A mountain to climb at William Hill

Like a flutter? Do online betting? Considered opening an account with William Hill? Don’t.

Check out one of our team’s experience in trying to CLOSE his account with them and get his funds refunded.

Moral of the story: check out how easy it may be to close an online account / get a refund before you ever open one. Check this:

The home of all hills

#Live Chat

Status: Connected

Ian (The agent is responding)

• Ian: Hi, you’re speaking to Ian. How may I help you?
  You: HI, Just want to close my account. But can’t remember login details, etc.
  You: Hello…?
  Ian: Yes. I am here.
  Ian: I am sad to hear that you would like to close your account.
  You: Don’t be. I don’t use it
  Ian: Can I have you email address associated to your account?
  You: Yep, here: xyz@gmail.com
  Ian: Thank you. Please allow me few minutes to locate your account.
  Ian: For additional verification, may I have your date of birth and answer to your security question: Mother’s Maiden Name
  You: 06.06.1966
  You: Doris
  Ian: Thank you for verifying your account. I understand that you wish to close your account, can I assume that you would like to close it as it is not being used as you mentioned earlier?
  Ian: Or do you have any other reason?
  You: Yes. Forgotten all about it and don’t want ‘charges’ thank you very much.
  Ian: I see. Please allow me few minutes to close your account.
  You: ok
  Ian: Thank you for waiting.
  You: ok
  Ian: Your account is now completely closed.
  You: was there any £££ in it??? Just thought you might have asked J
  Ian: I am looking at £5.00 balance left on your account.
  You: Thanks. So what happens to that?
  You: Hell-oooo…?
  Ian: It will still remain to the account, until you wish to have it withdrawn or reopen the account.
  Ian: I can also see that your account has not been fully age verified.
  You: Don’t understand. You said you were closing the account. So I’d like to withdraw my £balance.
  Ian: If you really wish to have this withdrawn on your account, you would need to send us your documents to completely verify your account.
  You: Such as…?
  Ian: I can have it reopened now. Since we just closed it.
  You: What?
  Ian: Valid photo ID such as driver’s license, national ID or passport. Please ensure that the following details are clearly shown: full name, date of birth, validity period or expiration date and ID photo.
  Ian: Also, proof of address showing the following details: full name, billing address, issue date, logo of the issuing company/authority with valid contact information. Please note that it should be issued within the past six months. We accept utility bills or bank statements.
  You: WHAT??? Jesus! Just to get my £5 money back. Haven’t you got my bank details there?
  Ian: Do you wish to have the £5.00 left be withdrawn from your account?
  You: You’re kidding me right…?
  You: Does everything have to be so slo-o-o-ow?
  Ian: Please be informed that this rules apply to all our customers to protect their account.
  You: Where are you in the world, just for interest’s sake…?
  Ian: William Hill Customer Service are actually located in different locations.
  Ian: Unfortunately, I can not disclose my particular location.
  You: And your current location is…?
  You: Why not? On the moon?
  Ian: Going back, do you wish to have your remaining balance be withdrawn from your account?
  You: OMG. Please…I don’t seem to be making myself clear. I just want to close my account. Have my £££ refunded. Why is this so difficult?
  Ian: I need to know, because if you really wish to withdraw to have it withdrawn, I need to reopen your account. Please answer “yes” or “no”.
  You: Hell-ooo. I am considering calling the Samaritans. To save myself from self harming, YES, YES, YES…!
  Ian: I apologise for having to ask this question. I just need to verify.
  You: WHAT IS THE MATTER. JUST DO IT PLEASE!
  Ian: Alright. I will be reopening your account. Also, like what I mentioned earlier, to completely process your withdrawal for the remaining balance on your account, please submit the documents to ageverification@willhill.com.
  You: Look, Ian. Let’s call the whole thing off. You can keep my £££. I don’t care. Just PLEASE don’t get back to me with any more dumb questions. I thought that was my job to ask you! Just promise me you won’t levy any charges on my account and you’ll never contact me again. Promise?
  Ian: As I understood from what you said, we will keep you account closed, is that correct?
  You: JEEZ!!!
• You: Ian, wherever you are…goodbye 🙂 I am calling the Samaritans now.
• Ian: I never reopen your account and the remaining balance will still be on your account.
  Ian: Thank you for contacting us. If there will be any other concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us again. Have a good one!

 

The freelancer’s dilemma

Many months back we posted a ‘true cost of agency workers’ article on the site. About how full-time (general) staff’s salary is actually about half what it really costs a company to employ them.

We still get the occasional response to that post – our posts attract all sorts of oddballs. Which we don’t mind.

