Hi Gandalf,
No I hadn't seen that email as it went in to my spam, but why was the billing telephone number not included on the letter to me rather than the customer service line with the 45 min wait?
I'm glad you've drawn my attention to this though as it raises several further questions (in addition to the ones in my previous post, which you haven't answered: Why did no one try to call me? Why was I directed to an online payment page that doesn't exist? Why was payment not taken by direct debit rather than cancelling it?)
Most importantly, the email you've linked shows that the bill was sent to recovery/debt collection before it was ever sent to me. This is utterly outrageous and bizarre. The timeline is as follows:
12 Sept: I call up to cancel. The adviser creates a support query to process this (why a support query? there was no query, why is it not as simple as issuing a final bill and collecting it via direct debit?)
18 Sept: 6 days later, someone "escalated" my "support query" to the correct queue. It seems reasonable to assume then that the original adviser did not process my cancellation request correctly.
25 Sept: A further week later, someone confirms the amount of my final bill. Instead of this prompting a normal reaction, such as issuing a final bill, issuing it on a letter, calling me up (perhaps just taking it by direct debit?) he decides to immediately send it in to recovery/collections. Keep in mind at this point that I have not been contacted even once to ask for the bill via any method. Nothing. The only thing he does do is send me an email entitled "Question 157694107 has been closed." What?! Why not something like "Important: We've calculated you final bill and put it immediately in to recovery" or at least "Your final bill has been calculated and needs to be paid." In any event it's redirected to my spam folder.
28 Sept: 3 days after being put in to recovery someone finally decides to write me a letter and actually let me know that you want any money, que the debacle of not being given the correct number to call, being directed to a web page that doesn't exist, etc. Note that this letter isn't sent first class, and if your letter processing system works anything like others I am familiar with, it won't have actually been put in the post until Friday 29th September. As it wasn't sent first class and as it was sent on a Friday, I wouldn't have received it until Tue/Weds the 3rd/4th of October, a full 8 or 9 days after being put in to recovery/collections. Yes, as unbelievable as it seems, you failed to let me know that a bill even existed until over a week after you'd already sent it to collections.
If my complaint was going by a similar timeline, I'd have already sent it to Ofcom, then a couple days from now I'd post something here saying "Oh I've got a bit of a problem, could you help?"
Please can you do the following:
1) Sent an updated credit report to every credit reference agency you use and cancel the missed payment report you will have given them.
2) Confirm that I won't have to pay a penny more than the final bill amount to the debt collection agency.
3) Apologise for your ridiculous behaviour
