I used to have ADSL broadband (i.e. an internet connection via a phone line) from TalkTalk. My contract was about to end, and while it was reliable it wasn’t particularly fast and I wanted a faster connection, and fibre had recently been laid in my area, so I asked TalkTalk to upgrade it to a fibre connection.
The old contract ran out shortly before the new one was to start so I checked and made sure I would have continuity of service. Two separate people from TalkTalk assured me this would be the case.
However a few days after the old contract ended my old broadband service was cut off and I got a message from TalkTalk saying I needed to pay them money to have it reconnected. This was despite my talk talk account saying I was in credit with them to the tune of £84.00 (money that had been credited to my account as part of the deal my the talkTalk operator gave me when I upgraded to fibre).
I spent several days trying to contact them by phone and text message so they could fix the problem. Then it got to the Friday the 16th of December and they were supposed to be coming to fit the fibre broadband. No-one came so I called them and they said no-one was coming!
Today (the 17th of December) they sent me an email asking for feedback so I wrote this on their web form:
You are utterly useless. You shut off my old (phone-based) broadband, when 2 separate advisors assured me you wouldn't. When I phoned you, you kept me on hold for ages and then cut off the call when I got to speak to someone -- you did that 4 times. When talking to people I got lots of "it's not my department you need to speak to someone else" and then when I did they told me to talk to the first lot again.
Note that this is not the fault of your individual operators: You need to train them to understand all of your business so that when I'm talking to one of them they can actually resolve the problem and not pass the buck. But no, you don't want to do that, do you? Because you can save money by having low-skilled poorly-trained operators who you don't have to pay much.
You agreed to come and fit my new fibre broadband on the 16th and no-one came, and when I phoned to check you said the appointment hadn't been set up (because it was Openreach who were doing it, and the appointment had only been pencilled in). I've gone with a different ISP now (Three) -- I got everything set up the same day and it's all working.
In fact you can't even get this feedback page right -- the textarea box I'm typing this in can't be resized, meaning that I can't see all of my comment at the same time. (HTML textareas are normally resizable, unless you deliberately go to the effort to make them not so, so you had to actually put some effort in there to make the functionality worse. I think that sums up your organisation.)
In summary, I will never willingly buy a product from you shitty company for the rest of my life and I hope I never have to deal with you ever again.
Three is annoying but works
On Friday after deciding I wasn’t going with Talk Talk anymore I went to Three and bought a 4G home broadband package:
When I got home I plugged it in and it was working within a few minutes.
Three aren’t perfect however. When I was in their shop their saleswoman tried to upsell me a phone contract by pretending to me that the 4G Home Broadband was only available as part of a larger bundle (contrary to what their website says). I only wanted broadband, so I deployed Broken Record:
In communication studies, the broken-record response is the conversational strategy of forestalling further discussion by repeating the same phrase or sentence over and over. also called the broken-record technique.
…and after two rounds of kayfabe where she pretended to consult her manager to see if she could offer me unbundled 4G broadband, she relented.
So Three can be annoying, but at least I got working internet at the end of the day.
Summary
TalkTalk are crap, don’t use them unless you enjoy being put on hold and given the run around for hours on end when contacting to their call center.
Three can be annoying in their sales techniques.
Because 4G broadband uses the mobile phone network, there is no hardware to install and no engineer has to visit. Thus it can be installed more quickly and with less hassle.
Companies that use call centers should train their call center staff to understand their business procedures so customers aren’t continually directed from one department to another and back again. The call center staff should have a computer terminal with all the customer’s account details in from of them and be empowered to get things done instead of just endlessly making useless apologies for poor service. it also helps if their native language is English.