CPC - Bad customer service

I've realised I only write two types of blog entry. There’s the "Here's an interesting thing I did" entry and there's the bitter rant. Tighten your seat belts...

I have a networking job on Saturday so as usual I ordered wire, trunking and faceplates from CPC about a week in advance but, uniquely, I told CPC to deliver them straight to the customer as I have no easy way of transporting 3m lengths of trunking down a motorway.

I checked the order status today expecting it to have been delivered and was amazed to see it had been marked 'cancelled'. To quote my letter to CPC 'what sort of idiot cancels a customer’s order without contacting the customer first to resolve the issue?'. Even worse they didn’t even contact me afterwards to say they had done it. Crazy.

I rang, gave my account number and was told the order was cancelled because I had specified a delivery address different to that on my Credit Card - which you can’t do without and account. I pointed out that I had just given them my account number. I'm informed that my account is just the temporary one that's used for the first order - which doesn’t qualify as an account. I pointed out that I had been making regular orders since February 2007.

The long and short of it is their systems gone wrong - they can’t fix it - they couldn't sort the order out for me and I was left to go back to the website and go through the whole process again only this time paying extra for the next day delivery that is now required - and having it delivered to my own address.

If it doesn’t arrive tomorrow I'll do a charge back on the credit card to cancel the order.... But I won't tell them.