Carphone Warehouse what are they like?

mobilejunkie

Shhhhhh... or you'll get accused of having a personal vendetta against (you-know-who) by people who should know better! Lol!

digp

Do not touch CPW with a barge pole, if possible, esp. for contracts.

Go direct to the network itself and if possible buy online from their official web site as there is a legal 7 day cooling off period.

spike7451

Bunch of cowboys! They sold a mate Mobile Broadband for her home as she's too far from the BT exchange to get normal ADSL broadband,told her coverage was fine ect.
Turns out she's not covered by the network she's subscribed to.
Carphone Warehouse are refusing to cancel the contract & return her money.as is the network.

digp

spike7451 wrote: »

Bunch of cowboys! They sold a mate Mobile Broadband for her home as she's too far from the BT exchange to get normal ADSL broadband,told her coverage was fine ect.
Turns out she's not covered by the network she's subscribed to.
Carphone Warehouse are refusing to cancel the contract & return her money.as is the network.

http://dispute.practicallaw.com/9-107-6848 is interesting.

Guys_Dad

Certainly CPW/O2 contracts of old are a problem as CPW put all the obstacles in the way to prevent you cancelling. I believe that they recruit direct from 3 overseas customer relations team for that role!!!!!!!!!!!

Their Talk-Talk broadband service is an absolute nightmare if anything goes wrong because the won't talk-talk to you about the problem!

If you have a contract phone that develops a fault, then they don't have a reputation for solving the problem in the way you would expect, say, John Lewis to deal with a problem with anything you bought from their store. On the other hand, they are not alone in this poor after sales service.

On the positive side, if you want to buy an unlocked phone to put your own sim into, then they have the best prices, but do ask them first of all - the shop that is and get the manager to confirm - exactly how they deal with phone faults in the first 3/6 months and then thereafter. Do get the name of the person who gave you this information and write their answer down in front of them so that CPW amnesia doesn't strike.

Millionaire

Intasun32 wrote: »

It is clear from the above that you have never had a contract with CPW/o2!

If you take a contract with CPW/o2, it's CPW that administer the account. CPW are the airtime seller dealing with ALL aspects of the account, this includes issueing the PAC. All the other networks sold by CPW are dealt with direct.

Refer to the many threads and posts here on MSE where customers have had great difficulty with CPW/o2 obtaining a PAC.

:cool:

Well I had a CPW purchased Orange contract and had no problems whatsoever cancelling. In fact numerous over the years.

Had numerous PAYG handsets from them, no problems whatsoever with the bonus of having them being open to other networks from the off.

Must be the CPW/O2 combination that is problematic for whatever reason.

mobilejunkie

It is and the reason is simple; cpw use every dirty trick in the book to try to stop you cancelling when you are allowed to. They have no control over other contracts so you don't have to put up with all the crap they produce.

MissKeith

Just FYI, the CPW O2 billing base no longer exists for new customers, they sell O2 direct now. So all the complaints about PAC codes and so on won't apply to you, you will just deal with the network directly for cancellations if you do sign up to a contract through them.

POPPYOSCAR

The problems my son had were not with cancellation etc they were with the terrible service he received from them.The phone was no good from day one
they kept sending it back for repair and would not replace it.One day it would work and then the next not.I personally would not use them because of this.

adamnsu

Personally I think most of the sales people at Carphonewarehouse (CPW) and Phones4u are wretched souls who will sell their own mother to sell you a deal. However, they arent that pushy at CPW.

I would advise anyone not to deal with these people and go directly with the operators cutting out the middle man.