psychobanana

First off a few quick facts….

Talk Talk provide a bundled telephone and broadband package that has consistently stayed at the top of the best buys list on the excellent moneysavingexpert.com website, (which I can’t recommend highly enough as it’s full of fantastic advice on all sorts of money matters and has helped me no end with my debts!).

The package includes broadband with a 40GB monthly download allowance, all your calls to landlines free, (except premium rate calls and the like) and for an extra £1.00, you get unlimited free calls to quite a few European countries!

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Well it is once it’s up and running, which ours is now, but installation didn’t go quite as smoothly as we’d hoped. If you’re considering changing over, you may well need nerves of steel and a reliable source of valium/strong alcohol. At this point, you can go away and sign up with Talk Talk and hope for the best, or you can read the rest of this admittedly rather long post. If you elect go ahead without reading the post and it does go wrong, I would recommend you come back and read the bit below about compensation! Either way, do leave a comment below if you found this post useful!

Carry on reading to find out exactly what I mean…………

We recently swapped over our phone from BT to Talk Talk. To say it didn’t go smoothly is something of an understatement!

We originally signed up for the change over on the 4th May and were given a changeover date of somewhere around the end of the month. They said it might take a couple of days to change the line over to Talk Talk and get everything connected and working.

BT handed the line over on the Wednesday 23rd May. We heard nothing from Talk Talk until the Saturday when, completely unannounced, we had a telephone call from an engineer who said he had an appointment to come and transfer our line over. I said I didn’t know anything about an appointment, but he just ignored me and asked if we were in. I said yes and he replied that he’d be there soon. Ten minutes later, he turned up at our house.

Now, we have two phone lines at our house – our normal line and a line I had installed for my job, which my company pay the bill for. Problem is, years ago, when they came to install the second line, there weren’t enough pairs of wires in the junction box at the end of the street, so they put a splitter box outside the house and both lines shared the line to the junction box.

So anyway, this engineer shows up at the house pretty much unannounced and knocks on the door saying he’s there to swap over the line. I leave him to it and after a few minutes, he’s deduced we’ve got a splitter box. He knocks on the door again and asks if we know we have a splitter box and what are we going to do – are we getting rid of the other line? I say no, we’re keeping the other line on BT and swapping the first line over. At this point he goes off to look at the junction box, then comes back and says another pair of wires needs to be pulled through from the junction box, but that that wasn’t his job, so someone else would come in a couple of days to sort that out. And with that, off he went.

On the Bank Holiday Monday, as both myself and my partner were on our way out to work, the second engineer turned up, also unannounced. He asked us the same thing, were we getting rid of one line and keeping the other? We said no, again, and left him to it and went to work. When we arrived back, we found that our other line was still working, but that the line we were transferring over had no dial tone.

I phoned Talk Talk up and spent over an hour on the phone talking to someone at a call centre in a foreign country who insisted on trying to test whether or not I’d installed the broadband modem properly. I said that there was no dial tone at the phone socket, so it was unlikely to be my installation of the broadband modem which was at fault, but she insisted on working her way through her prearranged script, removing equipment stage by stage till we were trying a known working telephone plugged into the plain phone socket where we found out that, surprise surprise, there was no dial tone! Having ascertained that our phone line was indeed faulty, she informed us that she wasn’t able to get through to the engineers and would call us back to make an appointment. I let her know when we were busy and when we were available and she duly phoned back, leaving us a message to say she’d arranged us an appointment for the engineer to come on a day when we were both at work. I rang back and said that we weren’t available on that day and she said she’d make another appointment, so I told her that we were also going on holiday for a week and were leaving the UK on the Thursday. Again the phone line to the engineers was busy and once again she said she would ring us back with an appointment.

No-one rang back the next day and it wasn’t until half an hour before we were due to leave for the airport to go on our holiday, while we were running around like headless chickens trying to get ourselves and our ten year old daughter ready, that they phoned up desperate to make an appointment there and then. I explained that it wasn’t a very convenient time to arrange an appointment but, as usual, the needs of the company seemed far more important to them than any form of customer service. In a rush, I agreed to an appointment the afternoon of the day after we arrived home from our holidays.

