So am I paying for O2's staff to sort out their computer glitch then?

Richard019

As an O2 PAYG customer I have an autotopup setup on my card so that when my balance gets low I don't have to worry about sorting it out.

This week it was triggered, which would be fine but my bank account has been charged twice. Thought nothing of it and looked on the O2 website for contact information to see what I'm supposed to do.

Despite it being a common enough occurence that it's been added to the FAQS this is what the website says:

https://autotopup.o2.co.uk/o2uk/FAQ.aspx wrote:

Why have you charged me twice for my auto top-up?

This shouldn’t happen. But if you think you’ve been charged twice for an auto top-up, call our customer service team on 4445 from your O2 mobile. Your call will cost 25p.

Other than the fact they're stating the bleeding obvious (did anybody think it should happen?), why are customers expected to foot the bill for the call? If I go into a pub and they give me change for a tenner instead of a twenty, they don't get to go "oh yeah, sorry, here's £9.75 back" when I point it out to them.

NB: I haven't been able to speak to anybody yet because they don't open til 8am, but it's irrelevent really. It must happen a lot to be in the FAQs so specifically, and I bet most customers are so focussed on the £10 (or more) they've been double charged that they don't even think to ask for the 25p as well. Who'd have thought there'd still be a company that could learn a thing or two customer service from the banks.

visidigi

When you call, I am sure they will, if asked provide a credit for the call you've had to make.

Unfortunately freephone numbers just lead to people calling for the most stupid of things - its amazing how few questions you get when you start charging to be called...

latecomer

If there is a genuine error i'm sure they will refund the cost of the call.

Richard019

To be honest I wasn't worried about getting the money for the call back for myself, I just thought it was a cheek that I was going to have to ask to get it sorted.

As an update though:

Double payment sorted, which it always was going to be.

The FAQ is rubbish because they've not updated it. The number is freephone now, so I guess they've had people complaining about paying to contact them to tell them that something is wrong, or they realised if they were ringing to say they couldn't top up their phone they couldn't call without topping up first.

Their email support team weren't aware of it being free though as they offered to sort it out that way if I forwarded a bit more information rather than me calling (I was working first thing so sent an email about the payment issue last night just to see if I had to waste my time ringing them from work).

I'm still wondering how much they made from that setup before they changed it though. There'd have been a lot of people who'd have not realised on the first call, and then wouldn't have wanted to pay for a second call just to try and get the 25p back as even money isn't a good return, and it's just not worth the time.