Ladbrokes paid me my money

Over 50 phone calls to Ladbrokes and they still owed me money, customer services even telling me that they didn’t think I owned the bets.  What a saga.

I can finally say a massive thank you to Denise who demonstrated what customer service should be about. The refusal of Ladbrokes to acknowledge my bets was driving me nuts. Any time I appeared to be making progress they took somebody off the case to send me back to the beginning.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about see if you can drag yourself through my first two appeals to Ladbrokes to sort payments out. It became so convoluted that I was dreading having to explain it to yet another person, but she took on board everything I said, did the spadework and found the bets I was talking about.

I had been underpaid on one bet, which she resolved for me, and she then arranged payment to be made to me for other bets where I had been informed that I needed to send the originals in.

The main problem though was with getting paid out on a couple of football bets where Ladbrokes permanently shut one of their shops while the football season was still running.

Denise mentioned that there are two ways to identify bets – locating the original bet and searching by winners.

I believe that Ladbrokes searched for my bets using the winner facility. Emails I received always talked about being unable to find ‘unpaid winning slips’.

In our conversations we agreed that, because the shop closed part way through the season, the bets would not show up that way as they were never settled and so it was that somebody traced my bets through her groundwork.

Sometimes there are good companies and sometimes there are bad companies. Sometimes there are bad companies with good staff and sometimes there are good companies with bad staff.

My view of Ladbrokes is that this was so poorly handled that we are talking about a bad company with badly trained staff but a bright light in the form of Denise, although when I initially spoke to her I believe she told me she was Coral customer service, so maybe there really aren’t too many bright lights in Ladbrokes at all.

It would have been wonderful if Ladbrokes had apologised for the inconvenience they created, the 50 plus phone calls and numerous emails I had to send but, what the heck, I finally received my money, albeit heading towards a year after I should have.

In my league table I am awarding a win to Coral with one win and three losses to Ladbrokes. They might well be the same company, but if I am correct, Denise is a Coral representative, and the service I received from her was way superior to anything Ladbrokes customer service had to offer. The three losses I award to Ladbrokes are for what I regard as three separate incidents.

Loss number one for the incorrect settlement of the bet and ensuing refusal to believe me, not for the shop manager, who settled it as he thought appropriate, but to Ladbrokes customer service for putting him in that position. The win I’m awarding to Ladbrokes is to the shop manager, Martin, who was as helpful as he could be in the circumstances. He did everything possible to facilitate a settlement of my bets with little help from elsewhere.

The second loss if for making it truly difficult for the customer to be paid out. In theory I could have been paid from any shop, but Ladbrokes deemed it necessary for me to send my slips into them when that is like sending money through the post. The response when I suggested there must be a better way was that if I wanted paying out that was the only way to do it.

Finally, the failure to identify any of my bets placed in a shop that had closed. No shop, therefore no bet, seemed to be the approach, and as much as I tried to explain otherwise, I made little progress for a very long time.

So, I have received my money, Coral has a W by its name and Ladbrokes have WLLL to add to the league table.