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Monday, September 04, 2006

Carphone Warehouse : Pulling my hair out

My personal woes with TalkTalk continue and my home broadband has been out-of-action since 8pm Sunday evening. The comedians in the customer service continue with their implausible scripted nonsense.

On a call to report a line fault: “I have a clicking sound in the background, whenever I use the phone”. “I can send a BT engineer out, but if the fault is yours, it will cost you £80”. Perhaps, BT should help TalkTalk with the engineering of their network, because Opal Telecom (the CPW subsid) obviously doesn’t have a clue.

On the broadband outage: “We have no outages at your exchange and I cannot answer any further questions because you are not using the supplied TalkTalk modem.” - I’m using a fairly standard D-Link Wireless Router. I asked if they have had any outages in the last two weeks – No. These gems cost me £1.

On a call to OFCOM complaining about TalkTalk not providing fault information and charging for rubbish support: “They don’t have to provide Fault Information and some companies charge £1.50/minute for helplines”. In other words, OFCOM can’t/won’t do anything about it.

I was even more upset when I found out the new CPW policy – “People over the age of 70 must be accompanied by a child to explain the small print” before they sign-up. If only they would have refused my application to join, my life would have been a lot easier now.

Charles Dunsontes quote from his blog springs to mind “As things start to improve, I hope people will appreciate that what we did was for the best for all consumers, and whilst giving birth to free broadband was painful, it is now turning out to be a beautiful child.”

I can’t believe this, even the most blinkered parents would not say that the terrible voice and broadband service quality and even worse customer service quality does not constitute a beautiful child.