TalkTalk feedback needed; good and bad

timcrunkhorn

I applied for broadband in May 2006. My phone switched almost straight away and they started charging £20.99 a month. I new I would have to wait until August until I got connected but it's now October 18th and I'm still awaiting a modem. Admittedly it's not completely TalkTalk's fault as Wanadoo had tagged my line (which should have taken no more than 2 weeks to rectify) but with the misleading letters telling me to change my line to analogue (?) and the lack of communication when a problem arose TalkTalk has caused no end of stress and upset. Because they needed me to cancel my current provider to continue with the order I have now been without internet access at home since 5th September! Fortunately I have access at work but my partner, who is currently a foundation year doctor, doesn’t have time to access internet at work and as a result has suffered greatly. I have sent many e-mails of complaint to customer services and the CEO C.Dunstone and the replies I have received have ranged from not much help to utterly ridiculous. It has been made quite obvious that they don't even read the e-mails I send because the response very rarely answers any of my questions.

The whole experience has made be feel sick to the stomach and all this to save a measly £120 a year. I'm absolutely disgusted.

Tim Crunkhorn

will136

I am very very disappointed with talk talk service. I am moving house oct 27 and have landline and broadband with talk talk. i called them about 2 weeks ago to ask them to move the line over, as I had been informed that they could do this without me needing to call bt. However, talk talk told me this wasnt the case i needed to call bt. So i did after several 20 minute waits bt finallly said i could go back to them for 3 months and then switch back to talk talk if i so wished. 2 hours of a thursday afternoon this took me to arrange. Then to my surprise on sat i recieved a sorry your leaving letter from talk talk also saying if i wnated to continue with their service they could transfer my line for free.....I tried to call them but to a loss. I eventually got the car phone warehouse website and called their customer support office who put me through to the talk talk high complaints deaprtment.....no answer, so i called back and asked them to get someone to call me back. I had recieved no call by the tues so called again. I was on the phone to them for an hour and all they kept telling me was that I would need to pay an £18 fee to get out of the 3 month contract with bt but talk talk were unable to trasnfer my line for free. i asked them to pay the fee out of goodwill for the inconvenience to me and was eventually told they would pay it but i had to pay it to bt and talk talk would credit my account. I eventuall told them i wasnt going through with the process and would stay with bt until i found a suitably provider. During all this i spoke with several different operators in their south africa customer service centre and asked to speak to steve rescorla (customer service director) they didnt even know who he was. When i spoke with the gentleman at the high complaints department i asked to speak with his manager who wasnt available so asked to speak to someone higher to which the guy replied i dont know who that is......and wasnt sure where he was based. I told the guy at talk tlak i felt as if i was being pushed to another provider by them......which i have been. Talk talk customer service is appalling. regrdless of the fact they may be cheap or what ever I wont be signing with them again. has anyone else experinced this kind og difficulty with them?

irritable

We have now got the call and broadband package. Everything seems ok at the moment except that we have had exceptional difficulty in connecting to the internet.
The modem which they sent out is a Huawei SmartAX MT882, which Talktalk know as "Sprint 2". My other half has no technical knowldge whatsoever but that shouldn't be a barrier to using their software. She actually managed to do everything right, without obtaining a positive result.
After of hours of work by me (semi-computer able and certainly more than able to load a modem) and several calls to non-English Call Centre staff, I was informed that that particular modem doesn't always work via USB.
That led me to connect via Ethernet and voila Success! However at the end of the session I switched everything off and smugly went away on business promising her indoors that everything would be fine. In fact when everything started up she found that the internet connection had been lost. After a call from home on the subject I was close to losing the will to live and certainly the prospect of going home at the end of my trip was not a happy one.
After a further session on the machine I finally discovered that the cause of the problem is that, when the modem is powered down, the connection to the internet is lost and cannot be recovered when the device is powered up again. Have spoken with Talktalk today (guy may have been English for a change) @ 10p per minute (and I think £2 connection charge). They appear to be looking into the probelm.
Has anybody else had a problem with that model of modem and if so have you found a fix which enables the modem to be powered down and restarted without losing the connection?

Heinz

irritable wrote:

They appear to be looking into the probelm.

Really?

Don't tell me, they promised to call you back too.

SarahSH_2

I have had a reply from my e mail to Charles Dunstone and got a phone call from nice lady at Talk talk to try and resolve things. However, having read up all this stuff and got slightly more technologically aware than I was before, I told THEM that they were not yet LLu at my local exchange, therefore a) they could not give me a speed of more than 2 megs or whatever (unlike my current supplier) as promised. They said that was planned for March 2007 (nearly a year after I would have signed up with them). And b) to connect with them I would have to lose my current internet connection for 2 weeks before they could connect.
I did point out that it was a shame they didn't tell me any of this when they rushed to take my direct debit details and sign me up, and, in my view, that is the real disgrace. If they were honest about their product, then we could make informed choices (but they wouldn't get as many direct debits).
As a result of all this, I have lost my landline connection with BT (is this the plan all along?), am still paying my old internet provider and am financially no better off with Talk talk than I was with my BT landline. In fact, I am down due to all the calls to Talk Talk and the time I have wasted on them.

irritable

Heinz wrote:

Really?

Don't tell me, they promised to call you back too.