Off we went on our holidays and a week later, we were back in the UK and it was only then that I realised that before I’d agreed to the appointment, we had agreed to meet our friend who lives in Barcelona and who was over in England for just a few days, the last day being the day after the night we arrived back from our holiday. So I had to phone up Talk Talk and try to cancel the appointment but, despite my explanation, they seemed to want to charge me 55 quid for cancelling the appointment. I went ballistic! I don’t know what it is about being told by someone in a call centre in a foreign country miles from the UK with a very poor grasp of the English language that they are, “here to inform you that it is not possible to cancel an appointment,” and then that, “if we do they are here to inform you that there is a 55 pound charge for cancelling an appointment…………,” but I just went off on one. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I had arrived back off holiday at 2am that morning and was a little short on sleep, perhaps it was the fact that I had been passed through four different departments and had to redial twice to get to speak to the right person in the first place, perhaps it’s because the person on the other end of the phone was plain, downright ignorant, rude and offensive, but I did go off on one. I asked to speak to his supervisor and by the time I’d finished I was literally screaming down the phone. He didn’t put me through to a supervisor, but he was “there to inform me,” that he had in fact made a mistake and there was no charge!

I arranged another appointment and the engineer duly failed to turn up as he was supposed to. I’d had a day off work specially, so you can imagine that I wasn’t best pleased. I phoned Talk Talk again and went through the usual pantomime of being passed from department to department and being asked to redial twice and eventually, I got through to a call centre in India where I told them that I had an appointment for that morning and that the engineer had failed to show up, even though it was now 2pm. I asked them for an explanation of the absence of an engineer at my house. The guy said he had read my notes on the computer and said he’d have to phone the engineers. He left me on hold for twenty minutes. He finally returned saying that he was, “able to inform me,” that I did indeed have an appointment that morning, but he wasn’t able to tell me at what time. I pointed out that it didn’t matter what time as it was now afternoon, so could he explain where the guy was and why he had failed to turn up. He said that they didn’t have that information and suggested that maybe he’d turn up in the afternoon and that I should just wait in for him. I explained that I had had a day off work to accommodate their appointment and that consequently I wasn’t particularly impressed by the fact that he’d failed to turn up. Remembering the fact that a week ago, they’d wanted to charge me 55 quid for the privilege of cancelling an appointment, I asked what compensation they paid for a no show of one of their engineers – he sidestepped my question and told me that I should wait in for the rest of the day again, so I asked to speak to a supervisor – he resisted and said there wasn’t anyone else to speak to, but I told him I’d already had that conversation with someone else on a previous phone call and was aware that there was a supervisor – I got put through to someone called Gunita. He said that they didn’t pay compensation for their engineers not showing up, but I was told that they pay 1.33 a day for being without a phone and they charge you 70 quid if you want to cancel before your 18 month minimum term contract is up. He promised to sort out the engineers coming and also that he would work out some compensation and that he would get back to me the very next day. I waited in for the rest of the day and the engineer never showed up. Gunita never did bother to phone me back, but to be honest by now this didn’t come as any great surprise.

My partner was off work the next day, but the engineer never showed then either. I rang back again trying to get an explanation for why they didn’t keep the appointment but they weren’t able to offer one. We asked for another appointment and they couldn’t get through to the engineers again, so they arranged another appointment when we were both out working, so I phoned them back to say we weren’t in and once again they couldn’t get through to the engineers so they said they’d get back to us, but they never did and then eventually a few more days later, an engineer phoned up and said he was at the exchange and he thought he knew what the problem was and he’d do what was necessary to sort it out. I thanked him profusely and went home after work to find the Talk Talk line working and my other phone line cut off!

I went through the usual rigmarole of being passed from pillar to post until they eventually were able to tell me that if my BT line was broken, even though their engineer had broken it, it was nothing to do with them and I’d have to phone BT instead.

I have to admit that at this point I was sort of relieved in a way. Surely, with a well established company like BT, I could expect something a little bit more closely resembling half decent customer service? It just goes to show how wrong you can be.

