Paying for mistakes

mos26

I've recently been paid £75 as a gesture of goodwill by my credit card company - I sent them two cheques to pay my monthly bill that they then lost (2nd one recorded delivery) - working on the principal that they are quick enough to charge me when I make a mistake I invoiced them £100 using their own charging guidelines as a basis. I'm hoping that their admin gets worse
::)

PeterPauper

Ooooo.....nice one!

You will keep us posted on this. Nothing like money
for Christmas from a credit card co.!

Peter

Martinslovechild

Excellent.

They must hate tasting their own medicine!!!

MLC.

johnllew

May we know which company? Handy for future reference!

mos26

Appreciate the interest but I'd rather not name the company, to be fair they did move to put things right quickly when they realised exactly what the problem was. I've had letters and a phone call since just to make sure everything was ok, not exactly the actions of a cowboy outfit. I pay by debit card now over the phone as I'm not trusting anything else to their post room. Of interest I've charged about £300 in the last 18 months to various banks and financial organisations when they make mistakes that they would have made me pay for - a brief explanatory letter with the word INVOICE stuck on top works wonders, don't forget to quote their own charges and tell them who to make the cheque payable to
;D

td_007

That’s fantastic mos26. Can you give us an example of the letter and how you estimate the charges.

mos26

Hi, happy to include an example - nothing clever, it is important to get the details of the problem right though:

An example

INVOICE

Dear sir,
as you are aware there have recently been some errors on my account.
<<DETAILS OF ERRORS>>
On this occaision the level of service has fallen below that which I normally receive
and expect to receive from a professional financial service provider.
As I have had to spend time and effort in dealing with this <<INSERT>> error I would
be grateful if you would accept this invoice for my time. I am charging £50 based on
a calculation of £25 per hour of my own time spent dealing with the above matters.
Please make the cheques payable (or credit my account) and forward to me within 14 days
and I shall consider this matter closed,

yours sincerely

mos26

I hope this helps.
::)

realaledrinker

Just playing devil's advocate, but wouldn't it have been better use of your very valuable time to have set up a direct debit to pay off the statement balance when you took out the card??

mos26

Sure, but you're missing the point - I did everything on time, their post room lost the payments. Thats what the scheduler on the PC is for, to let you know when things are due. None of the errors that I billed for:

Lost cheques,
Unpaid DD because they put in the wrong details
Bounced cheque while more than sufficient funds in my account
Failure to follow a transfer requset etc

would have been prevented by having a DD in place...