Nav the impaler…. hopefully not of customers…

Hi Nav. You’re a brave call centre monkey. I remember back in the day when I did tech support for a much reviled OEM what it was like to try and post on Internet boards. We’d find people who slated us relentlessly, even though much of what we were doing wrong was necessary to keep the overlords happy. When we attempted to help outside of our headset leash remit we were met with derision and random abuse. Now I keep my tips for calling major OEM in basic conversation and off the Internet to avoid the endless flame wars. So, I salute thee.

Make that 399 extra staff. I work in said call centre and a conversation between a new recruit and a customer resulted in the customer leaving our company’s service. Needless to say, the staff member was duly punished, under the company’s policy of 5 lashes of a whip per customer lost. After this event, I pride myself in putting the customer before all else, and can assure you that you are all most beloved (at least more than the slave drivers here love their staff).

That’s awesome news. I’m not even being sarcastic or facetious in any way. Do you know why that’s awesome? Because of the way a lot of the people here have been treated by customer service. With any luck it’s a sign that in the future, things may improve.

Do you have any tips for our long suffering readers Nav? Are you in the vicinity of the evil Mohammed?

Robin knows where Charlie plays tennis. Let’s go.

Not only did they take advantage of Talk Talk’s cheap broadband but they also snagged some mobiles and landlines. Yet, every single thing has gone wrong and they can’t get anyone to fix it.

I bought a new Broadband sub, 3 mobile phones, and switched 3 landlines to Carphone warehouse in December. They double billed me for the Broadband service for 5 months, failed to deliver cashback coupons on the mobiles, and I am paying more than BT for my land line service. I have rung written emailed to no avail. The only people I can talk to are their sales people who cold call to offer more stuff. Where do I go to now? Perhaps to Mr Bloody Dunstone’s tennis club in Holland Park?

Any suggestions for Robin? Besides replacing Dunstone’s tennis balls with tomatoes?
(Remember, the links for BBC Watchdog and Ofcom are over there on the sidebar —–>)

Hopefully BT’s blog won’t be the exercise in hot air

From the Times on Sunday:

n Britain, Charles Dunstone, founder of Carphone Warehouse, has been blogging about his Talk Talk broadband offer, and also using the blog to attack rivals, including BT.
And BT is about to hit back with a blog from John Petter, its chief operating officer.
“Customers are suspicious of ‘corporate speak’ and they want it straight from the horse’s mouth,” Petter said in a recent interview. “Especially in a big company, they want to know someone is taking responsibility.”
But, said Rogers, companies need to be very careful that they are being sincere.
“If you lie or are seen to lie, you are going to get into a lot of trouble,” he said.

Will it be any better? Doubtful. Will it be any worse? How could it? BT’s penchant for chopping through com cables and lighting exchanges on fire seems like a dream in comparison to the service I’ve received from Dunstone’s pitiful company.

Times online technology

We’d all rather be sailing.

Amusingly, whilst in the process of making this post, I was disconnected. Hooray for Talk Talk!

ABN quickly got up to speed and blitzed the course, flying around the Solent at speeds touching 25 knots and crossed the finish line some 48 minutes ahead of Charles Dunstone’s TP52 Red. The eventual corrected time victory for ABN Amro One was just shy of 13 minutes although a discrepancy regarding a navigational mark could see ABN penalised by the race committee who could either disqualify the yacht or impose a time penalty. Whatever the outcome of the protest, which will be heard this evening, the awesome spectacle of this super-charged Volvo 70 tearing around the Solent with a team of superstar sailors on board is certainly one of the sights of Skandia Cowes Week 2006 providing plenty of shoreside gossip for both the competitors and spectators alike.

I’m just workin’ folk, so I don’t really understand any of that, except that maybe Mr. Dunstone was out yachting this weekend on our dime. No wonder his blog has gone so quiet and the post from Friday has gone missing. He needed to unwind.

Glad you got beat you puffy scamming bastard. Anyone know where I can place bets against the next race?

From Yachting Universe

How to: Complain according to Talk Talk’s terms and services

Talk Talk has a rather lengthy pdf on their website talking about their ‘complaints procedure.’ From what I’ve read here, it seems like a lot of you guys have gone past the ‘deadlock letter’ point and can now go on to the Ombudsman for resolution.

14. If you are dissatisfied with TalkTalk’s service We are committed to providing you with the best-value residential telecommunications service in the UK. We understand that faults can occur and, when they do, we want to correct them quickly. We offer a comprehensive complainthandling process to solve your problem as soon as possible. You should also use our complaint-handling process if you want to complain about any aspect of how we marketed or sold the service to you. When you call us, a customer service adviser will note the details of the problem and agree a course of action with you. Complex queries may take a little longer to resolve.

