I am sometimes amazed at the bureaucratic incompetence and Kafkaesque daftness of big business. Our ideological masters have been telling us for years how inherently inefficient the state or public sector is, but have you dealt with a large corporation lately? How does the corporate accountability structure differ from a badly run state organisation? I generally find dealing with the local council or Post Office far more satisfactory than dealing with most private utilities.
We have just had a month of wasted phone calls and nonsense from Sky when their sales team convinced my beloved wife to switch from Virgin. It turned out that their subcontracted engineers refused to put a satellite dish on our roof. We were faced with paying £200 to an independent contractor to do this - so the whole savings offer of switching to Sky was bogus. As of June 1 we have had no phone line because Sky could not install it without the right socket. Now we are going back to Virgin, but they cannot get the phone to work again. I have been on the phone for an hour this morning trying to sort it out. Sky have charged us for phone services we never used. The customer service woman initially refused to refund then offered me an address or fax number to contact the complaints department. I said - what, you are telling me that your complaints department doesn't have a phone number? Come on! She stuck with it then went to her line manager. Then she came back saying we could have a refund but we would have to call back again. She claimed that Virgin had not requested our phone number back from Sky and told me to ring them to do this or we would lose our number. So I rang Virgin, and they told me they had requested the number. So I have wasted another morning dealing with this nonsense when I could be working. I still have no phone and I am being billed by two different media companies! And people say market competition is the best way to serve customers.
We have just had a month of wasted phone calls and nonsense from Sky when their sales team convinced my beloved wife to switch from Virgin. It turned out that their subcontracted engineers refused to put a satellite dish on our roof. We were faced with paying £200 to an independent contractor to do this - so the whole savings offer of switching to Sky was bogus. As of June 1 we have had no phone line because Sky could not install it without the right socket. Now we are going back to Virgin, but they cannot get the phone to work again. I have been on the phone for an hour this morning trying to sort it out. Sky have charged us for phone services we never used. The customer service woman initially refused to refund then offered me an address or fax number to contact the complaints department. I said - what, you are telling me that your complaints department doesn't have a phone number? Come on! She stuck with it then went to her line manager. Then she came back saying we could have a refund but we would have to call back again. She claimed that Virgin had not requested our phone number back from Sky and told me to ring them to do this or we would lose our number. So I rang Virgin, and they told me they had requested the number. So I have wasted another morning dealing with this nonsense when I could be working. I still have no phone and I am being billed by two different media companies! And people say market competition is the best way to serve customers.
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