Yes as you will have seen I used the word "appear" very carefully. Giving them a chence to respond before exploding. The earlier info with the email address of Charles Dunstone is easily the most useful post in this thread and will be my next resort.

berniebarm

wrote:

I signed up for the free broadband package about April or May 2006. I started using the Internet Broadband provided by TalkTalk on the promised date of around 20 May 2006. Initially, the service was OK, although I did experience connection problems which meant that I had to re-start the PC on quite a few occasions. Whilst this was annoying, I was prepared to put up with this and tried to get the issue resolved by ringing them. This exercise was the beginning of a long and wearisome experience with TalkTalk as getting through to them on the phone was a near impossibility. In the end I gave up and waited for the upgrade to 8meg.I was informed by letter that this was going to take place on 19 Sept 2006, and that I should expect some minor disruption to both my telephone and internet service.Sure enough,on the due date,my phone went dead. This was for a lot longer time than they had originally warned about. But, no matter, things would surely be sorted out for the greater good! By late afternoon of the 19 Sept, my Broadband service was restored and I then looked forward to a better Internet experience.The upgrade to 8meg had indeed, it seems been a success. However, my initial cofidence was dashed as, next day when I tried to connect to the Internet, I was unable so to do and an error message to the effect that the remote server was not responding, appeared on screen. Now my troubles REALLY started as trying to get this resolved was an absolute nightmare. I lost count of the time spent just listening to that infernal "call out the instigator" tune as I was placed on hold. After 2 weeks of no Internet service I wrote to TalkTalk and informed them that I was paying for a service which I was not receiving. I sent this letter by recorded delivery. They have not replied. After a time I decided to ring Otello,and, whilst they were very helpful the upshot was that I was really on my own at least in the short term, but that I should write to TalkTalk again and ask for a full and final decision regarding the fact that I had by now decided that I had no alternative other than to cancel as they had in fact broken the agreement and rendered the 18 month contract null and void.I then contacted BT to ask them to take over my telephone service. They told me that I did not need to do anything myself as they would inform TalkTalk that they would be taking over the line on 16 Oct 2006. I then wrote to TalkTalk as suggested by Otello and mentioned at the end of my letter that BT would be getting in touch with them in order to take over on the promised date. I sent this letter on or about 05 Oct 2006 by recorded delivery. They have not replied.On Monday 16 Oct 2006,the date my phone was supposed to be connected to BT, I picked up the phone about 1:00pm to discover that the line was dead. So I rang BT on my mobile and they told me that I was to be reconnected on 21 Oct 2006. I was not given a satisfactory reason why this was the case, but I suspect that TalkTalk are behind this. Who knows, as they haven't even had the common courtesy to reply to my letters. It is now 18 Oct 2006 and have neither landline phone nor internet service. I work for myself from home and I am now having to rely entirely on my mobile phone, which is causing me financial hardship as well as the additional stress involved in running my business as my customers are not very happy with the fact that they cannot contact me as easily as before.
Needless to say I am extremely annoyed, to say the least, with the shoddy way that I have been treated by TalkTalk. Unfortuneately, it would seem that on this occasion I was gullible enough to fall for the marketing strategy of Carphone Warehouse, a Company that in my experience are unscrupulosly trying to build a customer base by whatever means they see fit. If a percentage of customers fall by the wayside, I am sure they have probably allowed for this in there Business Plan and won't be deterred by a few minor irritations such as disatisfied or disillusioned clients. I write this letter in the hope tht others will think long and hard before committing themselves to a contract with this dreadful Company.

tristar_3

Apart from the broadband connection taking an extra 2 months to set up, and having to ask for a second MAC code the broadband is now up an running and in fact, I now have a speed of 2.2 mbs instead of the 512kbs I had with wanadoo, The main problem I experienced was with ataching my mobile to the land line for the free calls they offered between home and mobile, IT NEVER HAPPENED after several calls and several promised I was still being charged for all calls between home and mobile, so I dumped the mobile

Algonquin

Hi All. For those interested (and I'm sure there will be many!)
I have just spoken to Talk Talk high level complaints "filtering department" within the last 15 minutes on a number provided to me by Ofcom. The person I spoke to was polite and helpful, took details of my complaint/issues, and has forwarded this by e-mail to the "High Level Complaints Department" with a promised response time of 5 days. The person I spoke to was aware I had already spoken to Ofcom without me mentioning this, so obviously they are taking calls on this number with the prior knowledge that Ofcom are already involved and aware of the issue in question.
I have very recently finished working for one of the big mobile phone companies (without mentioning names it's the one with a very "bright" and "colourful" name that likes to think all it's customers are "animals") and as a result of this insider experience I am aware that the mere mention of the word Ofcom tends to make people jump when perhaps they would not have done so previously!
Thanks to all who have managed to read this far, and as a reward for your patience and time here comes the number I used and which was live within the last hour!

0800 049 5743

Best of luck to all who use this!!!!!

Cheers.

reggow

Applied on the 13th April.
They started charging me straight away.
To this date I have never recieved any corespondance or equipment.
The customer service is clueless.
Every time I call I get told they will send me the startup pack but I have not recieved anything.
Luckily I have my own router and used the automated service to recieve my username and password.
Been on line for about a month and the speeds are good.
If I did not know about IT I would still be pulling my hair out.
Out of interest I called the customer support to enquire about the starter pack,
they still didn't know I was online.....clueless.