Yourcalls.net appalling service !

homeworker

I had been with yourcalls.net for the last 3 months and on the 27th december 2006 3.48pm they left a message on my phone to say credit card expired and they would restrict my service at 5.30pm, effectively no outbound calls. Prior to this no notice was given and giving us 1 1/2 hours notice! It was no good as we weren't home and we didn't arrive back till Friday evening.

I was horrified that you weren't able to ring the company until today. I think in short term the moneysaving on companies is short lived when they don't have a customer service team at week end. I am so glad we will return BT.

Heinz

Good move. A 76p/month saving in line rental isn't really worthwhile.

Combining a BT landline (£10.75/month by DD with online only billing), a CPS package which gives free evening and weekend UK 01/02 calls for no monthly fee, 18185 for daytime UK 01/02 calls of unlimited duration for 5p each and the MSE Callcheckers to find the cheapest routes for your international calls will be far more cost-effective.

Click the 'HERE' link in my signature below for some ideas.

utilitybroker

Thats one of the dangers of moving your line rental away from BT. If you had just moved (CPS) your calls to another supplier and kept your line rental with BT,and the call supplier blocked your calls out,or if they had a fault on their network, you could have still used the BT Override facility 1280 to place your calls via BT.

I believe that BT Customer Service now closes on Sundays !!!

homeworker

I think these other call providers provide an overall cheap provider but service and call diagnostics don't exist in most of these companies. Nor do they have a telephone number to call them!

utilitybroker

homeworker wrote:

I think these other call providers provide an overall cheap provider but service and call diagnostics don't exist in most of these companies. Nor do they have a telephone number to call them!

All the CPS companies i know of have customer service centres and contact numbers. However IDA code providers like 1899.18185 dont tend to have customer service contact numbers, just e-mail contact,thats how they keep costs so low.

macminiuser

homeworker wrote:

I had been with yourcalls.net for the last 3 months and on the 27th december 2006 3.48pm they left a message on my phone to say credit card expired and they would restrict my service at 5.30pm, effectively no outbound calls. Prior to this no notice was given and giving us 1 1/2 hours notice! It was no good as we weren't home and we didn't arrive back till Friday evening.

I was horrified that you weren't able to ring the company until today. I think in short term the moneysaving on companies is short lived when they don't have a customer service team at week end. I am so glad we will return BT.

Hi, I work for Yourcalls.net and I was sorry to hear you'll be going back to BT, but fair play - I'd probably do the same under your circumstances. I don't know who made the decision to restrict unpaid lines just before New Year's Eve, but when I find out, I'll make sure I kick 'em in the nuts for you (well OK, I probably won't as "fired for Gross Misconduct/Assault" doesn't look too great on your CV!) but I will certainly question whether or not it was appropriate for the time of year.

I've often thought our debt management policy is quite harsh - you get an e-mail at least 2 weeks before the money is due to be taken, giving you ample time to make sure the funds are available, but if for any reason we can't collect the full amount (or a pre-agreed part-payment plan), we try three times to get in touch with you (on the third time leaving a message) and either recover the money over the phone or restrict the line.

This is because of a few people spoiling it for the rest - over the past 6 months we've had a massive problem with people transferring to us, spending the whole time calling expensive premium rate competition lines (Quiz TV, Millionaire, Deal or No Deal etc), racking up £1,000's in calls in the space of a few days (it takes three days to get your call traffic data from the network, so we don't know about it until it's too late) then cancelling their direct debit and churning away to the next unlucky supplier, resulting in huge losses. It's simply not worth pursuing the debt as it would cost us more to recover it than to just write it off.

In a business with ever-reducing margins, and extremely tight cash flow - remember that whether you pay your bill on time or not, we still have to pay BT Wholesale for your calls each and every month - we have to be super-vigilant when it comes to debt or we'll go out of business because BT will stop supplying US, resulting in loss of service for thousands and thousands of UK households currently serviced by Yourcalls.net.

