Internet Access

Posted on August 7th, 2008 by ray.
Categories: General Blog.

A week tomorrow and I should have broadband again, thanks to good old Virgin Media and a 20Mbps line. I will also have a nice clear telephone landline as well.

This is a significant improvement from my current ADSL connection of 0.5-3Mbps and the noise ridden piece of crap telephone line I have at the moment.

Suffice to say, moving my broadband and telephones to Sky was probably the worst ever decision I made when it comes to changing providers, as I have had nine months of techno-misery.

I have told Sky I’m leaving them to go back to Virgin and I want a refund for the services they never provided, however they have said no. I expected this would be their standard response though and in fact their argument for not refunding me works in my favour, as it’s exactly the reason why I do want a refund - so thank you Sky, perhaps that’s a lesson for you to treat customers as individuals before making decisions rather than blanket responses and having commission driven Salesmen.

Their whole stance is they say “up to” on various literature about the speeds you can get and when you telephone them, which I am fine with which is why I’m not daft enough to order a service blindly - but when they specifically tell me what I can have then it’s a whole different ball-game (basically they said I could have the full 16Mbps speeds as I’m only 400 metres from the exchange, but I said as long as I get 10Mbps then I’m happy so wouldn’t mind if there was fluxuation between 10Mbps - 16Mbps providing it doesn’t go to single figures). I suspect there’s so much controversy at the moment with the ancient copper lines and “up to” adverts that they’re assuming all customers reporting speed issues are the same, which is what they seemed to have done with me and their standard response. In reality, my complaint is the service sold to the service promosied which happens to be speed in this case but could really be about anything.

I’ve seen this so many times in so many companies where a commission (or greed) driven Salesman makes promises they can’t keep, but as soon as it’s a “ker-ching” and you’re signed up, then they wipe their hands of you and it’s over to Support and Customer services to deal with the aftermath, where Support and Customer Services are most likly pretty resentful for having to clean up after a Salesman who’s got a nice commission for creating this problem (as his managers only see it as a new sale/customer) yet they’re not allowed to just be open and honest that the Salesman was wrong and you need an apology and a refund as this will then be reflected as a customer churn figure that their managers do not want, and there’s no chance of being put back through to the Salesman who created the problem as “that’s not his role” (as he’s too busy bullshitting other people)

Without giving a plug for where I work, this is one of the big reasons we have the one team to handle a customer’s whole life cycle. If a customer has any problems, then he’ll be speaking to the same lads and ladettes who he spoke to when he first took out the package.

Anyway, if you are intrested in what I and they said and why I want a refund for the unprovided services, then see below:

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