Telco Customer Service is Worst

Customer Service from the telephone companies is even worse that it is from the banks, in my experience at least. In both cases the business processes leave no room for the flexibility typically required under the label Customer Service. A quest for support or modification of a transaction merely takes the complainer down a dark alley where they get mugged by the premium rate telephone call system.

Quite why we should be charged premium rates during a call deliberately extended by those needless announcement of options is beyond me. It happens because the company we want to complain too, and about, has outsourced its customer service interface to bandits, making us pay whatever the ripoff merchants can screw out of us.

“I’m sorry all our customer service representatives are busy at the moment. Please hold and one of our associates will be with you as soon as possible.” Meanwhile the cost of our call is racking up at anything up to £1 per minute and we’re bombarded by that dreadful piped music.

That’s exactly my experience with Talk Talk subsidiary Opal, otherwise known as Nildram. Here’s that story.

My broadband line has been provided for the last several years by a client under his bulk account. Three months ago I tried to get the account switched to me but Nildram wouldn’t do it. Effectively the client was allowed to camp on my BT telephone line, preventing me from switching ADSL provider. More than a month ago the client decided to stop paying for my line and I got involved in a merry go round between sales and customer service with me trying to pay these people money.

Of course the whole thing was a cock up. I returned from a month’s trip to the USA to find my ADSL line dead – service suspended because of lack of payment. Even though they had my credit card details and had charged it.

Surprise surprise the Credit Control office doesn’t work on weekends so Saturday and Sunday I’ve been without my Internet connection. At 9.30 this morning I managed to speak to the Credit Control office and get the service reinstated but as of 13.30 there’s still no Internet connection and I’ve paid out more than £5.00 in phone charges trying to get somebody to fix it.

But that’s only part of today’s story about telephone company customer service. There are two more.

My mother asked me to arrange to switch her service from Talk Talk to BT. A helpful guy at BT explained the opaque pricing structure and that I needed to get a MAC code from Talk Talk. Mother calls Talk Talk to get her MAC code and the person she spoke to refused to give her one.

And finally it turns out the helpful man at BT explaining the opaque pricing had been duplicitous, undoubtedly by design. He omitted telling me the all in one pricing for ADSL and calls isn’t all in one at all. It doesn’t include the standard BT line rental.

Worse is my call to ascertain the truth about BT pricing, and the complaint which followed, elicited the most demeaning response I’ve ever received from any sales or customer service.

“If you’d asked the right question?” he said “you’d have gotten the right answer”.

I wonder how that fits with BT being voted Most Trusted Internet Service Provider 2009? Guess all that means is the others are even bigger crooks?

Do you have Highlands experiences you can share with our readers? Please add your comments, suggestions and memories in the Comments box. The more news and views the better!

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Tagged as: banking, banks, be unlimited, british telecom, bt group, credit cards, customer service, customer service representative, ill, internet service providers, talk talk, telco, telephone companies, telephones, united kingdom