I would like to complain about disconnection charges that were recently levied against my account (number XXXXXXX), for the amount of £31.33.
I have been an Orange customer for many years, so when I recently moved into shared accommodation in London I was shocked to be informed by your customer service representative that I would be charged a "disconnection fee" for closing my account. This was the first time I had heard of any such fee, and it left me with a very bad impression of Orange.
Your representative informed me that the new fee was listed on the "Terms And Conditions" site, and that I would have been informed of the changes by Orange. I don't recall receiving a letter, so I just checked my email record and found one email that might qualify as "being informed of changes", it is dated 18th December 2008 and has a general statement about terms and conditions changing. I can only assume that this innocuous sounding email was a cynical and manipulative attempt by Orange to hide the fact that new fees were being introduced; I'd like to say that I checked the changes at the time, but sadly I have a life, and made the mistake of trusting that Orange would highlight significant changes so I dismissed this email as unimportant. This would seem to be quite reasonable given that previous emails describing minor changes in terms and conditions actual included summaries of the changes.
Unfortunately I'm now unable to check if Orange actually informed me of the change in fees because the link included in the email no longer works. So, I'm left with serious questions as to whether Orange has actually met it's obligations as described in section 12.1 of the terms and conditions - i.e. "Where these changes are material we will notify you by giving you 30 days notice in advance of any such change taking effect". Either way, it seems clear to me that Orange made no serious attempt to inform me of these significant changes to my terms and conditions, and in fact may have attempted to hide the changes out of fear of losing customers.
I now want to avoid additional fees that Orange may arbitrarily decide that I owe, so I will be posting a cheque for the outstanding amount today. However I thought you'd like to know that I've posted this letter online, and I'll be telling all of my friends about my experience with Orange via email (that's 200 people), facebook (110 friends), twitter (29 followers + retweets), and whoever else I can tell, for the rest of my life. So please enjoy the £31.33, perhaps you can use it to generate some goodwill instead of mistreating your customers?
Yours sincerely,
James Siddle