Listening to hold music has got to be one of the most annoying consumer experiences.

But over the last few months it's something that thousands of Empire customers would have had to have put up with.

Their billing system's been botched and their customer service at times has been appalling.

In fact, so much so that the regulator at one time threatened to ban them from telesales altogether.

Our Empower has told me that it's on a mission to turn things round.

Judging by the comments I've seen on social media this morning, it's nowhere near, but it promises that it's on its way.

So first, I'm off to speak to Neil, who works in customer services at Rainton, and who has heard

more than his fair share of customer complaints.

There are a few complaints come through, yeah.

I mean, a lot of them people wouldn't phone up unless there was something wrong with their

accounts, so yeah, we do get a few complaints.

And what sort of powers do you have to deal with those?

We can get things sort of put things like that are wrong.

We can offer compensation if needed to be able to resolve the complaints and things like that.

Sometimes if the major reasons have been entered incorrectly

and they've got wrong bills, obviously, get the account bill correctly correctly and everyone's happy with that you know must be tough dealing with

complaints day and day out yeah some some of them are quite difficult to handle it the

people are very shouty and understandably angry whereas others they're kind of like yeah

they know there's a complaint on the account they know that we have had trouble and they kind of like, yeah, they know there's a complaint on the account. They know that we have had trouble. And they kind of just like, oh, okay, they're kind of accepted, but they're still not happy sort of thing. But yeah, I mean, it is. Sometimes you can't be on the phone for about 50 minutes with somebody shouting and bawling it, yeah, which isn't very good. What do you do? Well, you just have to listen to them shout you know just say look

we're here for you to shout us you know with the complaints so and then they're just kind of

at the end of it you go through tell them what they need to know and then they usually are right at the

end and would you mind just telling me quickly i just listened in on a call that you answered

...