If a company makes a mistake, that doesn't make it a monster…
If a company makes a mistake, that doesn’t make it a monster…
As it says at the top of the page, MoneySavingExpert.com is here to cut your bills and fight your corner, and we do our best to live up to that promise. As part of that, our forum, Twitter, Facebook and News pages are often filled with individuals who feel they have been horribly mistreated by companies both big and small.
I wanted to take a few minutes to explain my view on these issues. I often hear people who mistakenly believe that we’re here to ‘take down’ companies at any occurrence (sometimes this is said as a compliment, other times by businesses as an insult). Yet that simply isn’t true. I’ve always explained my stance as ‘the adversarial consumer society’ – in other words, a company’s job is to make money, as consumers, our job is to stop them. Yet I don’t believe companies are wrong to do so.
The best analogy I have for this is that as a Man City fan, when we play Man United, I desperately don’t want them to score, but I don’t believe they are wrong for trying to do so.
Looking at what happens when companies have mistreated a consumer is a subset of this. Things fall roughly into one of two bags…
When we’re all guns a blazing. If you look through the reclaims section of the site you will see articles about when businesses have systemically, deliberately and occasionally, maliciously mistreated customers. Here they’ve overstepped the line as to what is acceptable, and often the law.
When that happens we are ‘all guns a blazing’, using all the firepower of our 15 million unique users, combined with media appearances to help people help themselves to get redress from those companies and the money they should never have had to pay out, back into their pocket.
When it’s just human error. Most problems with businesses actually tend to happen due to simple human error, or unexpected consequences. When people contact us about those, provided the firm says: "Oh, we are very sorry that was the individual operator" (and we can’t see any systemic problems). Or they say: "We didn’t realise that happened but we will put it right immediately, sorry about that". For me, that is usually it.
I instruct my editorial and news teams that the latter isn’t really a story (with the odd exception of something that’s genuinely interesting in its own right). Providing the company puts it right, stops it happening again, and puts the individual back into the position they should’ve been in, we don’t cover it. You’d be amazed at how many stories like this we drop.
I do occasionally note stories in broadcast or print media where you can see it was just an error but they go to town on it anyway, and I always find it uncomfortable so I don’t particularly want MSE to follow that line.
PS. Just to say, this isn’t a blog requesting you to send us your individual complaints. I’m afraid if you do we are nowhere near resourced enough to deal with them from millions of users, so most remain untouched. The main job of MSE is to aim to try and help you do it right in the first place. We aim at prevention more than cure.
