Warning - SKY £75 Pay Once Watch Forever problems

Thankyou, NonGeographicalMan.

I read through the thread, and then used your advice above ^^^ to send an email. I think you probably saved me a lot of work and grief.

I'll post my email, and the reply I received, in case it helps anyone else.

__________________________________________________

Dear Jeremy Darroch,

I purchased a SKY T.V. SKY PREPAID PACK from Dixons, and had Sky installed on 17th March '08.

The Dixons advert clearly stated:
£75 one-off payment
PAY ONCE WATCH FOREVER and try Sky TV for 4 months.
No annual contract
after 4 months you will continue to receive Sky TV for £19 a month. Let us know before then if you no longer want to receive Sky TV.

In June, I phoned Sky to say I no longer wanted to receive Sky TV. Your operative said that was fine, but I should also put this in writing to your Customer Service Department before the end of the 4 months, which I did, on June 23rd

Yesterday (16th July) I received a letter from your Mark Anderson, saying that if I cancel my subscription I will have to pay you reasonable losses and costs.

I have already informed you by phone and in writing that I no longer wish to receive Sky TV. I have no contract.

I have checked my credit card account, and on July 15th you took £19 from my account.
Please refund this immediately, and assure me that you have cancelled my Sky TV and no further amounts will be taken from my credit card.

Kind regards


***** ********

_______________________________________________________


Dear M **********

Customer Account Number ###########

Thank you for your email, addressed to Mr Jeremy Darroch, which has been passed to me to investigate and respond on his behalf.

I would like to begin by apologising for the problems you have had with your Sky account.

Having checked your account I can confirm that this was established as a Pay Once Watch Forever account on 27 March 2008 with a payment of £75 for a 4 mix for four months.

As you have indicated that you do not wish to continue with the 4 mix after 27 July I have arranged for the cancellation of your account on that date. You will, after that date, be able to view the free to air channels. In addition I have arranged a refund of the payment of £19.00 taken for viewing after 27 July and this should be completed within 72 hours.

Your account will be fully cancelled on 27 July and there will be no future charges applied to the account after that date.

I trust that I have been able to address your concerns and should you wish to re-subscribe to Sky at any future date please contact myself or our customer Service team on 08442 414141.

Kind regards

William Cunningham
Customer Liaison
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kwt wrote: »

this is an unfortunate situation which doesn’t happen frequently

Good old William it seems he was born to be "economical with the truth", although at least he does manage to sort the problem out whilst still consistently lieing that you are the only customer to have ever had these difficulties with Sky.:rotfl:

rogercr wrote: »

With my memory I couldn't leave things to chance like that so I wrote to Mark Anderson Customer Marketing Director at Sky requesting cancellation. His reply stated that I had a 12 month contract and I could not cancel until it expired, otherwise I would have to pay them costs.

Mark Anderson is a total and utter disgrace and should resign.

He constantly allows his signature to be put to letters he never writes or sees and then lets his customer service numpties make quite outrageous threats of debt collectors etc that are clearly in violation of their own terms and conditions.

Unfortunately some of you on here have a rather old fashioned faith in writing paper based letters to Sky but letters to the company do not work as they are all syphoned off to low level customer service staff. Whereas emails to the addresses mentioned above get to the people who actually have the power to actually do something about the problem. It is however very alarming that William Cunningham keeps on leading customers to believe their case is an isolated incident when time and again Sky is using bully boy tactics to convert people who did not intend to become subscribers to become subscribers against their will.

An item on yesterday's (Thursday 31st July 2008) You and Yours program at 12pm on BBC Radio 4 regarding Sky's involvement in providing satellite tv equipment for the pilot digital switchover scheme in the north of England reveals that Sky is once again up to its old dirty tricks in relation to the terms of the deals that people who are often on very low incomes believe they have signed with Sky and them then encountering extreme difficulties in cancelling when the free period ends. Surprise, surprise Sky has provided free Sky+ boxes with several free months use of the Sky+ facility so that these customers will then find it harder to give up subscribing to Sky (as they also lose the recording facilities). They have not provided Sky HD boxes perhaps because the HD functionality can still be used for BBC HD and C4 HD without still paying Sky any sub. Why on earth was a deal not done with Freesat Playback/+ instead.

Listen to it from minute 32 onwards at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/youandyours_thu

Now how many people have been intimidated into paying them? On this website we only see those people that can stand up to them. Following the advice of earlier correspondents above I have emailed Jeremy Darroch etc. No doubt they will again apologise for the mistake and take the supposed ineffective action of telling their administration staff to get it right.

Unfortunately Mr Darroch and his colleagues appear to be directly behind all of the dishonest lieing and cheating techniques in which Sky's call centre staff are repeatedly schooled in order to try and prevent customers from leaving the service. The people working in their call centres are only normal human beings on modest wages and the constant threats of penalties etc against customers who should be able to cancel without any difficulty at all clearly reflect board level policy and not the maverick actions of individual call centre workers.

I have challenged Mr Anderston directly by email to explain how these "mistakes" are repeatedly being made by his staff but he prefers to stay stum and hide away behind his chief sidekick William Cunningham (a decent enough chap based on my phone calls with him but earning his living by working for a company with the same marketing morals, or rather lack of them,as Ryanair or TalkTalk) in the Customer Relations department.

harz99 wrote: »

Unless one of the TV consumer shows can be persuaded to take this up, I fear the only way this will stop is if an individual takes one of the numpty directors whose names are put to these threatening letters, to court.

Is Martin Lewis's moneysaving tv show still running? I have to say that I had to give up on it after a couple of programs as it was so unashamedly downmarket in its approach. I presume this was in the hope of getting the largest viewing numbers at the time of day that it was being shown?

Things have surely reached the stage when its time for a program like Watchdog or You & Yours to do a major story on this repeated disgraceful behaviour by Sky.

I see that the person from Sky who posted earlier on in this thread seems to have lacked the courage to return to try to explain away their continued lieing and cheating of so many of their Pay Once Watch Forever customers.