Dear Mr Frieze

Your recent correspondence concerning the telephone calls you previously received have been passed to me to investigate and respond. Please accept my apologies for the poor perception this matter has left you with and my appreciation for the opportunity to respond.

Firstly, I wish to apologise for the inconvenience this matter may have caused you. This was never our intention.

I am sorry if you feel our first letter did not address all your issues. I will address them in the order they appear.

The call-back was in connection with the quotation you obtained last year. The system will automatically call any number which is due approximately the same time the following year. There is no specific time when a call will be made however, the system operates between the hours of 9.00am to 9.00pm.

The dialler system will only call the home number as this was the initial preferred contact number, however, if the Consultant had spoken with your partner, an alternative number should have been obtained in order to contact you directly.

An evening call was schedule to allow the Consultant to speak with the policyholder in order to clarify the details.

I regret no actual contact was made regarding the above. This was due to us rescheduling a large number of outbound calls due to the major influx of inbound calls received.

I do not have an explanation as to why the telephone is constantly dead when you answer, but can advise that your comments have been passed on to our Telecommunications Department for further investigation.

Our telephone system records the majority of our calls for training and quality purposes, however, not every call is recorded.

As previously advised your personal details have been removed from our database and ths will ensure no further telephone calls or mail-shots are received. I trust this meets with your approval.

I would like to advise that your experience is not indicative of the normal level of service provided by Kwik-Fit Insurance Services and I can assure you that steps will be taken to ensure a similar situation does not arise in future.

Should you have any further concerns please do not hesitate to contact me on 01324 606170 between 9.30am and 3.30pm Monday to Friday.

Yours sincerely

Lynda McKeown
Customer Relations Officer

Lynda McKeown
Customer Relations Officer
Kwik-Fit Insurance Services
2 Forrest Gate
Tannochside Business Park
Uddington
G71 5PG

Dear Lynda McKeown,

I would thank you for your letter of the 22nd May, but I found reading it to be an unsatisfactory experience, so I will not. Aside from the fact that it is, in places, incoherent, you have failed to answer my complaints to my satisfaction. Suggesting I have a poor perception of your company is, I feel, something of an understatement at this point.

You apologised for the inconvenience that Kwik-Fit may have caused me, yet I complained about specific inconvenience that you did cause. Consider the fact that I had felt the need to involve Telewest's nuisance call bureau last year, when you think about how concerned I had become. I get the impression from your letter that you wish me to believe that you were only calling me because I had initiated contact with your call centre, and that I am ultimately responsible for this situation. I want you to acknowledge and resolve your own faulty practices, which are to blame for this situation.

Having re-read my letter to you, I notice you have not actually answered any of my direct questions. Here they are again, along with more information to help you understand them.

• What business did your staff have ringing my home number in the middle of the day? - by this I mean, why does your dialler system bother scheduling a home-call in the middle of the day? Do you assume that all of your customers are unemployed or housewives?
• Why would your staff not take my work number from my partner and call me there? - you claim that your consultant would ask for an alternative number, yet in actual fact, they point blank refused to do so - why?
• Why did your staff insist on scheduling an evening call after their questions were answered by my partner? You tried to answer this by saying that you needed to clarify details, but that is nonsense! When one of your consultants spoke with my partner he was told that we had already bought our car insurance and that there was no need to call again - yet again, your staff member refused to take this from my partner and decided to make another call - why?
• Why did these evening calls either not happen or consist of a dead line? Clearly there are problems with your dialler system. It cannot schedule calls to reasonable times (for instance, when I am likely to be there). The system seems to be making calls on the off-chance that one of your staff will be available to speak when it gets through; if you get a "major influx" of incoming calls, it looks like those households with telephones ringing just end up with a dead line. You have not really told me anything about your phone system. Please will you tell me why it is so poor and what you are going to do to improve it.
• Does your phone system keep logs of every call that you make? You successfully answered the question Do you record many of your calls?, which I did not ask. However, my actual question concerns whether your dialler keeps a list of all calls that it makes along with the time of the call. Perhaps when you pursue your colleagues in the telecommunications department, you could ask them for me.

Please take the opportunity to help me get to the bottom of this matter. If you cannot do so, please pass this letter on to one of your colleagues who can, preferably someone who can write a letter.

I look forward to receiving some answers.

Yours sincerely,

Ashley Frieze.