Dear Tristia,
CC: Press.Office@Talktalk.co.uk & Social Media
I hope this open letter/email finds you well. In fact, I hope this email finds you at all. I highly doubt it will and based on the customer service I have received from your company so far, I’ll be surprised if it even gets delivered. Even sending this email to you has been a challenge – I’ve had to tether my laptop to my phone in order to send it to you, as for the last 45 days, we’ve been without internet and telephone line in our house.
Yes Tristia, you read it correctly, we’ve been without service for 45 days. For nearly the entirety of this year, we’ve been without services (Which I hasten to add we’ve continued to pay for) which are supposed to be provided by TalkTalk.
On the 6th of January, we reported to your technical team that we were having an intermittent internet connection over our FTTC line. Initially your technical teams denied such issues, and suggested we had a faulty router which was “hearing a faulty signal”. This absolute unfounded rubbish provided to us by a man over 6 and a half thousand miles away might wash with the majority of your customers, however I work in IT. I had therefore already tried a number of different, known, “Not Faulty” routers and was certain that our connection was at fault.
Eventually, after a number of calls to a large number of offshore call centres, I convinced one of your agents that an Open Reach engineer needed to visit our home and take a proper look. A few days later, I stayed in for the engineer and a lovely man turned up who confirmed that while our copper to the cabinet was absolutely faultless, the Fibre Operations team at Open Reach could see our line disconnecting regularly and suggested that we’d need to be moved to a new fibre port. He told us not to sweat and that although we had no available ports on our cabinet, a high priority ticket would be raised and we would be swapped within a few days, at worst a week.
We were overjoyed to see an engineer working on our cabinet a few days later, but with no further communication from TalkTalk I pulled my car over and spoke to him. He informed me that although it would be a few months before the new cabinet he was installing would be live, there would be no impact on our connection. While not ideal, we thought we’d be able to cope with a few more months of intermittency.
What happened instead is that were plunged into digital darkness. On the 20th January we went dark. We had absolutely nothing. No Phone, No Internet and no communication or real idea as to what was going on from anyone at TalkTalk. The well-known phrase about inability to host a raucous party in a brewery could be used as an adjective to describe things here….
We called… and called… and called and were eventually told that service would be resumed on the 1st March. Unhappy but having made a number of calls to your call centres, including a call where we were told we had been escalated to the CEOs office and we’d get a call back from a member of your team, (we didn’t ) we gave up and decided to sit tight until the 1st March. Meanwhile, we have run up huge bills on our mobile phones for calls and additional data.
The first of March rolled round, and I had to check we hadn’t jumped a whole month to the month of April. Sure enough, when the 2nd of March came, it was no April fool… we were still without anything. Another call to another of your exotic call centres told us that “We should have an update within 3 to 28 days”. THREE TO TWENTY EIGHT DAYS.
As you can imagine Tristia, we are now getting to the end of our tether with this entire charade. We were given a selection of numbers for Open Reach who refused to talk to us, and were even given a case number and engineer update line number so that we could pretend to be TalkTalk in order to try and gain updates and APPLY PRESSURE OURSELVES when it should have been your customer service team doing this. I’m not sure I’d trust your customer service team to service a dead cat, let alone my broadband line.
Further contact with your social media teams with a request for a member of your team to simply call me and explain what the wait is about has failed, with them only yesterday informing me we even had a case manager, and today promising me today a call “within three days”. Have any of your “CEOs Office” even seen my tweets, DMs, Facebook messages and general discontent? I doubt it!
But Tristia, let me tell you the biggest irony in all of this. When the line first went down, we had incoming calls forwarded to the account holder’s mobile. While the line has been down, we’ve had calls from scammers trying to tell us there are problems with our internet. You know, the scammers who have our details from your huge data leak a few years ago – even though you deny leaking our details… Ironic really… for once, the Scamsters are actually correct!
Tristia, The account holder, my dad, has been unable to work for two and a half years. During this time, he’s been using your service to stay sane. From watching TV to browsing the internet, and talking to friends, without the internet and Telephone service you are supposed to be providing, he’s at his lowest he’s been. Adding to this, we’ve noticed his moods have gotten snappy as he’s spending endless amounts of time saying the same thing over and over again to your exceptionally incompetent call centres.
This evening we had a call from an office in Manchester, (Even though the Philippines promised us there wasn’t one!) with more shallow apologies and loose promises of updates in a range of timeframes. Initially updates tonight were going to be in 28 days but when we explained that we were only able to actually hear the calls on our mobile phones by hanging out the kitchen window, it has been suggested that there will be a call tomorrow. I shan’t be holding my breath.
So, Tristia, as you can imagine I’d really like to get this shambles resolved. In fact I’d like to take a day off work to come and visit you at your shiny “NoTalkNoTalk” West London office, where I’m sure you have excellent connectivity. (If you’re sensible, it will be provided by Virgin Media!) Please let me know when would be a convenient date for you to meet with me, and I will ensure to arrange appropriate leave time from work.
Honestly, I’m not sure how you can get something so simple, so wrong. In 45 days, all we’ve had is shallow, half-hearted apologies – no one has even told us the reason that the line has gone completely dead. We know there was nothing wrong with it – the Open Reach engineer told me that when he was in our home.
I really look forward to hearing from you, (although doubt that I will.)
Kind regards,
A very disgruntled Steven Phillips.
(@steveeypips)