If you are unhappy with the response you receive, you may ask for the matter to be referred to a senior manager for further investigation. If we cannot resolve your problem, we will write to say so. This is sometimes called the ‘deadlock’ letter. When you receive this letter you have the right to refer your case to the Ombudsman (see ‘Resolving disputes’ below). Any unresolved complaints can be referred to the Ombudsman 12 weeks after being raised with us. You can find the Ombudsman’s contact details in section 10. The Ombudsman will want to ensure that you have followed our complaints process before contacting him. If this is not evident, he is likely to refer the matter back to us for resolution. If you receive the deadlock letter as described above, you must decide within six months whether you wish to refer the issue to the Ombudsman. Please note that the deadline for referring an issue is nine months after first making your complaint to us.

Even if you apply to the Ombudsman, you must still pay any amounts not in dispute. We are happy to work with other independent bodies, such as Icstis, Citizens Advice, Consumer Advice Centres and Trading Standards Departments.

The full document is here on their site (Beware, it’s a pdf)

400 more rude and angry staff in Warrington.

Charles Dunstone and his board seem to think that the only thing their customers want is more hapless bodies behind the phone. I’d rather they cloned Simon in Preston 200 times then hire 100,000 more Mohammeds. I doubt this will make it any better but it at least we may find out in less than 20 minutes and with fewer hang ups that the person on the other end of the phone is a drooling zombie with no clue as to what they’re doing.

When the company, a division of mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse, launched the offer in April it only employed around 600 people at its purpose-built Birchwood site. But the phone and broadband package has proved so popular – 476,000 customers have signed up – that it has had to take on another 400 people taking the total to more than 1,000.

Full article on icCheshireOnline.

Irish Examiner: Talk Talk admits it can’t keep up with demand

Is there a comma ya think? I keep putting one in because it seems like one should be there.

Carphone Warehouse said today that it had signed up 476,000 to its “free” broadband product Talk Talk and admitted its customer-service provision had not kept up with demand. The huge interest in the service helped Europe’s largest mobile phone retailer lift group revenues by 42% to £857.6m (€1.3bn) while retail revenues rose almost 30% to £394.3m (€575.6m) in the 13 weeks to July 13.

It’s nice to know they’re making so much money from their customers’ misery. Oddly, the referenced blog posts are nowhere to be found on Dunstone’s blog.

From the Irish Examiner

I want your tips, complaints…whatever.

Hi guys,

First off, I think I’ve now covered all of your comments. I really appreciate them and hope that as a group effort we can force them to actually clean up their act (instead of pretending.) I know what I want and it should be easy.

I won’t post e-mail addresses unless you ask. But if you have a url you want to direct traffic to, let me know. Not sure about how much this is getting at the moment but it seems like it’s being found, which is good and bad. I’ll do my best to help with your techie issues but there are a lot of things I don’t know about their configuration.

Ultimately I hope this is helpful. Over the next few weeks I’m going to try and sort out the entry tags, get us an RSS feed and some useful links. Suggestions are totally welcome. Anything is totally welcome.
For now, send your tips, complaints, compliments, questions or whatever talktalkhell@googlemail.com

Ramir wonders how the hell it’s free at all?

I’ve looked at this but not too clearly. I do think it’s something that deserves a bit of attention outside of the IT trade press (The Register was harping on it a while back.) Have a skim through Ramir’s post and see what you think.

I would like to air a grievance of mine against TalkTalk…I hope this makes it into print ! ( If it does, please don’t publish my email address )

After a sensational marketing drive TalkTalk – the Carphone Warehouse business has signed up over 350 000 customers to their ‘free’ broadband service. Like many others, I also signed up for this too good to be true offer. On further investigation, it came to light that the broadband offer is not actually free but does cost £20 per month, which includes fixed line rental. Since the equivalent BT package costs around£12 per month, the additional cost of £8 does not appear to be free, as it is claimed in the TalkTalk advertising media. Despite this, the deal overall did seem worthwhile and I pursued with signing up. That was in May. Now, in mid June, I am still waiting for my broadband to be connected.

In the mean time I am paying TalkTalk the £20 AND I am paying my old broadband provider for their broadband service, as I am yet to be connected to TalkTalk. The overall cost of these two subscriptions exceeds what I was paying before signing up to TalkTalk. I approached TalkTalk a number of times regarding why my connection has taken so long. Each time, different answers are given and when I bring up the question of reducing my bill to bring my costs in line with what they should, had TalkTalk fulfilled their end of the deal and signed me up in time, my question meets with a complacent and oftentimes rude response.

I would like to invite TalkTalk to make good their offer to potential customers of ‘free’ broadband and reduce the amount billed to customers to take into account this double charging that is taking place. Surely, I am not the only dissatisfied customer, and when one takes into account the volumes of potential new customers (350 000), I think that this is a story worthy of a response from TalkTalk

Charles Dunstone has a blog! ‘As people keep telling me, the UK telecoms market will never be the same again.’

Just like we do. Doesn’t he look pleased with himself? Yet every day I get another comment from one of you guys who don’t want to lose the 70 pounds for such a crap service.

Have a laugh at it here.

Yeah, I’m sure he’s losing sleep over our worries. I love how he says that calls wait times got up to 10 minutes on May 8th. The day when I had to call more than a few times and wait on hold for way the hell more than 10 minutes because of the DNS outage. I aged about 20 years that day, just trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Either he’s massively delusional, or he’s being lied to.