When Stanley Kydd got in touch, the ATM at his store – Frances Street Filling Station, in Newtownards, County Down, Northern Ireland – had been on the blink for quite some time.
He wrote: “Don’t know if you can help or not. I am having major issues with Cardtronics and my ATM has been out of action from Sunday [22nd January] and it is impossible to get to speak to anyone who can solve the problem as you will see from my emails below.”
On the 25th January, Stan’s wife Susan wrote to the company: “I am disappointed at the length of time it is taking in order to have my ATM repaired. Having telephoned on Monday morning at 8am I was informed that the ATM had automatically printed a ticket requesting an engineer. (A lot of good this did.)
“An engineer arrived on site yesterday and said he only got the call on Tuesday morning. He was not only unable to repair the ATM but could not give a time frame as to when the ATM would be fully functional again.
“This will be my 4th day now without an ATM. Would be grateful if you could let me have a time frame on a possible repair please?”
The following day she wrote to them again: “My husband Stanley took a phone call yesterday morning and was informed that a priority ticket had been raised for the repair to the ATM. I emailed yesterday afternoon for an update and a member of staff has just informed me that someone called yesterday afternoon to confirm that a priority ticket had been raised. Here I am today at 16.26pm with no sign of an engineer and now looking at six days without an ATM.
“This level of service is APPALLING.
“If a priority ticket was raised for my site then God help anyone who has had a non priority ticket issued for their site!”
And the day after that she again wrote: “The engineer has just arrived and is not in a position to repair the ATM as it requires a new core.
“He was unaware that an engineer had attended the site on Tuesday so it’s now obvious that what was required to repair the ATM was not passed on from the engineer who attended on Tuesday.
“It really beggars belief the total IMCOMPENTENCE of NCR in this matter.
A ticket was raised for this automatically on Sunday and I also reported it on Monday morning and six days later the ATM is still down. UNBELIEVABLE.
“I would have thought that my daily emails and telephone calls would have alerted someone to raise this to a level where I could expect a positive outcome. It is obvious that Customer Support is badly lacking in this instance. There must be someone in Cardtronics or NCR who can solve this?”
The couple eventually queried whether they could leave the contract for breach of T&Cs but got this response: “Unfortunately being without an ATM service for 9 days would not give you grounds to terminate the contract with immediate effect. However you are welcome to serve notice of termination at any time for the contract to finish at the end of the current term. I believe I discussed this with Stanley recently and recommended he send the notice ASAP.
“As I understand it, the service level agreement is 30 days. If after 30 consecutive days there has been no results, you may issue Cashzone with notification of breach of agreement. This would then give Cashzone an additional 30 days to rectify the problem. Should there still be no results, things could then be taken further, however we’d hope things don’t get to that point.”
Even that didn’t result in a repair though.
On Jan 31 Stanley informed me that their ATM was still out of action which he said was a big disappointment not just to them but to his customers.
“The impact on my elderly and vulnerable customers has been immense as they have come to rely on this ATM for cash,” he said.
(Don’t imagine it was doing a lot for the store’s image either.)
Meanwhile I had attempted to reach Cardtronics through the public relations firm they had employed.
When the deadline came and went (and we were by now into February by the way) I sent them a chaser with updates about how long this was all taking. This finally got a result but not the one I was expecting: the PR company no longer worked for Cardtronics/Cashzone, but they said they had now sent my request for comment to the customer service team of their former client.
I have no idea whether that helped because I didn’t get a response but, by Feb 3, an engineer finally showed up!
But taking 12 days to fix an out-of-order ATM is well, really out-of-order in itself.
