"ORANGE customers must be prevented from contacting Customer Services at all costs."

ITBoffin

Making small changes to your online account whatever the service should always be simple and intuitive… self-service is the order of the day in 2012 isn’t it? Here is my mission should I choose to accept it… to change my direct debit details on my personal Orange/EE mobile account...

Simple? you would think so in this day and age, in fact given that Orange/EE are supposedly at the top of the game where 4G is concerned a simple admin request like this would surely be without incident...

Feeling confident that such a change would be completed in a matter of seconds I logged on to my customer portal... One should never assume... after logging on and clicking on my bank details I noticed a message that stated 'You cannot change your direct debit details please call us on XXX'. Ok fair enough but surely such self-service would save Orange/EE a huge amount of resource?

I rang said number... After completing the menu choices I was informed that my wait would be 25 minutes... clearly this is disheartening news to hear after my initial thought of completing this change in a matter of seconds online... I decided to hold and muster up my 'brits know how to queue' frame of mind... to my surprise and pleasure after only 2 minutes the phone began to ring and while performing the obligatory victory dance in my mind the voice I heard was garbled and broken up... it was clear this was a call centre in India, which is fine however someone had clearly not configured the VoIP correctly or applied any QoS as the agent was illegible... Is this a communications company I thought?

I tried in vain to explain my need to change my Direct Debit... "I can help you with Direct Debit" was the response, this was good news albeit short lived... I asked what information he needed from me and he responded that 'he could not hear me'... this ensued for several minutes before he kindly offered to call me back...

The call never came...

Feeling vexed I thought I would try a new-fangled technology called Web Chat so online I went... and there it was on the 'contact us' page a small floating tag with an inviting message "Talk to one of agents now" it was all too simple, why had I not though of this before? In my relief I clicked the link... "Sorry all our agents are busy please contact us by phone on XXX"… a communications company I hear you say?

I don’t take defeat easily and thought I would go ‘old school’… finding my way through the ‘contact us’ page I found my ultimate goal… an email form submission page.

I dutifully filled in all the details name, phone number, account number, reason for the message… clicking ‘submit’ I felt jubilant that now my request was on its way to be dealt with, in fact the confirmation page bore the promise and reassurance of a 48hour resolution… mission accomplished.

My phone buzzed and I immediately concluded this was the confirmation email thanking me for being a wonderful human being and reassuring me that I was the most important customer of Orange/EE… “Dear Customer, we are sorry but we are not accepting emails to this address please contacts us on XXX…” really? what business shuts down their email contact with customers let alone one in the communication business.

So there you have it… Orange/EE a communications company that failed to deal with my simple request on all possible avenues of communication short of visiting an Orange store…

In one final irony I received a text message from Orange/EE asking me to respond to a customer survey where 1 was poor and 10 was excellent… I will let you guess the number I sent, in fact so will Orange/EE, as my final attempt to contact them simply ended with ‘Message Delivery Failure’…

silvercar

I had better luck than you. Phone them this morning and they said their systems were down and they would phone me back after 2pm. Had a return call at 2.30pm and changed my tariff to a better deal while still in contract.