OMG Sky Broadband Helpdesk

Rainja

I don't know about anybody else's experience but every time I speak to someone of support I feel ready to pull my hair out. It is not like your in the best of moods to begin with, as you want to use your internet to do something only to find out it's down. No problem you go to the sky website on your phone to find out if there are any problems in your area and after a few times of going round in circles you find that there are no issues whatsoever. So you decide to call the "sky experts" to see if they can help out.

Your mood will go into steady decline from there. Particularly if you know a thing or two about internet connections and computers. Not sure how they manage it but each and every time you will get someone on the other end of the line who you can barely understand because of some heavy, to me Martian, accent (usually Scottish or Indian) and who speaks so quietly that you're wondering if you're actually talking to the other side - literally. Perhaps a Quija Board could be a more and effective means of communicating with Sky.

Getting down to the actually issue is like having your teeth pulled. Both you and him/her know that you've got no internet. Both parties also know that there is no way that it will be resolved in just this phone call. As a matter of fact, both parties know that this whole phone call will serve no real purpose in this life-time, unless you happen to have forgotten to actually turn on your computer and the Helpdesk operative happens to have it under action point number 7 of his/her trouble shooting guide and you may be one of the lucky few to have an issue resolved.

I wouldn't actually mind if the troubleshooting list was written with an ounce of intelligence. But it seems to have been penned by someone who takes cruel and unusual punishment to heart. Once you've gone over the 15 steps which involves whether you have a mobile phone with internet and if so, why are you calling us to say you have no internet? You get to a milestone. If you can take a picture of your phone socket and send it to them. Ideally by post so they don't have to respond for a while, if ever. If you are unlucky enough of having to go through the ordeal of troubletshooting again, you may well be asked to take a new photo of the phone socket, in case it has made Michael Scofield Prison Break attempts since you called last time and essential screws are missing.

All in all something as important as if your router is actually communicating with sky is never checked. Whether your router may be burning right where it is sitting is never checked. Whether there may be an issue with your network settings on your pc is never checked. In short, I think you can conclude that Sky does not really care about whether your internet is working or not. They only thing they seem to care about is wasting time. As much as they possibly can. Because they can and you're paying for them to do it.

On top of that simple commitments like "we will call you back" or "we will send you this" are never followed through. As a matter of fact you may as well have someone troubleshoot your dis-functional internet on the internet which would produce the same results. No internet at the end of it.

That is actually not entirely true.

Each time you do speak to sky your internet connection may all of the sudden miraculously be fixed after you've put the phone down. You may achieve higher speeds than you did before and you will never find out how this can happen. Even on your next issue and you ask them about what was done last time, no one seems to be aware anything was ever done or fixed. Perhaps its an internet connection deity taking pity upon those having talk to sky or a lonesome technician who recognises its time to jump into action after a fault is being reported.

Anyway. Given the reputation and marketing campaigns of such a large company I find it astonishing that they can't manage to run a decent customer helpdesk operation.

Perhaps its time to move ISPs so I'm open to suggestions. I'm paying around £20 per month for 20mbit which I think may be steep in this day and age. Anyone got any ideas?

Time for a :beer:

pmduk

My Sky broadband has only gone down once, touches wood frantically! I found them helpful, though I had a pretty good idea it was an external fault on my line and had ruled out most of the internal possibilities. It took the advisor 3-4 mins to check the line to confirm it was an external fault and confirm that OR had been notified. BTW his accent was perfectly clear.

teddysmum

I have only had two small problems in three years and found the 'tech' department very helpful.

Rainja

Was this sometime ago? I'm glad they immediately got onto your issue!

Their standard operating procedure these days doesn't include a line check any more during the call (I did have a thorough one in the early days of Sky buying up UKonline so I suspect it was still UKonline that did it). This is now a 24 to 48 hour procedure after which they will call you back at an agreed time and date (which they didn't follow up with me, even when I especially stayed at home for it).

In case your wondering what the steps are, they are the same as your router takes you through trying to self-help getting your connection back up. Rebooting router, checking wires, unplugging and plugging back in phone line and at the end of it you'll get a phone number to call after which you get run through the same exact same process but this time with a person. Towards the end of this exercise they will ask you to take a picture of the phone socket (which is to identify which socket you have) and send this picture to a web portal which of course, doesn't work if you don't have internet but they want you to do it with your mobile. Once you've gone through that, they will want to replace the micro filters which they'll send to you, and when that isn't successful they will send out an engineer who will replace the connection plate for you for some reason.