If you missed it, we took a vote some weeks’ back and picked one of the oddballest ones. And published it with our comments. After all, the freelance oddball who wrote to us asked us to do this. And anonymity was, accordingly, preserved.

Rated daily

Now, by popular consent – and never ones to turn down a challenge – our fearless crew here at VnN, re-publish the letter together with our comments. And, to spice things up a little, the comments from our readers, too.

But first, the original letter:

Dear Ed

I’m appalled. I’ve just been for my third ‘interview’ (they’ve really been nothing more than informal chats) with an agency looking to appoint an experienced and successful freelance new biz person. Me!

At least that’s what I thought as we’ve had good chats and we seem to get on well enough. They tell me they have a great product and their fab clients love them muchly. And so they want to grow. They see me as helping them to do that. And I’d like to make it happen.

So far so good.

Now for the not-so-good. They have offered me less than I have asked for as my day-rate. As requested, I gave them a range of £x (the lowest amount) to £y (the top of the range) and they’ve come back with £x minus £z. Which means I don’t even get to £w. If you get my drift?

Unfortunately, I have to admit this grates. But what do I do? If I turn them down, then I’ll end up with zip. If I accept their lower-than-my-stated £x threshold rate, I’ll be continuously hacked-off that they’re getting me on the cheap. So I won’t do a great job and it’ll all, most likely, end in tears.

Agencies are always hacked off when their (new) clients try to screw them down. And that sours the whole relationship before it even starts. What should I do?

Yours confused…

We’re hiring! Why every job isn’t fantastic.

If you happened to be scanning a jobs section and this popped up, would you give it a second thought?

Marketing assistant 
Dull and limited position demanding masses of isolated and unrewarding routine work and with no likely future prospects for candidates hugely unconcerned about success…show more

And even though it may not be your ‘thing’, how about this one?

Marketing executive
Exciting and varied role inviting masses of individual and rewarding research work and with infinite likely future prospects for candidates hugely passionate about succeeding…show more

See what we did there? It’s the same job!

Management excluded: they rarely come in on Fridays

So it seems churlish even to have asked the question, doesn’t it.

Yet the first ‘extract’, above, is often the subtext for what many marketing jobs are really like and how they sometimes end up becoming.

So why is this? Why is it that every advertised job is, potentially, such a great opportunity? When, as we all know from experience, as VnN staffers will readily testify, reality can be rather different.

Enter, briefly, 44-year old Parisian Frédéric Desnard. As was reported in last week’s press, Frédéric didn’t think his job was that great. Not for four, depressing years in fact.

So Frédéric, as is the tendency in France among the disgruntled, took action direct. He decided to sue his company for boring him to (near) death. For over four years. He maintains no

It’s only a game

Staffers at Views not News are suffering from FSAD: Football Season Affective Disorder. Sadly, no one at VnN HQ saw the light back in August 2015 when Ladbrokes offered the now not-so-crazy odds on Leicester City’s Premiership campaign.

So who’s not sick at missing out on a 5000-1 ‘certainty’? Well, certain now on this final morning of April 2016, anyway?

There can’t be many easier ways of making a wedge for so little effort. United’s mostly morose LVG must now stand for Leicester’s Victory Game. Even without suspended Jamie Vardy.

And even if they don’t win on Sunday thanks to a very unsporting Man U mistakenly thinking their league position means anything at all to anyone, most teams, Tottenham apart, beat Chelsea at the Bridge nowadays (Leicester’s final game this season) so BIG Congrats Leicester City and Claudio Ranieri.

“You’ve all done very well.”

Theatre of Dreams

Yet for one man there’s an even more rewarding game than footie. A game that pays out much MUCH more. It’s called retailing.

Email biters bit

Surprised to read that meedja folk don’t like emails. Selling ones, that is.

Announced they’re being snowed by retailers after they bought something from them.

Curious incident of the email in the inbox

But maybe yours was one of the sympathetic 132 comments agreeing with the posting person, Tom Godwin, right.

If you missed / can’t read his post it says: Retailers…..stop signing me up to daily email lists because I’ve bought something from you. Brands needs to get a more realistic view of their importance in people’s lives.

After all, while Tom is completely unknown to VnN, isn’t he directly representative of – or at least a key part of – the industry that advises clients on how they should be selling stuff to customers? You know…how and where to place their comms? And, wait for it, isn’t email on their clients’ media schedule? Somewhere?

Surprised VnN would be (again) if email wasn’t included as part of their clients’ proposed multi-channel strategies.