After pressing option 1 for this, option 4 for that, option 7 for something else and option 29 to go back to the menu you first thought of, I found myself in a queue waiting for an operator. I held the line for 5 minutes and then I was cut off. So I dialled through the various menus and eventually found myself back in the queue, where I stayed for 15 minutes until they cut me off again. I redialled again, went through all the options again, I got back to the queue spent four minutes on hold and was cut off again. I redialled again and remembered that I’d read somewhere that if you hit the zero button on your phone repeatedly, it can take you straight through to an operator instead of having to go through all the menus. Surprisingly, it worked. I got through to someone called Raj in a call centre somewhere – though to be completely fair, it was in the UK and the guy did speak very good English! Problem was, the service he was offering was that they’d log the fault and get round to repairing it sometime in the next four or five days after that and after weeks and weeks of talking to idiots in call centres to arrange for other idiots to come and mess with my phone lines and not actually sort anything out, I didn’t really feel that his offer was good enough. So, I asked to speak to a supervisor, but he told me that there was no supervisor there for me to speak to. I asked if he honestly expected me to believe that he was working in a call centre completely unsupervised and he assured me that he was – the managers all went home at 5pm and the call centre staff managed themselves – apparently, there wasn’t a single manager anywhere within the building where he worked from any department whatsoever. I figured he was probably not telling me the truth and said I wanted to be put through. He again said there were no managers whatsoever and he was the only person I could speak to. I asked him what time he finished work, because I was going to stay on the line speaking to him until he went home. At first I don’t think he believed me, but after 25 minutes, I think it was starting to wear a little bit thin even for him. He offered to take all my details and pass them on to a supervisor, who would contact me the next morning – I’d had enough too by now, so I agreed.

Two minutes later, I got a call from the Call Centre Manager, called Sophie, who listened to my story and, after initially trying to fob me off, realised the treatment I’d received from Raj, and also that by now I wasn’t happy with either BT or Talk Talk. She told me that there is always a manager available to speak to and that perhaps Raj was in need of some additional training – I told her that I thought that really he was in need of his P45, but that I really wasn’t interested what they did with him – I just wanted my problem sorting out – after a short argument in which she tried to say that my BT line problem was not related to my Talk Talk line problem and so I should be prepared to wait the 5 days, to which I replied that the problem seemed to be with the people who sort out your line, which is a company called BT Openreach, which is a subsiduary of BT, and that they’d broken this line trying to fix my other line, she finally agreed to have someone look at the problem first thing the next morning. True to her word, (and if you are Sophie and you happen to be reading this, I am very, very grateful!), by 10:42am, both my phone lines were working.

So, that was it then, sorted – all that remained was for me to follow up on my earlier call to Gunita the Team Manager at a call centre that I mentioned above. I figured after all this, I was due a bit of compensation for all the hassle I’d had, but to be honest, the last thing I wanted to do was phone up and talk to someone in a call centre who really didn’t have my best interests at heart. So I left it for a few days.

And guess what happened a few days later – yep, you guessed it, our first bill from Talk Talk arrived and, yep you guessed it, they charged us line rental and call package charges of just over 22 quid for the period when we had no phone line!

Not surprisingly, that was all the impetus I needed to phone them up, but I didn’t want to go on the phone and explode at them, so I left it a few days while I calmed down, during which time I collated all the information of what had gone on.

On the 10th July, I phoned them. I didn’t really want to go through to the usual Indian call centre, so I had a look on www.saynoto0870.com and phoned a freephone sales department number. They wouldn’t take my call, but they did give me another number to phone, which was a UK geographic number, although it wasn’t free. I phoned that and they told me that seeing as the account was actually in my partner’s name, I’d have to get her to phone up and arrange a password on the account, so that I could then phone back with the password and they would be able to discuss the details of the account with me.

So, I kept my cool, phoned my partner and asked her to phone them up, they gave her a password, she phoned me back and gave me the password and then I phoned them back again. I explained the sequence of events above and told them that I wanted my bill reducing as I wasn’t prepared to pay for a phone service they hadn’t provided and that I was seeking some compensation for all the phone calls I had to make to 0845 numbers, all the time I’d spent on the phone, (literally hours!), the poor customer service I’d received, the day I’d had off work unnecessarily and the lack of any phone for almost a month. They told me that they were the connections department and couldn’t do anything about it, but that they’d put me through to Customer Services. Luckily, I didn’t get put through to India, though the call centre was obviously somewhere near Australia, as all the staff spoke with an accent from that part of the world.

