New Talktalk poll; feedback needed, good and bad

alared

Thanks for that Emma, but will definitely be staying with TalkTalk who have saved me at least half of what I used to pay to BT and fast4 broadband.

Quids in and thanks again.

trinidadone

hello moneysavers, my TalkTalk package will be up for renewal in a few months time. I was wondering what the benefits were to renewal my contract. On the TalkTalk forums, customers have been offered sweetners from customer service, including £30.00 off your bill, and a free wireless router. Has anyone had any "real" sweetners from talktalk when renewaling???? eg, half price package etc.... please let me know

Antagony

I have not had much to complain about for myself since switching over to TalkTalk in July--although I was/am irritated by the apparent inflexibility of the "Clever Calls" boost which doesn't allow me to turn off the call waiting feature, which I'm not fond of-- but my mum has just had a fault on her line and I have to say that their customer services leave a lot to be desired.

My mum is in her seventies and she doesn't have (or want) a mobile--she used a neighbour's phone to tell me about the fault--so I reported the fault to TT for her. First of all it seemed to completely flummox them that she didn't have an alternative number for them to contact her on. Then, after some wrangling over that and explaining that I wasn't at the premises so I couldn't carry out their internal checks at that time, they eventually deigned to test the line. They reckoned it wasn't showing a fault so I would have to go and perform their internal checks. So I drove up and did that, none of which made any difference, and I called them back and was told an engineer would be assigned within the next five days. I wasn't very happy about leaving my mum with no phone for so long but I was told that was the best they could do. I gave them my mobile number and was told I would be contacted within the next few days to be informed of their progress.

Five days later, having still not heard anything from them and my mum's phone still offline, I called back and was told that they had been trying to call but weren't getting a response. I asked them what number they'd been calling and it turned out it was the one with the fault on it! When I asked why they hadn't called my mobile they said they didn't have that, or any other alternative number listed! This was extremely incompetent because not only had I given it to them on three separate occasions, I'd had them call me back on it when I went up to to do their internal checks. Anyway, they ran another line check and this time they reckoned there was a fault showing up, but it might be a couple more days until it was fixed. I was not impressed and asked that the ticket be raised for an official complaint.

A few hours later I received a text on my mobile saying their engineer was reporting the issue fully resolved. I called my mum's neighbour who kindly went to get my mum and let her call me back again. It turned out the phone wasn't actually back on yet, it was just that the problem had been identified as one which BT were responsible for so they were waiting for them to fix it. Thankfully that was done a couple of hours later, but what a performance!

TalkTalk

HI Ant,

Sorry to hear your mum had problems getting a fault fixed on her line. If there are any issues you need looking in to in the future then it would be worth you posting at www.talktalkmembers.com/forums. We can only offer account specific information to the named account holder but we can log faults for none account holders.

Cheers
Emma x

Antagony

[FONT=&quot]Hi Emma,[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Well my mum's issue is now resolved so I'm happy enough about that, but I've got a problem of my own now and I'm finding customer services just as poor, if not worse, I'm afraid. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]I am going to detail this problem here, rather than on the TalkTalk members' forum, because I believe this will reach a wider audience and it is useful information for people considering switching to TalkTalk. People need to have some idea of what kind of service to expect.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]One of the boosts I pay for is 'clever calls.' I particularly need the call divert service as I frequently receive business calls to my home phone, so I tend to divert it to my mobile when I'm out and about. Occasionally, if I know I'm going to be out of mobile reach, I will divert to a friend's land-line. Ten days ago (17 September 09), I tried this for the first time since switching to TalkTalk in July. Unfortunately, no matter which land-line I tried to divert to, I was simply getting a recorded message – in a male American accent – saying, "Your update request has been rejected!" Weirdly, diverting to mobiles still worked okay.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]After calling TalkTalk and navigating through the tortuous automated voice menus, the fault was eventually passed to a higher technical team and I was told they would call me back within 24 hours. Good to their word [/FONT][FONT=&quot]– and this was one of the few times they were [/FONT][FONT=&quot]– [/FONT][FONT=&quot]they called me back later that day. But, irritatingly, all they did was take details which I had already given to the customer service team. It appears that TalkTalk don't have any system in place for recording and passing information between their different departments! Anyway, I was told I would be called back again later. The next day I was called back again and told the fault had not yet been resolved and they would like to try and reset the service, but that would take five days! Well, as I said earlier, the divert function is something I use frequently, so I was reluctant to be without it for so long. However, they assured me categorically that it would only be for a maximum of five days, that it may well be sooner and that they would mark the job as urgent. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Five (working) days later and – shock, horror – nothing had happened! So I phoned again and was eventually told that the boost was still switched off pending action from the technical team and that it would take maybe another 48 hours to get sorted. I was not impressed, and made my views perfectly clear. I was again promised that the problem would be highlighted as "urgent" and assured that 48 hours would be the maximum. That was last Wednesday (24 September 09). I hadn't heard anything by the end of Thursday and I was out on Friday and Saturday. I've just checked my phone now and it would appear that the caller boost has been turned back on, but the original fault is still there! As if having the divert function turned off for seven days – which always struck me as a forlorn and somewhat pointless exercise, by the way – wasn't bad enough, even more infuriating was the fact that no one had even bothered trying to contact me, either by phone or email (which I had specifically requested), to appraise me of the situation. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]So here we are, ten days on from when I first reported this fault, and I'm no better off than I was then. I am far from impressed by the competency levels of TalkTalk's technical people and am now seriously considering my options. I'm pretty sure that their failure to get a service I am paying for to work properly, to say nothing of their appalling lack of customer care, warrants a breach of contract on their part. If it wasn't for the very good deal on the broadband and phone package, and the hassle involved in doing so, I would be switching already. If this is how useless they are for a seemingly simple technical fault with my phone line, I dread to think how they'll be if anything goes wrong with the broadband![/FONT]

Antagony

TalkTalk_Company_Representative wrote: »

HI Ant,

Sorry to hear your mum had problems getting a fault fixed on her line. If there are any issues you need looking in to in the future then it would be worth you posting at www.talktalkmemebers.com/forums. We can only offer account specific information to the named account holder but we can log faults for none account holders.

Cheers
Emma x

[FONT=&quot]You might want to edit that forum link, as you have entered an extra 'e' (highlighted above) so it doesn't go to the correct place. It took me a while to figure out what was going on there.[/FONT]

alared

http://www.talktalkmembers.com/forums/

TalkTalk

Hi Ant - thanks for the heads up on the link. I belive Deb and Michelle are dealing with your issue on the TalkTalk forums now. Please let me know if you need any further info.

Cheers
Emma x

Antagony

Thanks Emma.

Yes, Debbie informs me she's passed it to the network team, so I'm awaiting further developments. I'll update this thread if/when any progress is made.

Antagony

Well the divert problem has been resolved (thanks for your help Emma).

It turned out that the problem was arising by entering the full divert code and number and dialling in one go, like speed dialling, rather than dialling the divert code first and then entering the number. Curiously, this problem only occurs with land-line numbers for some reason, and it never occurred when I was with BT.

Oh well, all this aggro and frustration and it was so easily resolved in the end. It's also pretty amazing that the guy looking into it managed to set the service on and off within a few minutes, as opposed to the five days which the original technical team insisted was necessary!

It is comforting to know that at least one part of TalkTalk's customer support service (the members' forum) works well, but it is also a poor state of affairs when one has to resort to posting complaints on forums in order to get decent support.