ll wait to see what BT’s next charging cock-up is!

The second-most company complained about by readers to me this year was Scottish Power. Hundreds of you told tales of woe of the company miscalculating usage and suddenly increasing direct debits and then chasing customers for cash that they didn’t owe.

Gary Waldram said Scottish Power raised his direct debit by 62 per cent. “That was totally unfair and unnecessary,” he said. “If enough people complain, it may force suppliers to improve the algorithms they use to calculate new direct debit payments and allow customers to keep more money in their own bank accounts.”

Many of you did contact me to complain, and in almost every instance Scottish Power backed down and put things right. AM Reilly reported: “Due to your article, I have negotiated a much lower monthly direct debit adjustment.”

After being bombarded with letters from Scottish Power trying to increase his direct debit, Joe Rock said: “I suspect that Scottish Power underestimates the cost of the energy when making the first quote to win the account under the switching process. Then they seem to try to cover this up by modifying the direct debit.”

Meanwhile, Brendan Flanagan was fed up about the incorrect transfer of his gas supply. He said: “The mistake was not Scottish Power’s fault, but its response since the problem came to light has been inept, dilatory, at times arrogant and robotic.”

The company apologised and handed a goodwill payment to Brendan, an outcome he was satisfied with. But he added: “Thank you for your help. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it clearly is.”

That’s a point I return to again and again about all the firms you write to me about. They’re usually quick to respond positively when there’s the risk of publicity about their cock-ups, but otherwise often seem to treat customers with contempt. And that’s simply not acceptable.

Scottish Power eventually gave me an explanation for all their problems. Neil Clitheroe, Scottish Power’s retail and generation chief, told me: “We’ve invested £200m to improve our customer service. It meant moving all our millions of customers to a new system.

For the vast majority it worked perfectly well. But we’ve had difficulty with a small number of customers. Over the last year it’s been tens of thousands, but we’ve reduced that now to a few thousand.

“We will make sure that if anyone’s lost out financially, they get compensation for the issues. We will also make sure we get them on to the best tariffs for them.”

They kept true to their word for all the readers who subsequently contacted me, and fed up customers kept coming right on through the summer and autumn.

However I remain hopeful of a major improvement from the firm in 2016.

The third company to make my list of shame for 2015 is Viagogo, the online ticket exchange. I had to intervene time and again on behalf of readers who bought tickets through the site but were left out of pocket and outside the venue when the tickets never materialised.

There was the daughter of our Paris correspondent, John Lichfield, who flew from France to Dublin to see Taylor Swift as a celebration of finishing her exams. Then there was Josie Cole, who was left without tickets for Ed Sheeran – the same concert that Martin Pharo had bought two tickets for as a birthday treat for his son and who also ended up ticketless.

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Next up was Sharon, whose two tickets for her daughter to go to One Direction’s London concert failed to arrive. Then in November, Katalin Tarjan travelled from Budapest in Hungary to London to see U2, to a no-ticket welcome. In the same month, Jack Pritchard discovered that the tickets he bought through Viagogo to see Seth Troxler and Apollonia in Amsterdam were fake.

In all cases, once we contacted Viagogo, replacement tickets or refunds were sorted out. But it shouldn’t have taken our intervention. The company tells me it deals with millions of tickets every year and almost all are successful transactions.

It quickly sorted things out once contacted by a newspaper, but it should have the same rapid response for people who may have travelled a long way to an event and are left feeling cheated and fed up when their promised tickets don’t appear. Good customer service should be responsive to customers, not to journalists.

s.read@independent.co.uk; twitter.co.uk/@simonnread