simont | (no subject)

Well, that was a slightly concerning experience.

My credit card was refused earlier this week when trying to make an online purchase. As soon as I thought about this, it was obvious why this might have happened - I bought some hardware a month or two ago and had no recollection of paying a bill since then, so presumably I'd slipped over the deadline. On the other hand, I had no recollection of receiving a bill either, so it wasn't clear what exactly had gone wrong.

This morning I got a letter from the Halifax saying "Despite repeated reminders your account is still overdue" and also "We are grassing on you to the credit reference agencies", which was rather more worrying. So I rang them up and said, essentially, "What reminders?", expecting the usual bull-headed "Well we sent them" / "Well I never received them" sort of argument.

To my pleasant surprise the guy took one look at his screen and said "Gosh, you're right, we didn't actually send the reminders, we'll inform the credit agencies forthwith that it was all our fault and that you paid in full as soon as we actually managed to send you a reminder, sorry for the inconvenience". I do like the Halifax. It's folly to expect any large organisation not to screw up egregiously, but the Halifax at least seem to be able to notice when they've done so, which is always encouraging. So now my card should work again; phew.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Perhaps you should tell John Munden (http://www.google.com/search?q=john+munden) about the Halifax admitting to mistakes.

Yikes, that doesn't sound like much fun. Perhaps they decided in the wake of that that admitting to mistakes was better PR in the long run...

Though really, I don't think this is about admitting to mistakes versus covering them up. I think it's about having good enough records to notice that you've made a mistake. I was just really impressed that they had records of whether they really had sent me various letters or not, and that those records were accurately enough kept that they genuinely did log the failure.

(Apparently they stopped sending me letters some months ago because one came back "addressee unknown". I can only assume something went odd within the Post Office; my current best theory is that the letter was misdelivered to Howard Road rather than Howard Close, and the person at the same house number there understandably didn't know who I was...)