For a company that’s now 3rd in the UK as far as broadband providers go, and the amount of customers they have, there are bound to be teething problems when launching “free broadband”.

Thank you for your email.

I do apologise for the loss of service you have encountered while TalkTalk have been upgrading your exchange. Firstly I would like to apologise for your call being dropped, the adviser you were speaking to did try to call you back, however we were experiencing difficulties with our equipment and the system wouldn’t allow the adviser to call out.

I understand your frustration caused by this issue, however you are in an 18 month contract for your broadband and if you do decide to cancel there is a £70.00 cancellation charge.

I understand that you have encountered loss of services now for 35 days and this is not acceptable. I have credit your account £19.99 and £11.00 this will cover a full month’s package charge. I hope you can accept this credit as a gesture of goodwill for the frustration and inconvenience that has been caused due to this issue.

Please note that if you do decide to cancel your services with TalkTalk I would advise that you contact the supplier you wish to be with and they will transfer your services for you. Also you will need to contact our cancellations department to confirm this. Please be aware of the cancellation charge.

The Carphone Warehouse pride ourselves on excellent customer service and in this instance we have certainly not provided this to you. I am sorry for the upset and inconvenience caused.

I hope you can accept my sincere apologises and the credit raised for the inconvenience and frustration that has been caused due to this issue.

If you have any general queries, please call customer services on 0870 444 1820.

For technical queries, please contact broadband technical support on 0871 226 7146 or email broadbandsupport@talktalk.co.uk. Calls to this number are charged at 10 pence per minute (call charges may vary from mobile phones and other telecom operators).

Both of these numbers can become busy during peak periods and TalkTalk apologises for any inconvenience caused by the delays.

Kind Regards
Jennifer Warren
Correspondence Department

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Dear Jennifer Warren,

Thank-you for you response on this matter. Please could you provide me with a proposed date for my services to be up and running again? Your code of conduct clearly states that this is one of your responsibilities when dealing with a fault. I am willing to accept the credit to my account for the services that I have not received over the past 35 days, but this will in no way compensate me should I have to wait another 35 days for my service to resume. I hope that any additional days that I am without service will also be credited to my account.

I feel strongly that if this issue is not resolved in the next 7 days, I should be able to cancel my contract without any cancellation charge. Afterall, part of the contract I signed was that you provide me with a working service. I find it completely ridiculous that I am expected to pay for a service that is not being provided and should I wish to find better service elsewhere, you wish to charge me. It isn’t as if I’ve just decided that are better deals elsewhere and want to cancel. I have kept to my side of the contract and expect to have a service that I am paying for.

As a loyal customer of both TalkTalk and The CarphoneWarehouse, I am unfortunately writing to complain about the non existent TalkTalk service and poor customer service that I have received since the 17th October 2006.

Dated 11th October 2006, I received a letter from yourselves informing me that the TalkTalk network was being upgraded to improve the services I receive. However, since the proposed upgrade date on the 17th October, I have had no TalkTalk service at all, meaning I have been unable to make or receive telephone calls or access the internet.

The first 3 times I tried calling the customer services team to report the fault, I was on hold for over 30 minutes and on each occasion my call was not answered and the line went dead. All of these calls had to be made from my mobile phone and was therefore charged national rate for these calls.

When I finally managed to get through to speak to someone, they told me that the fault was due to a problem with the upgrade and that I should wait a few days for the problem to be rectified. After two days, I still didn’t have any service at all so called the customer services team again. I was then told that they were still investigating the problem and could I bear with them, but they could not give me a proposed date of resolution.

I then left it for another few days and again called the customer services team. I was then told that they still hadn’t highlighted the cause of the problem but an engineer had been assigned to look at my case. I was also told that in the meantime a call divert could be set up so that any calls made to my landline number would be directed to my mobile. This has never been set up.

I then contacted TalkTalk through the Contact Us section of your website to complain, I was informed that even though I had been without a service for 28 days, I was not entitled to any compensation or refund and that they could confirm that no changes had been made to my service and caller divert had not been set up on my account.

Today (35 days without service!), I called your faults department, who informed me that I had come through to the wrong department, they said they would need to transfer me through to the correct department, on trying to transfer me, I was cut off. I then tried 3 more times, speaking to 3 different people who all on trying to transfer me, cut me off! Admittedly, the last person I did speak to took my mobile number in case I was cut off again and they could return my call. However, as of yet, I have not had a return phone call. Throughout this time, you still continued to take my £20.99 line rental by direct debit from my account.

As you can probably tell, I am extremely upset and frustrated at the appalling service I have received from TalkTalk. I feel that going 35 days without a service at all is completely unacceptable and extremely inconvenient.

I now realise that I am not alone in receiving terrible service from TalkTalk. The following URL link makes interesting reading:

http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/2006/08/02/charles-dunstones-email-address/

I understand that when I subscribed to TalkTalk, I signed up for a contract of 18 months, however, as part of that contract you have a responsibility to provide a service, which you are not doing. I would therefore like to cancel my contract with immediate effect and claim a refund of my last months line rental of £20.99, the £29.99 connection fee and compensation for the calls made to your customer service team and inconvenience of not having any of the services fro 35 days.

My landline number is 0nnnnnnnnn1 and TalkTalk Account number is 5nnnnn9.

I would appreciate your response on this matter and can be contacted through the following channels:

mobile: xxxxxxxxx
email: xxxx@xxxxx.com

(I wonder whether I shall finally get anything sorted following this email to CD???)

After many many calls to Opal/Carphone warehouse, and to other internet providers (for advice) I found out that Carphone had not programmed an email address routing table correctly and, incidentally, that many other ex-Onetel business customers had suffered a similar fate. Depite my providing technical advice to Carphone as to what part of their system they had to fix, they seemed unable to deliver, so now I get my email through a third party (much safer – you can pick it up no matter which ISP you use) and just use broadband for the connection.

Coincidentally, early this year a guy at Kingston’s Carphone Warehouse shop interpreted a causal conversation about business telecoms as an instructiuon to switch our business lines over. They used the private account details for my wife’s mobile phone to do this (a big suprise when our bank statement came in) and it was a nightmare to undo. No forms had been filled in or signed for this to happen. No real apology from Carphone for hijacking our account in this way.

Dunstone’s acquisition of AOL customers will certainly throw up more horrors as they try to combine and rationalise the network of ‘customers’ they are amassing.

All I can do from my perspective as an IT lecturer who lectures Undergraduates on how HelpDesk systems work (or don’t) is make sure that the students I lecture are all aware that the case study I present of an incompetent company, including listings of my dozens of calls and eMails with them, relate to TalkTalk. I can’t tell them the best Phone/Broadband company to sign up with, but tell all the students I can, passionately, and with clear evidence to avoid TalkTalk at all costs. ‘Cost’ being the important word. They are not worth the time and effort.

Sam Broome of the ‘High Level Complaints’ department Brooms@cpwplc.com is supposedly one of those empowered to actually sort out problems. You might try eMailing him. It does beg the question what Mr Dunstones hundreds of other call centre staff are doing.