Arguably the worst service I have ever experienced

I am appalled at the customer service delivery from JetStar. To set the tone - we booked a weekend in Bali in May, and did so sometime in October. At the end of December, they changed our flights - by a convenient 2hr 55 minutes (just under the 3 hours that they allow themselves to change without offering a refund). I can accept an hour or hour and a half, but this felt just wrong. So after a lengthy complaint process with them, they granted me a refund on December 28th. Suffice to say, that was just the beginning of a tiresome and infuriating process. Here is an excerpt of the mail summarising things:

"As a customer service professional myself, I am appalled at the terrible service I have received from JetStar. I can understand that as a budget carrier, one has to keep his expectations managed, but this service level is at a low beyond anything I could imagine.

I put forward a refund request which was accepted (made via phone) on DECEMBER 28th, 2010. As you can imagine, it never arrived. My call to your service centre at the end of January was handled by a JetStar staff who pleasantly enough, informed me that it can take a few more weeks to process (apparently, four weeks is quite a short period of time when you own someone else money). Having not received by the START OF MARCH - I called your contact centre once again. This time, I endured a torturous 29 minutes and forty-nine seconds with a staff who was not only unaware of how to problem solve himself, but required the assistance of another colleague at least a half dozen times. If you need a training demonstration on HOW NOT TO DELIVER CUSTOMER SERVICE - I suggest you dust it from your archives and have an eye-opening experience as to how you are being represented as a company.

Suffice to say, at the 30 minute mark we concluded with the result that a new refund cheque would be delivered with urgent priority and within 6 business days. Well, here we are, 12 business days later and there is still no refund. I have to admit, I am at the end of my rope with the lack of service and the outright inability to resolve a basic customer service contact.

As a director of customer service centre in the region, I am irritated with the embarrassment that you put on our collective profession and it is because of service experiences like these that customer service gets a bad name.

Interested to know how you intend to close out this issue - at this point it seems beyond hope."

As an update - I called again today (12th of April) and even after speaking to the leader of the call centre (the first person just couldn't come up with a solution to the problem) - he too had no solution. A further example of complete lack of proactivity, blaming other departments and as a supposed leader - handled the call terribly.

This is now just going from bad to worse - I can't fathom how they could do this any worse for a simple request.

To be continued...