Diary of a broken phone line

[lnr]

Wednesday August 31st: My mum tries to call me, we realise the phone is broken. It's after 8pm so I try leaving an email through their webform, as they recommend on their webpages as a way of reporting faults. This results in an automated reply to me quoting my mail and saying they might not get back to me as they get so many emails. Not wanting to spend ages on hold on the mobile I leave it for the meantime and hope they'll get back to me.

Sunday September 4th: mum tries to call me again, still broken, decide email is obviously not going to be answered.

Monday September 5th: Call NTL on mobile at lunchtime. Answered after approx 10 mins. Offer to send an engineer "this afternoon, before 6" so I go home to work from home. No engineer. Call NTL on mobile at 6:05 - answered after approx 25 mins, having heard the entire loop of their hold music. Earlier call centre assistant booked "wrong sort of technician" who can't do house calls. When technician got to ticket they gave it back to dispatch. For some reason, despite me having given dispatch my mobile number, no-one called me to let me know. The right sort of engineer is now booked for Thursday morning, 8-12.

NB a very similar problem with phones around this time last year (no dial tone, line gives busy signal if rung) took several weeks to get fixed. They never refunded any line rental. They never refunded me for two 45 min calls on hold on a PAYG mobile. They never refunded me for a wasted morning off when their engineer failed to show up. Admittedly I didn't ring their customer services department and insist, but I suspect I will be doing this time.

Comments

[aldabra]

Bugger customer services. E-mail the CEO. Was aizad.hussain@ntl.com in October, but may have changed. This got me several grovelling phonecalls and a refund for the services I hadn't had and fifty pounds or so towards the cost of being on hold to customer services on my mobile for 45 mins at a time. (But no return visit to fix the "temporary" phone connection, which I've quit worrying about.) Tip courtesy of new_brunette.

[reddragdiva]

There's a reason I have a BT phoneline and Zen DSL. NTL is too expensive at half the price.

[catyak]

Send them a bill for the wasted time. after all, they'd bill you for a failed callout. Make it clear that this is what it is and why you're charging them. Tell them that it's also cost you X on the mobile phone because they've failed to answer your calls in a timely manner and that you'd like that back as well. I'm also opposed to 4-hour slots, it's tempting to respond to their 8-12 with "Well I can only be there between 8 and 10 so if he can't manage it in that timeslot then he'll have to rebook because my time is valuable".

D