Rant Companies today!

Raven

I am a FH squatter
FH Subscriber
Joined
Dec 27, 2003
Messages
45,668
Is anyone else totally fed up with pretty much all companies being utterly useless?

Last weekend my O2 mobile phone contract ran out so after a little shopping around I settled on a Samsung Pixon from Orange, I managed to get a pretty decent deal with them. The phone arrived (its smashing btw) and I set it all up, charged it and started messing about with it, had a temporary number while the PAC code transfer was going through. Anyway I noticed that I have zero reception at home, I have to walk to the bottom of the garden to make a phone call, I get zero reception in the pub and 2 bars at work. Obviously this made the phone useless to me. So I phoned them up and asked them to cancel the PAC code transfer as I wanted to cancel under their 14 day terms, they confirmed that this was fine and they would send out a returns envelope, cancel the transfer and that would be the end of it.
I then phoned O2 and explained the situation and they set me up with an upgrade to my existing account, the same deal as orange but also chucked in free home broadband for a year. Quids in I thought!
No. New O2 phone arrived today, stuck my O2 sim in it but it wouldn't work. Turns out some fuckwit at orange half carried out the PAC code change and took my number from O2 but did not transfer it to my Orange account. I phoned them up only to be in a hold cycle with some dickhead called Ranjit or some shit who really couldn't understand the concept of the English language. I have now got 2 samsung Pixons (which I have to return) and no telephone contract I have also lost my mobile number which I have had for about 8 years. Orange did enough to take the number thus automatically closing my O2 account.

I have had to set up a brand new O2 account with a new number and everything now but because I am technically a new customer I can't get the free broadband :(

An afternoon wasted talking to dickhead call centre drones.

Then I get home and find Npower have sent me a bill for £200 odd quid electricity even though we changed over from them to E-on last July. We changed supplier as soon as we moved into our current house and were only with them for about two weeks. Another series of calls to prompt card reading window lickers to sort it out, I am not even sure if it is sorted out, I had pretty much lost interest by the time he had finished rambling off his little cards.

Whatever the fuck happened to competence, does education even exist any more or is the ability to read a prompt card enough to get a customer facing job?


Gaaaaah!

Still, I have bought empire total war to make myself feel better, a bit of frog bashing will do wonders.

Oh and sorry about the wall of text, a bit of venting :)
 

Uara

Part of the furniture
Joined
Jul 24, 2004
Messages
2,254
Empire Total War, fucking A game!! Frog Bashing makes everything better!!

EDIT:Oh and I had the same situation with Npower. When I moved into a house in 2nd year I was with Npower but looked around for a cheaper deal and unsurprisingly found one! So went with them, all was fine up until 6 months later got a rather heft bill from Npower for the last quarter. Ended up being on hold for ages and having to restrain much annoyance over the phone!
 

Chronictank

FH is my second home
Joined
Jan 21, 2004
Messages
10,133
Unfortunately you don't actually have to know what you are talking about to work in these call centers anymore.
You turn up, they do some training and the rest is read off a screen :/
In the past the people you talked to had to be somewhat competant as these types of systems didn't really exist.
 

Syri

FH is my second home
Joined
Jan 4, 2004
Messages
1,019
A lot of companies are sacrificing quality for numbers. Get as many people served as possible, in as short a time as possible. Here we see the result.
I worked for a while on the support lines at dixons doing support for pc world and the rest of the group. Some of the targets were just mad. Wanted you to get average call length of about 8 minutes, and deliver quality support still... just couldn't be done. So many people ended up instead of solving problems, just telling the customer to format the pc just to make it quicker, then let someone else deal with the backlash from it.
Unfortunately, people keep on getting the services using this method, so everyone else switched to it aswell, and the whole thing just went to pot.
 

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