I had a loan with a company called Creation Finance which was paid off last month. As part of the closing of the account, a letter is to be sent to me to confirm the same. I need this letter to draw down a mortgage as it is part of the bank’s requirements.

As of today and eight phone calls to Creation Finance, I have not received my letter. I have logged three complaints with them and asked to speak to a manager three times.

Every time the response is that the complaint has been logged and a manager will respond in 24 to 48 hours. I have never received a phone call from the manager.

I am at the end of my tether with this. It has already delayed my drawdown by one month. I have tried to reach out via LinkedIn to the CEO and COO of BNP Paribas who are the parent company of Creation and have had no luck with either. Without this letter I cannot draw down my mortgage.

GH

There is very little more likely to irritate customers than service providers who simply will not engage. And you have to wonder why they do it.

Companies are, by their nature, in the business of selling – whether it is a good or a service. Failing to engage with your customers when issues arise is pretty much guaranteed to dent a company’s reputation, a reputation that is, in general, a company’s most important calling card as it seeks more business.

And apart from being generally counterproductive, it can also see companies incur needless costs in time and money. Failure to process requests runs the risk of having to handle complaints, which inevitably take longer to resolve than the initial enquiry.

The fact that companies can adopt a very different approach when the boot is on the other foot, and they feel the customer is ignoring messages from a finance provider, only exacerbates customers’ sense of injustice.

Creation works with a number of well-known brands, including the John Lewis Partnership, B&Q, Currys and DFS among others, offering finance options that allow consumers spread the cost of purchases over a period of time. According to its website, it is active in sectors including furniture and electrical retail, motor dealerships and home improvement stores.

In this case, your purchase was with another furniture retailer for a mid-four-figure sum which was paid off in full last month. However, the letter confirming the loan was paid off has yet to arrive, despite a series of calls by you to the company. That has left you having to delay drawdown of your mortgage.

There’s a few things to unpack here. First, why Creation Finance didn’t do what they said they would do. Second: why the Irish lender needs that letter. And, third, perhaps, the very tight window involved.

Let’s take those in reverse.

As I understand it, the loan was repaid on schedule in mid-January. By the time you got in touch with me last week, the temperature of the conversation had been ratcheted up quite a bit – and you had had to defer your mortgage drawdown.

Yes, of course, it should not take weeks to get delivery of a promised letter but if anything goes awry, as it did in this case, your timeline between the loan ending and the mortgage being drawn down was very tight indeed.

Second, I don’t really understand why your bank needs this letter. Ireland has a central credit register run by the Central Bank. Any group lending a consumer more than €500 must register those details and then update the register to note repayments and the satisfaction of the loan.

The Central Bank tells me that lenders must provide an update on every loan to the register on a monthly basis. They update shortly after month end and, after validation and checks, the updated record is visible from mid-following month.

Also, any group looking to lend more than €2,000 is obliged to check the register for the borrower’s credit history. So this is where your mortgage lender should have been checking. In fact, they must have.

Creation Finance is subject to this regime and appears to have updated the register as required. So your mortgage lender could – and apparently did – see that the Creation Finance loan was repaid. It may not have happened in time for the original drawdown date but all details were available by the time you were talking to me.

Why, then, did it require the letter?

Frankly, there is no good reason for this. The letter was not required. The bank was simply yanking your chain because it could, which says a lot about the bank concerned.

But let’s not leave Creation Finance entirely off the hook. Had it done what it was supposed to do, and what it said it would do – send this letter – there would have been no issue at all.

Annoyingly, it took just one email to Creation Finance’s parent, BNP Paribas Consumer Finance to get this resolved. And while you note Creation Finance’s customer care team never got in touch within the 24-48 hours promised, the parent group was in touch with me within hours and had the issue resolved within 24 hours.

It really should not take a call from the media and the prospect of negative headlines for a company to get its basic customer service right.

Yes, they do have a slightly different recollection of events to you but you are very firm in your understanding of what happened and, in the circumstances, your position certainly makes more sense than theirs. But, in any case, the required letter was in the mail to you as of late last week, I am assured.

According to its own website, Creation Finance “know what a great customer experience looks like! We listen, we support, we make it easy…”. They may need to revise that, or at least remind themselves of it.

Please send your queries to Dominic Coyle, Q&A, The Irish Times, 24-28 Tara Street, Dublin 2, or by email to dominic.coyle@irishtimes.com with a contact phone number. This column is a reader service and is not intended to replace professional advice