For this reason, we have a zero-tolerance policy on debt - either pay your bill on time, or risk losing service until it's paid in full. Whilst I appreciate there are always going to be legitimate reasons for not paying YOUR bill on time, WE can't afford not to pay OUR bills on time and there are people out there who deliberately abuse the system; we have no choice but to protect ourselves against this unscrupulous minority. In the months of October and November more than 50% of our client base did not pay their bill on time, so we have had no choice but to take action.

I am genuinely sorry to hear you got caught in the crossfire and I sincerely hope it didn't ruin your New Year's celebrations.

hurrah

Surely you do credit checks to detect serial churners, bad debtors in the first place.

macminiuser

hurrah wrote:

Surely you do credit checks to detect serial churners, bad debtors in the first place.

Of course we do, any post-billing service provider will conduct regular credit checks on new applications as standard practice. Or so you would have thought, right?

Our Privacy Policy states the following:

"Credit Checking

We may pass on your details to bona fide credit checking agencies, for the purposes of assessing your credit worthiness. We and other organisations may also use credit reference agency and fraud prevention agency records that we receive about you, people financially linked to you and others in your household to help make decisions about you and them.

You agree that we may use and update this centrally held information:

for credit and credit related services and to manage your accounts;
to provide you with other services;
to identify other products and services which might be suitable for you;
to recover debts;
to prevent and detect fraud;
to update our records about you;
to prevent money laundering; and
to check your identity."

Obviously, we don't accept business from customers who are clearly not going to pay - credit checking should highlight and enable us to filter out people who regularly apply for credit cards or consolidate their current insurmountable loan repayments with even bigger loans every 6 months, people who have undertaken an IVA, or worse, declared themselves bankrupt.

However, spotting serial telecoms churners is not an exact science as not all telecoms companies (especially the smaller ones due to the cost implications) a) do credit checks or b) update Experian, Equifax etc with information about bad debtors, making it difficult to see what a potential customer has been up to.

With Britain's growing debt crisis plastered all over the news, it's easy to see how these amazing debt-preventing risk-assessing credit-checking technologies might not be all they're cracked up to be. Not because the technology itself is flawed necessarily, but simply because companies don't use or enforce it enough, set their refusal criteria too leniently or let their customers keep using their service for too long without paying.

The only way that we can guarantee someone who hasn't paid isn't going to rack up any more debt is to prevent them from doing so. So that's exactly what we do.

andyjervisuk

I've been with One Bill telecom for my line rental for 2 years or more, not any cheaper than BT but just wanted to get away from all the sales talk. I've just discovered through their web site I can have 5 nominated numbers where I get free phone calls anytime plus free weekend calls all for the price of £10.95!. Additonal packages are £2.99 for free evening and Weekend calls or £7.95 for Anytime. the website is:

https://www.onebilltelecom.com

They also do Broadband £12.99 for 1MB and their Customer Service is good, at least it in the UK and you speak to an English operator!

Also their parent company is Your Calls is even cheaper!
£9.99 Line rental
Evening and Weekend Calls £1.99
Anytime £4.99

This is an online company though, no paper work and possibly not a great customer service. Their website is

https://www.yourcalls.net

Anybody with either of these companies? Would be interested to hear your views.

Heinz

In case you haven't noticed, your thread's been merged with an earlier one about the same company.

It may be worthwhile you starting at the beginning (only 8 posts).

andyjervisuk

Heinz wrote:

In case you haven't noticed, your thread's been merged with an earlier one about the same compoany.

It may be worthwhile you starting at the beginning (only 8 few posts).

Thanks Heinz, that answers my question about Your Calls but doesn't do anything about One Bill. I e-mailed them on Sunday to ask them if they charged a connection charge for my 'free' weekend calls and had a reply to-day to say no connection charge, I'm happy with that service. Ithink I shall have all my calls for £7.95. Previously I have just had my line rental with them and used 1899 but now they charge 5p connection charge and my monthly bill is now over £10 so I'm going to save a few quid.

if anyone else has had experience with One Bill perhaps you could transfer this one to that thread.