Halifax

Regular readers may recall that the former friendly society called the Halifax Building Society has completely p'd me off by the way it treated me as a regular and long-standing customer for its house insurance product. That is to say it pushed the (direct debit) charges up every year in the hope and expectation that I would just pay up, with the result over the years that, despite moaning from time to time, I paid a good deal more for my house insurance than was fair or proper. I am now no longer a customer for their house insurance product and there was no reply to my letter to them explaining why.

Today they invite me to fill in a computer based questionnaire which, they said, was intended to help them provide a better service. Actually it was intended to help them refurbish their customer lottery, and after being asked many times - say more than twenty times - to choose between two options, all of which looked pretty much the same to me, I gave up and closed the survey window. I was not given the opportunity to explain that I would much rather that they did not spend money, time and effort on customer lotteries. I would much prefer them to put it all into services rather than peripheral & irrelevant inducements to use those services. Lotteries like this irritate me just as much as all the money, time and effort poured by the big shops into their various reward schemes.

Maybe Halifax should take a leaf out of the Ryanair book and stop p'ing this customer off just for fun. Or perhaps profit.