With the millions being spent on promoting the new Samsung G600 camera phone, and the millions O2 spend on creating and maintaining their public image as one of the best mobile phone companies to do business with, readers might find the following a trifle extraordinary, to say the least.
All my wife and I wanted to do was to upgrade our old mobiles to the Samsung G600 with its five megapixel camera.
The O2 shop gave us hope. You should be able to get the G600 for free, the man said. The hope proved to be a false one. He came back and said the tariffs we were on meant we'd have to pay £129.99 each for the phones.
He suggested trying O2 customer service over the phone as they might be able to offer a better deal.
It sounded easy. Just dial the number, speak to customer services, and ask if they could do a free upgrade.
Not so. The first time I rang, I waited for six minutes while the recorded message reminded me, frequently, how important my call was to them.
Eventually, I heard another ringing tone and my call connected. Only no-one spoke to me. I could hear background noises of people chattering away at the call centre, but no-one seemed to be able to hear me.
Or perhaps they didn't wish to.
Frustrated, I rang off and went through the entire process again. Four minutes this time - and exactly the same thing happened.
After two more attempts, I finally found myself speaking to someone.
She assured me that we didn't qualify for a free upgrade to a G600, even though we'd both been loyal long-time O2 customers for years and hadn't upgraded or asked for any other benefits for years.
As everyone knows that phone companies have retentions departments whose sole purpose is to offer customers better deals to prevent them leaving and taking their business to a direct competitor, I asked her if she would put me through.
She, however, was having none of it. She told me, unequivocally, that O2 did not have a retentions department.
I protested that O2 did, but she was adamant.
I told her that I knew the retentions department existed and that I wanted to be put through.
Nevertheless, she insisted the department was a figment of my imagination.
Patience wearing thinner, I asked to speak to her manager, as I didn't believe what she was telling me about the alleged non-existence of the retentions department.
This seemed to do the trick. Without missing a beat, she informed me that she was going to put me through to the retentions department after all.
Anyone with an ethic to subscribe to would have found that a difficult leap to make - from repeated and absolute denials that a department even exists, to an offer to put you through to it moments later.
But not her. First she told me the line was busy. Then, as she tried to put me through, I hung on for 13 minutes before the line went dead and I was cut off again.
Undaunted, I rang again and, perhaps fortunately, was answered by one of her colleagues who didn't try to deny the existence of the retentions department but put me right through to it.
The chap I spoke to couldn't explain why she should have lied to me so brazenly and repeatedly. He agreed that the retentions department did exist - after all, he worked for it - and he was a lot more helpful. But he checked the system and confirmed that we did not qualify for a free upgrade to a G600 but would have to pay almost £260 between us.
I thought that was a little parsimonious, bearing in mind our loyalty and the minimal demands we had made on the service over the years. But he wouldn't budge.
I asked to speak to his manager.
She was similarly pleasant, but again wouldn't give an inch on the matter of the upgrade.
That was fair enough, as it's a commercial decision for O2 whether it wants to reward trouble-free and loyal customers or not.
Beyond asking nicely, I couldn't argue with her decision.
But then she astonished me.
Blissfully unaware that I was an investigative journalist and author of the forthcoming self-help consumer manual Sort The Bastards! - a guide to dealing with the fobbers-off of this world, and others who try to do us down at every turn - the manager mistoook me for a mere O2 customer... and treated me accordingly.
That, presumably, is why she switched tactics and tried to put me off wanting the phone in the first place.
I listened, amazed, as the manager of the retentions department at one of the UK's most reputable mobile phone companies used childlike psychology to try to convince me that the Samsung G600 wasn't all it was cracked up to be in the multi-million-pound advertising campaign being run by Samsung and endorsed by O2.
The picture quality isn't that good, she told me. The reviews were bad, she said. In fact, she suggested, I'd be better off buying a digital camera if I wanted to take pictures. The sound quality on voice calls wasn't up to much, either, she claimed. And so she went on.
I began to feel sorry for Samsung. They create what appears to be one of the best-looking, best-equipped camera phones on the market and spend a fortune promoting it, only for one of the senior people in O2 to badmouth it in a futile attempt to kill a potential customer's dream of owning one.
As I don't believe in rushing into print without giving companies a fair chance to comment, I approached O2's press office to ask if they'd care to offer a quote for the end of this posting on my blog.
The nice woman in the press office seemed (as I would have expected) astonished that a customer had been treated in such a way. She e-mailed back the next day saying she'd arranged for someone in customer services to contact me that day "to remedy the situation" – whatever that meant.
He didn't call.
Back to the press office, where the woman was embarrassed that the man hadn't kept his promise to ring.
Shortly afterwards, he did.
But whatever "remedy" the press office had had in mind, it certainly hadn't been mentioned to him.
He spent some time telling me what I already knew (ie that O2 didn't usually give free G600 upgrades to people on our tariff) but went on to hint that he didn't entirely believe me anyway.
Despite the messages warning customers that incoming calls to O2 are recorded "for security and training purposes" he said that none of the conversations I'd had with any of his colleaues had been taped, so there was no evidence.
He seemed pleased about that.
I wasn't. I'd rather been hoping that O2 would have been able to play back the tapes and find out what it's like being on the other end of the phone when you're just a customer. But it wasn't to be.
He looked at the computer records and, to my astonishment, told me that the first woman I'd spoken to – the one who had lied about the non-existence of the retentions department – had noted that my call to her had been abusive.
As someone who has never been abusive to anyone on a phone in my life, and was also conscious that the call was supposedly being recorded, I couldn't believe she would have made such a defamatory entry on the call log. Mr Remedy didn't seem to realise the gravity of what his colleague had done.
I explained that as I had not shouted, threatened, sworn or called her or O2 names, my call could not possibly have been classed as abusive.
Yes, I was assertive. I was persistent. And I challenged the veracity of what she was saying when she lied about the non-existence of the retentions department. But that is not abuse.
The fact that she probably didn't like someone standing up to her and refusing to be fobbed off by
someone lying on behalf of the company wasn't abuse, either. But that's what she called it on the log.
What a shame the recording couldn't be found, as it would have revealed that I was polite but firm while she was determined to fob me off by telling barefaced lies.
So that's customer service in the 21st Century, O2 style.
How many other customers have been treated in this way?
What have Samsung done to deserve this?
And can anyone out there recommend another phone company that treats its customers with even a little more respect than that?
And what was O2's comment on all this? After ignoring my communications for more than a week, the woman in the press office finally came back tonight to say she didn't wish to comment, but she indicated that she had to believe what she'd been told by her colleagues in customer services.
I wonder if her faith in them will be shared by people thinking of buying a phone from O2?
Just spotted a web page from O2 that contains the following boast: "Our strategy is to turn our customers into fans by giving them an experience that cannot be matched elsewhere."
Priceless!
Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!