I spoke to the girl on the other end of the phone and explained everything that had happened. She offered me £20 credit for the mobile phone calls I’d made to Talk Talk, £10.50 line rental refund and £10 goodwill, (total £40.50). I pointed out that my bill was over by £22.13, not £10.50 and also mentioned the £1.33 a day that Gunita had discussed.

She went away to speak to a supervisor and came back offering £20 for mobile calls to Talk Talk, £23 for line rental and £10 goodwill, (total £53). I said it still wasn’t enough and mentioned the £1.33 a day compensation again.

She went away to speak to a supervisor again and came back offering £20 for the mobile calls and £39.90 compensation, (total £59.90), but nothing for the line rental and call plan refunds, as these were apparently included in the £1.33 a day!!!

I laughed and asked to speak to a supervisor. They offered me £20 for mobile calls, £40 compo, nothing for the line rental and call plan refunds again though, and £10 goodwill. (Total £70).

This guy said he was the last in line to complain to as he was the Escalations Manager. I told him he wasn’t offering enough, bearing in mind the costs of all my calls to them, plus the time involved and also the day off work I’d had to have. At this point he started to get a little shirty and said he put a note on my account saying that I’d refused their offer of £70. I asked to speak to his boss. He said it would have to go through to the escalations department and they’d get back to me in 24 -48 hours. I told him that he should write his notes up to say that I hadn’t refused their £70 offer, just that I’d said it wasn’t enough and that he should note the costs of my day off work as well. I did this because the stance he was taking at this point was, “well, we offered you £70 and you refused it so now you’ll get nothing!”

Thirteen minutes later, someone called Fuad phoned me back. He asked for the full story, said he couldn’t compensate me for the day off work, but offered a £100 compensation in total. I accepted his offer for two reasons 1) I didn’t think they’d go any higher, (but frankly, I don’t feel as if I’ve triumphed as I still don’t think it’s adequate compensation for all the time and heartache involved), and

2) in all my hours of conversations with Talk Talk (and it is literally hours), Fuad, (and the first girl I spoke to on this occasion), were the only people who actually said they were sorry for all my problems.

Just as a little aside, Fuad also said that he was escalations manager. Also it took him only 13 minutes to contact me, so it’s possible that he worked in the same department and at the same level as the guy who I spoke to before him. This is the trouble with call centres – you never know who you’re really speaking to and you honestly can’t seem to trust what anyone says – the first guy says it’ll take up to two days and then they phone you back after 13 minutes – either he was lying, or my case looked so extreme when they passed it over that they didn’t think it’d wait, or maybe they didn’t have much else on that day? Who knows?

Anyway to sum up, we’ve been happy with the service Talk Talk are providing, now that they are finally providing it – we’re saving about a tenner a month on the cost of our old phone bill and have broadband in with it at that price, which isn’t to bad a deal really. Which makes it such a shame that they provide such dire customer service. In my book anyone’s allowed a mistake and if they’d provided some decent customer service to sort those mistakes out, I’d still be singing their praises, but there really is no excuse for the dreadful response I had from them. But remember, I had a similar problem when I phoned BT. To be honest these days it’s rare you find a customer service department that offers just that – most of them seem to have been put in place with the sole purpose of keeping you from speaking with someone who can help you with your problem. Part of the problem is that these call centres are run on an absolute shoestring with the people who work there either in a foreign country and struggling with the language and also struggling to help you when you’re thousands of miles away in another country and they haven’t a clue what’s going on, or in the UK, but on a minimum wage and under immense pressure from their bosses. Either way they don’t seem to want to let you get to speak to their boss. I don’t know why that is – perhaps they’re just so bored with their job that they’ll take the mickey out of you to brighten up their day, or maybe they get told off if they put you through to their boss. I don’t know why, but the end result is that you as a consumer get very bad service, the exact opposite of what these companies would claim there customer service departments are there for.

So to summarise – as far as I can tell, it is worth swapping to Talk Talk to save money, but if it goes wrong, you really do have to prepare yourself for the possibility of a nightmare similar to mine. If you persevere, you will get there and you will get compensated for your trouble, but be aware that virtually everyone you speak to will be out there to fob you off without giving you any help whatsoever – basically, if you have a problem, they want you to go away as they don’t want to have to deal with it. But then again, it could all go smoothly!