customer service

yozz

I had an issue playing a game in william hill the machine basically froze and staff said there's nothing they can do its down to the company who own them so i complained to william hill customer service provided them with a video proving my point after 65 days they sent me an email saying they would pay me 320 as a good will gesture and pick it up at my local store but they know nothing and customer service has closed my case i think i was wondering who do i complain to about the customer service.i cant find ceo cfo email

bluelad1927

It's always a gamble dealing with these betting shops

Abbafan1972

The solution here is to not even set foot into these places. 

RefluentBeans

I think your first point of call is to go back to the customer services and ask what to do. I can see why a betting shop wouldn’t just give out £320 based on an email - you could just end up going to loads of William Hills and getting £320 if there’s no system in place to ‘claim’ the money on their end. 

I think you should ask them to tell the manager of the store to expect you at a specific store, or to give you a credit voucher that could be redeemed for cash (not sure if the latter exists.

If all else fails, I think you need to look at reporting to the Gambling Commission. I don’t know much about the rules in all honesty but it may be that there has been a breach. 

I think anything further (suing via small claims court) is tricky. I’m not sure who would be held liable - if what William Hill has said is true that they don’t own the machine and instead it’s owned and operated by a third party, and all William Hill basically do is lease the space this company, then I think that any claim should be against the third party company that owns and operates the machine. But if William Hill operates the machine (even if they do not own it) then they are held at least partially liable. 

If you do claim via court I’m not sure how much you’d be entitled to claim for. You normally claim for actual losses. So if you put £20 in and lost that, you’d be able to claim for £20 if the machine was proven to be faulty. But if the machine glitched out at you winning a jackpot of £500, I’m not sure if you’d be able to claim that. And I think you’d never be able to claim ‘future wins’ in these cases - meaning you can’t claim £500 because it would’ve been the next spin I would’ve won! But happy to be corrected on this stuff. 

The machine also has to be legitimately faulty - as in it’s a lot easier to prove that you didn’t get your payout because the coin dropper failed to function than it is to prove that the odds of winning are incorrect. 

As I said, I think the process would be to follow up with customer services, and potentially mention you’re looking at legal options and/or reporting to the Gambling Commission. Then if that doesn’t work, file what’s called a Letter Before Action with the amount of actual money lost. This is a hostile act, and so is the last resort - think of it as a pay me now or I’m suing sort of letter. Finally, depending on value, going to small claims to file a case. Hopefully it wouldn’t get to that point.