Path: Welcome > Good'n'Bad 
Good'n'Bad
… and ugly:-). Okay, seriously: the idea here is to report upon particularly good or egregiously bad cases of customer service, product features et cetera. I will only write about those things that Vero and I have actually witnessed or experienced ourselves, so no second-hand urban legends here. Given the general state of things in the world of customers and consumers my suspicion is that I will have to deal more with bad than with good cases. But I will do my very best to highlight companies that went out of their way to do The Right Thing. After all, it's only satisfied customers who come back for more.
There is also a separate section I'll call Rants with… well, with rants! Please don't take them overly seriously; they're just one way to poke fun on some things I at some point found – to concoct a new word – “rantable”.
Speedferries.com
These are the guys we're currently using for crossing over to France. They are almost as fast as the Tunnel (especially as the latter have drastically cut the number of passenger trains) – the Tunnel needs about one hour and fifteen minutes if all goes well, Speedferries.com takes between 90 minutes and two hours. The actual sailing time is 50 minutes at best and is done with a fast catamaran (the feeling is not unlike crossing with a Hovercraft, including the fact that people who get easily seasick will have not much fun during a stormy sailing, as Vero can vouch for). And after some initial hiccups Speedferries.com seem to have to come to grips with the service: they are now punctual and reliable. The main advantage is the price, of course. Booking early (their business model works like a budget airline's) means that one pays between £38 and £50 for a return ticket (!) – and without any restrictions concerning length of stay or other stupidities. Compare that with the Tunnel where a normal return (ie one for more than five days) is in the region of £150 – on a good day! Recommended.
cahoot
That's the bank (branchless, internet/phone only) we switched to after too many disasters with our current account at Citibank UK (see next entry; though I have to admit that banking in general is a rather sore point here in Britain). cahoot are competent, friendly (not a matter of course with UK banks) and rather swift in dealing with customer queries. There are a few minor gripes but in general they are at the professional end of banking. What I like most is their rigorous approach to internet security: they take these things seriously, not like some other, err, so-called banks we had the pleasure to deal with.
Citibank UK
This is one of the most incompetent financial institutions in the UK (and I am being friendly here). The troubles we had with them, over the years, are far too many to detail. Among the crowning highlights was their inability to send out new internet PINs in time for their grand website make-over. This impressive feat of foresight and planning left us and many other customers without online access to our accounts for several weeks. And Citibank's fabulous phone hotlines were so overstretched by irate customers (like us) that we literally couldn't access our own money for almost a full week.
Or the fun we had when we walked into one of their London branches and asked whether there was any way to get hold of our delayed new PINs if we're abroad: we were advised that sure, no problem, we should simply ask a neighbour to open the envelopes with the PINs inside and have him or her read the PINs to us over the phone (!). The helpful Mr X (we do have his full name) stuck to this advice even after we pointed out that this sort of behaviour would be in gross violation of Citibank's own terms and conditions. These guys are definitely dangerous: we switched accounts as quickly as we could.
$updated from: Good'n'Bad.htxt Fri 25 Apr 2008 16:35:17 thomasl$