Complaint Review: Standard Oil

Standard Oil in Bridgeport, CT has some of the rudest customer service people that I have ever come across. They will huff and puff on the phone and they clearly do not have a positive attidude. I dread having to call Standard Oil for 2 reasons. The first reason is that the majority of employees that I have spoken to on the phone are not even knowledgeable about their own employer and policies or service agreements.

I am a fairly new customer and I was given different information about service agreements depending on with whom it was I spoke. They cannot clearly explain how they determine oil deliveries. I spoke with a rept today and when I questioned the randomness of the deliveries, she adamantly replied saying that they are not random and that there is a reason and then in the same sentence said that even though our oil delivery was scheduled for 2/21 (and came, instead on 2/11) that sometimes a delivery is week later, sometimes it's 2 weeks early and it depends on the temperatures outside or if there was a storm or if a storm is coming, etc. - RANDOM!

When we initially signed up for service, we had to provide our SSN and was told that it would not affect our credit score. A few days later, I received a notification that my credit score had been affected as a result of Standard Oil's inquiry. I contact Standard Oil and they were shocked that my credit had been hit "hard." As a result of my own investigation, Standard Oil learned that 3 years ago, the credit reporting agencies changed their policy with regard to credit inquiries for oil companies. Instead of a new customer's credit being hit with a "soft" inquiry and no reduction in points, all inquiries are now considered "hard" hits and can reduce your credit score by 5 - 10 points on average. Management at Standard Oil was apologetic, but shocked because someone in their organization clearly missed the boat bigtime on that one. For the last 3 years, they've been giving new customers inaccurate information and I think that, alone, is reason enough not to use them again.

Second reason - their severe lack of customer service skills. The people that answer the phone in the customer service group are far from pleasant and they just sound like they don't want to be there, they don't want to deal with customers, and they are clearly annoyed if you have a question that goes beyond, "What's your mailing address?" which they'd probably also have a problem with answering - like it's such a hassle.

I cannot wait until our service contract has expired. I will not deal with Standard Oil again after that unless they overhaul their customer service group and hire people that know their job and actually ENJOY their job. Customer service is a tough gig, no doubt, and really only certain personalities are good at dealing with the day-to-day stuff that goes on with customer inquiries. None of the customer service reps at Standard Oil have that type of personality and should find other lines of work where they don't have to deal with people.