You cannot get around this process because its the way they do things and otherwise they cannot (read will not) help. If you want to put in a formal complaint the person on the helpdesk has to put it in for you which I doubt would happen.

So I'm a bit surprised you got a line check straight away whilst I nearly begged to have the line checked at the exact point my internet was down just so it could be proven that the fault wasn't on this side - which I'm confident about. They won't let me speak to any technical department either you're just being held at check-list level. It's frustrating to say the least.

Rainja

I actually got so fed up this morning that I decided to factory reset the SKY router (there is a little button on the back and you hold it until the power light starts flashing) Once done, I had to sort out my devices (the thing I was dreading really) as router settings will have been reset.

But behold, 3 hours of un-interupted internet service at 14 ping and 17mb/s downspeed!

You may want to give it a go if your not getting anywhere with your issue. Factory resets are not in their self-help guides as far as I'm aware. I certaintly have never been asked to try it on the phone. So there you go

Edit: I'm in the process now of filing a complaint - this should be interesting.

Rainja

I've been pleasantly surprised by Sky's customer complaints. The person that I spoke to was very knowledgable about the technical side of things and immediately spotted the problems that I was experiencing and that they had indeed not been addressed appropriately by their staff if not wrongly.

So they are going to put forward some training requirements to the people that were involved as well as giving me back £20 to cover the service downtime. Which is goodwill that I wasn't really expecting to see!

For the time being my faith in sky has been restored but I'm not getting too over-excited just yet. Only time will tell.

Just out of interest, what are the support functions of other ISPs like? Any experiences?

pmduk

Mine was last October. I'd explained I'd already rebooted everything, swapped out all the wiring and filters but was very suspicious of the construction work taking place on the estate on which I live. I've only been a customer of Sky and Talktalk, not had to to use TT's tech support but if it's anything like their customer service then I dread to think what it's like.

Have a look at pulse8? A couple of others on here have good things to say about them. On first sight they're pricey £25pm, but that includes broadband and landline and their call rates are cheap.

teddysmum

Rainja,I'm surprised that you didn't do the reset before calling Sky,as it's the second thing to try after just switching the box off then on again, at the mains.

mac.d

Rainja wrote: »

Just out of interest, what are the support functions of other ISPs like? Any experiences?

Any of the 'big' companies like TalkTalk, Sky, BT, Virgin etc tend to be similar IMHO (though some are worse than others, and Sky not usually rated one of the worst), you either choose to pay more by going for an ISP that is highly rated in terms of customer support, or pay less and take your chances & just hope you don't often need to call them!

jas88

£20 for 20Mbps ADSL with "normal" service is a bit steep; if your usage is under 100Gb/month, even my current ISP is only £25, and they specialise in serious pro users (with expensive well-trained support staff to match)!

I thought if you were a Sky customer for TV, their basic broadband service was actually "free" with their phoneline? (Which, at £18 per month, is actually more than £8/month on top of BT's wholesale price, so nothing "free" about it, but still cheap...)

(Support? The one time I had a problem, I ended up talking to the ex-Nokia guy who programs their routers - and he diverted my traffic through a different bit of BT's core network to bypass the fault, then got BT working on fixing it. Try getting that out of Sky - or even BT themselves!)

teddysmum

jas88 wrote: »

£20 for 20Mbps ADSL with "normal" service is a bit steep; if your usage is under 100Gb/month, even my current ISP is only £25, and they specialise in serious pro users (with expensive well-trained support staff to match)!

I thought if you were a Sky customer for TV, their basic broadband service was actually "free" with their phoneline? (Which, at £18 per month, is actually more than £8/month on top of BT's wholesale price, so nothing "free" about it, but still cheap...)

(Support? The one time I had a problem, I ended up talking to the ex-Nokia guy who programs their routers - and he diverted my traffic through a different bit of BT's core network to bypass the fault, then got BT working on fixing it. Try getting that out of Sky - or even BT themselves!)

Sky's tv is a separate contract to phone/broadband, though it's possible to get a better deal by negotiating them at the same time.


Their line rental is not £18 but £17.40.