So why are the media’s advocates getting so het up? Is it still news to anyone that providing your email address to an organisation means they just might use it…?

Banking made inhuman

One in five Brits can’t read their bank statements, claims an 82-page FCA report which landed on our desk last week*.

Nope, VnN dudes didn’t read it, either. Finance always sounds so dull. And 82 page-zzz…

Even though we didn’t attend Bank Statement reading classes at school, either, we don’t get why something so basic should be so baffling.

Our bank statements normally come in two simple sizes: ‘overdrawn’ or ‘very overdrawn’.

I obey

But help is on the way.

In our much-loved and exciting technology-led fashion, banks are deploying robots to give us poor financial services-challenged and low-wage, bank-statement-illiterate bobos new, state-of-the-art, robo-advice.

And we said finance was dull? We did.

So in our readers’ interests VnN has done a little digging. Not for gold but for robo-info. Because the future of our individual financial health is likely to get even trickier than not being able to read simple bank statements.

What’s in a mononym?

Star-cross’d Juliet asked almost the same question. The answer is everything

Unlike her parents, Juliet couldn’t care less about her intended’s surname. Names, as far as she was concerned, were just artificial constructs. Better consider the person than their name, she declared.

Poor soon-to-die-tragically Juliet was wrong. She couldn’t escape the conventions of her time.

Yet ironically, where Juliet was referring to Romeo’s surname, Montague, it’s their Christian names which have bestowed immortality upon them. Mononymically speaking.

In connected 21st-century Britain, and even abroad, names are so much more than names. They’re brands. We connect with them in milliseconds.

How did it come to this?

Being known by your first name alone is the very pinnacle of instant, connected success: Jesus, Elvis, Bono, Moses, Banksy, Donovan, Ella, Maggie, Pele, Napoleon, Michelangelo, Galileo, Superman/woman. Whoever. Add your own.

The EU Referendum’s unique marketing opportunities

114 and counting. Now we know the day: it’s June 23rd. Calendar events like this don’t pop up that often.

So…exciting or what! Have you made your mind up? Are you for staying in or hoping for Brexit?

Outta here

That’s half the problem, really. As yet there isn’t a cute little antonym for Brexit: the antis’ neat little neologism that sums up the whole bloody mess instantaneously. Like Grexit did. And as Frexit is being bandied around.

So…calling all Marketeers: time to make your name. Leave a legacy. Decide that antonym for Brexit.

And before Kit-Kat comes out with another of its neat and really topical little ads…”Have an emergency break (geddit!)” might be the one to go for, guys. But remember: you heard it here first.

Have an emergency brake?

Needless to say, the newspapers (poor Indie excepted, RIP) are / will be awash.

Pundits have already been involved in wall-to-wall weekend telly interviews and front-page splashes.

And more determined to out-regal our own dearly beloved monarch, Bojo, Mayor of London, kept the nation waiting to pronounce his intentions. That’s his career intentions, by the way.

For making-a-name-for-himself-Bojo, #EU Referendum is all about him. Nothing less. So he’s a declared Brexit-er now. Chess game career machinations. Judge a man by the company he keeps: George Galloway, IDS, Chris Grayling… I bet you just can’t wait to get cold called by one of them.

Lovin’ it. A fashion for passion

Love and romance were in the air last week. Yesterday, Sunday 14th, saw its impassioned climax.

Handily topical times for band-wagoning agencies who are always proclaiming their own undying and dna-filled passion. For marketing, that is.

Hoping that this bedroom quality (or other preferred location) transitions to the boardroom. That it will stir prospective client partners – declared advocates of such attributes, themselves – to examine their credentials. And that they come up smelling of roses.

If we may so describe the act.

Career-advancing statement

So is passion-filled mid-February (2016) peak hook-up time? Are agency match-makers

The probably pointless game of product catch-up

What matters to you most: price or quality?

Both, I hear you say. Spoken like a true consumer: you want it all.

Priced in

But you spotted the trick in the question. It implies ‘product’ is what it’s all about. That we make buying decisions based on comparative product quality. And that price is one of the most visible cues about product value.

So cheap is bad and expensive is…yeah, yeah. Ob-vi-ous. So why, Dear Reader, is VnN telling you what you already know?

Volkswagen and Mondelez’ Creme Eggs folk excepted (what has Mondethingy done to those eggs?!) all marketing directors, brand managers, their team members and associated staffers will tell you, with pride and some prejudice, that their brand, their stuff is the best. That they have the best product.

They probably have it in their company mission statement, too. Writ LARGE. Actually, Mondelez probably shouts about that, too. Shows the value of mission statements.

Here’s an example of one of a million: