> On 7 Sep 2020, at 23:38, Andy Smith <andy@???> wrote:
>
> So, I shall ask all of you, how would you expect it to work?
>
> a) As soon as a mandate is authorised, just charge all existing
> invoices immediately
>
> Very tempting. Very simple. I fear there will be at least one
> person that will claim they never expected that to happen, and a
> returned Direct Debit has caused them to incur an eleventy
> billion pound penalty charge from their bank, their mortgage
> payment got rejected, and now there are men outside in shiny
> leather jackets.
>
> b) As soon as the mandate is authorised, if the customer has
> existing invoices that are unpaid, there is a very noticeable
> message on the screen like:
>
> You seem to have unpaid invoices:
>
> #41234 £107.88
> #41239 £1.92
>
> Pre-existing invoices won't be automatically submitted for
> payment by Direct Debit. You can <a href="…">pay them now</a>
> by a one-off Direct Debit or any of our other supported
> payment methods.
>
> I like (b).
>
> I am open to other ideas if you have any. I can't really think of
> any.
c) You put a flag on all accounts preventing setting up a Direct Debit if there are outstanding invoices. This forces action by the user either to pay all invoices then set up a DD, or call you to have the flag removed and pay everything by DD. Either way the user should be in no doubt about what happens as a result.
Andy, I really appreciate your attitude towards customers, but sometimes I think you do try too hard. If a user has ignored repeated warnings then it’s really not your problem to fix. (Assuming the warnings were actually sent… :P (That was a bit mean, sorry.))
Regards,
Chris
—
Chris Smith <space.dandy@???>
