SO WHICH FIRM LET YOU DOWN IN 2017?

Money Mail

IT’S TIME to stick it to the firms that drove you up the wall in 2017. T oday we launch the tenth annual Money Mail Wooden Spoon Awards for poor customer service.

If you’ve been let down by a telecom firm, passed from pillar to post by your power supplier or left brimming with rage by a bank, this is your chance to get your own back.

And in a new feature this year, we also want you to nominate your Service Star.

This new prize will be awarded to the com - pany that has gone above and beyond the call of duty, and left you beaming . Just send us a short account of a memorable act of kindness — or of staff unexpectedly resolving a tangle using good, old-fashioned common sense.

Over the past decade, Money Mail’s Wooden Spoon has become the trophy big bosses fear the most.

That’s because your opinion matters. Today we reveal the five on this year’s shortlist and ask you to vote for the one you want us to name and shame as the worst. Our list has been carefully compiled from the hundreds of letters, emails and calls we receive each week.

Money Mail spends most of its time fighting your corner against the giants who bungle everyday requests and payments.

So the traditional end-of-year Wooden Spoon Award hones in on organisations that look after the key areas of our finances: bank accounts; savings and mortgages; investments; insurance; tax; and essential utilities such as phone and energy bills.

BT, the winner for the past two years, is the most notable absentee this time around, after considerably cleaning up its act.

We now receive far fewer complaints about faulty BT broadband and phone lines or unhelpful call centre staff.

The same goes for V odafone. After an

ignominious third place last year , chief executive Nick Jeffery vowed he’d invest in better customer service — and it seems to be paying off. The quantity and seriousness of the gripes you send us are much reduced.

Once you ’ ve made a decision on who provides Britain’s worst customer service, vote using the form below or visit thisismoney. co.uk/spoon.

And don’t forget to tell us about the good service you’ve had, too — for our new Service Star prize. Simply include a note in your letter explaining your choice.

You can pick any company you ’ve had dealings with this year.

You have until Friday , January 5, 2018, to vote. We’ll then reveal the winners later in January, when we’ll hand over the Spoon and Star gongs to the respective chief executives.

E.ON

WHEN Money Mail revealed in September that energy companies were using highpressure tactics to push customers into having smart meters installed, you inundated us with examples.

These new meters use wireless signals to tell suppliers how much energy you use. But they are not compulsory and customers can refuse.

In some cases, firms scheduled dates to fit the meters without being asked — and bombarding customers with calls, texts and letters if they refused to have one.

E.ON was the worst offender among the Big Six power giants. Angry customers said it had told them that they must switch to a smart meter or face bill hikes.

Others had been sent letters that suggested installing a smart meter is a legal or a safety requirement.

E. ON also revealed plans to replace its expensive standard tariffs with cheaper rolling deals — but only for its customers with smart meters.

It was only after Money Mail reported the firm to the energy watchdog that E.ON agreed to change the information it sends customers to make it clearer that smart meters are optional.

A spokesman for E. ON says: ‘We’re always looking at how we can improve things for our customers. We fully support the smart meter rollout and are keen to enable our customers to see the benefits of this advanced technology for themselves.’

HMRC

THE taxman is no stranger to the Wooden Spoon shortlist — and it ’s had another miserable year . HM Revenue and Customs’ new tax - free childcare service, launched in April, has been plagued by technical problems, leaving parents locked out of the website and unable to log into accounts to pay nursery fees.

When parents then tried to ring the helpline, they routinely couldn’t get through. In August the taxman had to set up a compensation scheme for those who had lost out.

HMRC has also come under fire for unfairly pocketing thousands of pounds from savers.

Money Mail revealed in November that people in their 50s and 60s who made extra payments to top up state pensions found they didn ’t actually qualify for an increase. Yet when they asked for their money back, the taxman refused.

There has also been a great deal of confusion around the marriage tax break . In September we reported that 2million of the 4.2million couples eligible for the perk had not claimed it, missing out on around £1.3 billion between them. You tell us the application process is cumbersome and it is difficult to find out if you’re eligible.

Letters to Money Mail’s agony uncle T ony hazell also suggest hMRC is still giving customers the runaround when they’ve paid the wrong amount of tax and need to correct their records.

Sometimes it has taken the tax office months to reply to your requests — and then it ’ s failed to apologise. A spokesman for hMRC says: ‘We’re delivering better customer service across the board.

‘Call waiting times are below five minutes, we’re now available seven days a week , and 13 million people have signed up to online tax accounts to manage their tax online.

‘We’re sorry that some parents didn’t receive the standard of service to which we are committed. We’ve improved the new service.’

SANTANDER

AT ThE start of this year Money Mail was flooded with heartwrenching cases of Santander customers who had lost their life savings to online banking fraud.

Con artists pretending to be from telecoms firms and even Santander itself had found a way to exploit the bank’s payment verification system to empty people’s accounts without them being alerted by text message. In one of the worst cases, a 49-yearold from London lost £180,000.

Santander refused to cover these losses, claiming the victims should not have given out their details over the phone.

In some cases it sent victims standardised letters claiming to have investigated their case fully just 24 hours after the customer had reported the incident.

Santander also failed to tell some customers that they had the right to appeal to the Financial Ombudsman Service if they disagreed with the bank’s decision.

Since Money Mail highlighted the flaw in Santander’s text message system, the bank has tightened its security.

But many victims are still thou sands of pounds out of pocket.

A spokesman for Santander says: ‘We work hard to prevent our cus - tomers becoming victims of scams. We invest heavily in processes and systems to detect and prevent fraud. We are sorry if some of our customers feel we have not met the simple, personal and fair standards we strive to meet. W e take our responsibility in this area very seriously and will continue to fight back against the criminals who are ruining people’s lives.’

SCOTTISH POWER

AFTER Scottish P ower won our Wooden Spoon three years ago, its service appeared to be improving.

But over the past 12 months its name has again started to crop up in our postbag with regularity.

You tell us time and time again that the firm is unable to deal with the simplest of queries.

Readers routinely say their bills and direct debit payments are wrong — sometimes because their address has been confused with a neighbour’s. Then, when you ask for it to be corrected, nobody comes back to you — and sometimes Scottish P ower compounds the error with another bungle.

In the worst cases, customers are being threatened with debt collec - tors over money they don’t owe.

Scottish Power has been ranked bottom of the Big Six suppliers for service by Citizens Advice in its latest ratings.

And the firm ’s own figures show that complaints are starting to creep up again. Between July and September it received 138,877 complaints.

That’s a 14.4 pc increase on the 121,320 it received in the final three months of last year.

Its figures also show that com - plaints are taking longer to resolve. Colin McNeill, retail director at Scottish Power, says: ‘In a recent survey we had the best call answering times out of the big suppliers and throughout the year we have continued to make solid progress in our service.

‘We are working hard to keep making service improvements and developing new products to look after our existing customers.’