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Clínica Luso Espanhola: How to lose a client due to incompetent handling of a claim

Hi there,

Here I leave the previous post that I wrote about this clinic when I was delighted with Doctor Antonio Pinto:

Since I was so happy with this doctor, I decided to go see the dentist because I have a bit of gum recession and I wanted a budget for a gum graft.

I imagined that all the doctors at the clinic were going to be just as good as Antonio Pinto.

The consultation with the dentist was on November 11, 2022. He took the photos of my mouth and explained that he had to speak with a periodontist who would propose the best solution and make the budget.

I paid 55 euros for the consultation and the orthopantomography.

I must also point out that before making the appointment, I had sent an email asking if they provided this service because each dentist has a specialty. The dental assistant, Giuliana, took a month to reply to the email and she said yes.

In other words, I went to the consultation believing that the person who was going to assist me was already the periodontist.

After the appointment with the dentist, a month passed, and no one had contacted me.

I sent an email to the Clínica Luso Espanhola and they told me that they would communicate it to the dental area. A week later, Giuliana sent me an SMS to tell me that the periodontist was on vacation.

3 months passed and before I went on vacation to Budapest, I wrote on Instagram to tell them that they still had not given me the budget for the gum graft.

Just when I was in Budapest, one day I saw that I had two missed calls from the clinic and an SMS from Giuliana quoting me for consultation the next day, which was when the periodontist was there.

When I returned from my trip, I contacted the clinic again and Giuliana wrote on WhatsApp to tell me that she would call me the next day to make an appointment. A week passed.

When she finally wrote on WhatsApp again, she told me that she did not know when the periodontist was going to go to the clinic. I told her that they had already made me lose more than 3 months and that I would look for a real professional.

As I had already paid for the orthopantomography, I wrote to [email protected] on February 10, 2023 so that they could send me the orthopantomography and don’t have to pay for it again at another clinic. I did not get any response.

As I found it outrageous that they did not even send me the orthopantomography that I had paid for, on April 22 I filed a claim through Livro de Reclamações to get the money I had paid back and left the negative review on Google.

After placing the claim, I went to see Dr. Antonio Pinto to get Botox and I already noticed a different treatment by the ladies who worked at the reception.

On May 15, 2023, I received an email from a lawyer in which she said the following:

“Honorable Madam,

In attention to the complaint made in the electronic book of complaints of the Luso-Espanhola Clinic – Serviços Médico Cirúrgicos, S.A., by means of the present, by way of answer, I say the following:

The content of your complaint, which received the best attention from the Clinic’s Dental Medicine team, with all due respect, does not correspond to the truth.

In fact, you went to the clinic for an evaluation and in that consultation, which you actually paid for, they also kindly performed an orthopantomography, which was not charged.

However, the administrative services tried successively and for at least 20 days to contact you by phone to make an appointment with Dr. Pedro, Periodontist.

However, such contacts proved unsuccessful.

Since, after this period, it was you who contacted the clinic, claiming that you did not answer the calls because you were on vacation and, they suggested January 17, 2023, for a periodontal consultation, a date that your Excellency refuted.

To that extent, it was explained that you would then have to wait for a new date to be announced.

When requesting the sending of the orthopantomography, unfortunately and by mistake, our services sent it to the clinic’s general mail instead of your email.

In either case, the exam will be sent to you.

Here you can see how the assistant Giuliana supposedly sent the orthopantomography to [email protected] instead of sending it to me.

The situation looks like a parody.

First, any company must have a staff specialized in handling complaints and responding to reviews. It’s stupid to pay a lawyer to respond to a simple claim.

That job corresponds to the customer service manager or marketing director. These are the people who have the training and skills to manage something as precious as the relationship with customers.

Another thing that seems atrocious to me is to tell the client that he or she is a liar. Also, the same lawyer says that they tried to contact me for 20 days, which is false.

This is very serious because either the lawyer is lying, or the clinic lied to the lawyer. If we were to go to trial, the clinic would have to prove the record of these calls for 20 days.

To finish screwing up to the bottom, they admit that Giuliana made a mistake sending the email, but still no one had the intelligence to send the blessed orthopantomography to the correct email.

Really, it’s not that hard to be professional.

When I was discussing it with Diego, we thought that they had probably lost the orthopantomography and that is why they were making up the story about sending it to the wrong email.

As for the Google review, no one bothered to respond and, in fact, none of the clinic reviews have an answer, which leaves a lot to be desired.

In the claim I asked for a refund of the 55 euros I paid, but an apology for wasting my time would have been more than enough.

Any normal company has a general template in which they apologize and offer to fix the situation.

In fact, knowing that my boyfriend and I are clients, and we regularly get Botox, fillers, and countless aesthetic treatments, they could have offered a discount of 55 euros on the next treatment.

As a company they don’t lose money and would have kept 2 very good customers.

To this day, I don’t understand why they told me they provided the service when there really isn’t a periodontist in the clinic.

The lousy management of the claim and being called a liar outraged me so much that even though I was super happy with Doctor Antonio Pinto, I decided to find another place to get my aesthetic treatments.

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