Yesterday I finally managed to sever our ties to NTL. We used to use them for phone and broadband, then we switched to another phone service and yesterday I asked them to cancel our broadband.
The people we’re switching to aren’t cheaper, but they’re small and ethical. Also, they’re not NTL. This might seem a bit harsh, but NTL seem to have a knack of fouling up whenever they can. I shan’t go through everything here as it would get tedious quite quickly, but as an example there’s the time when we moved house. We had used NTL for phones at our previous house and wanted to move our number with them to the new house. I gave them plenty of warning and the engineer turned up on moving to sort us out.
Pretty much the first thing he said was “Where’s your box?” – we didn’t have one as none of the previous owners had been NTL customers. “I’m only here for a reconnection; I was told there was an old connection here.” Who, better than NTL, would know if NTL had ever supplied a particular house? 🙄
Anyway, NTL managed to go out in style. I phoned up yesterday and got their press-3-for-this system. I pressed what I thought were the right buttons and got through to someone. I told them my account number and said I’d like to stop my broadband and was told “Please hang on while I put you through the disconnections department”. OK, maybe disconnection is rare enough that it’s not something that everyone’s trained to do.
I got through to the disconnection department and was asked for my post code. “Hang on while I put you through to the disconnection person for your area.” Hmmm… this seems a bit poor, but OK. The third person then asked for my account number again, couldn’t find my account details on their computer system, asked for my post code and told me I’d been put through to the wrong area and so transferred me to someone else.
The fourth person seemed to be the right one! He was very nice and asked me why I wanted to cancel. I said it was because I got better service elsewhere, and he offered me NTL broadband free for 3 months if I’d stay. I said I’d already ordered the new broadband. How about super-fast broadband for the price of my current broadband? No, I’ve already signed the contract. OK. Long silent hold later, and all was done.
The irony of having to talk to 4 different people over 15 minutes to execute a really simple transaction was not lost on me.
Yes, I always enjoy that type of waste of time 🙄
Never really ahd that much of problem with HTL when we had them in Leeds. In fact was quite impressed with them outisde in the dark at about 8 pm fixing our Cable BB. And they rang me up a bit later on to check if it was working.
But yep it bugs me when you go through the ‘if you want this service’ press 3 and then you have to still explain what you want to do. If I press 3 to pay my bill, why doesn’t the person answering know that and just say, hi, so you wanty to pay your bill?
PS, who’s your new BB supplier?