OK guys, prepare for a rant of quite epic proportions.
We’ve moved house recently, as you’ll probably know. We didn’t move far, so we requested to get our number moved to the new address.
Wind back the clock a few months – I received a call from a nice lady from a company called TalkTalk Onetel. She offered to reduce my line rental (which I was paying to BT at the time) by a few quid per month. We were already with OneTel for the cheaper calls and I did all the call management and billing through their online portal, so I figured that moving the line rental to them wouldn’t be a big problem. It wasn’t, and we switched to them.
Fast-forward a few months and we’re just about to move home. I call them up and request to move the line to the new property. They stated it would take two weeks, which shocked me, so I tried BT instead and got pretty much the same response because I had to migrate back to them (the whole gory mess is detailed in this blog post).
So I had to wait until August 13th (yesterday), when the line would absolutely, positively, be provisioned at the new house. Trouble is it still doesn’t work, even today, and for some reason a BT Openreach engineer turned up yesterday unannounced, even though we’ve got a dial tone and a brand new BT face plate. He left a card that said, “Please contact your communications provider to arrange another appointment”
I’m unsure why a BT engineer would be needed – we have a clear dial-tone, brand new cabling throughout and it’s obviously worked perfectly well for the previous owners for many years. Our only problem is that we are unable to make or receive phone calls and I figured a simple bit of jumpering needed adjusting at the exchange.
So I called the utterly useless OneTel customer service team. This time I got through to someone who understood numbers correctly (the previous person struggled to understand my phone number). I asked why a BT Openreach engineer is needed, to which he replied that it was “to check that the cabling is OK”.
I asked if I could arrange a new engineer, which he did. He came back on the line and stated, “latest time a new engineer can arrive is Augist 22nd”.
I stated that we’d like the earliest time, not the latest. He responded by saying, “Yes, that is the latest date an engineer can attend”. I asked again for the earliest possible date, not the latest, but this seemed to get me no-where. He got utterly confused and just kept saying, “yes, it is”. I tried to help by saying, “the word “earliest” is the total opposite of “latest” – I’d like the opposite of “latest appointment” please”. He got confused even more and I gave up.
This is yet again another example of how the OneTel / TalkTalk customer service team fail to understand the English language. After giving up with the whole appointment thing I asked the representative whether my line had been activated as promised on the 13th of August. He stated, “yes, it is online now”.
Guess what though. I just checked it (today being the 14th) and we are still unable to make or receive calls. Rubbish.
I’ve just called back and been told by a different person that no, the line won’t go live until August 22nd, when the BT Openreach Engineer turns up. Heck, this completely contradicts what the previous customer service rep said, but who cares ? They certainly don’t.
So now I’m stuck, still without a phone line until the 22nd. I’ve then got to wait another 5 days or more to get broadband, so it looks like I’ll be back on the internet sometime in September properly.
I’m so absolutely appauled that any company can have a customer service team quite this bad. Sure, out-source if you want, but ensure that the people answering the calls can understand english properly so that we, the customers, don’t have to TEACH THEM WHAT WORDS MEAN. Oh, and it would also be good if the company actually did what we ask of them, and if they could actually let us know that an engineer would need access to our house, and perhaps arrange a date for this to happen instead of just turning up out of the blue.
Are we living in the middle ages or something?
TalkTalk Onetel – You are officially the worst company I have ever dealt with!