ChuKKy
07-02-2004, 11:50
I have been a customer with NTL (telephone & TV) for around five years with very few problems. When I have had reason to contact customer support, once I actually got through to them, I found them to be friendly and helpful.
I took up their Broadband offer in December with the first months service free. The £24.99 credit for the first month appeared on our usual bill for the telephone & tv and I assumed that moving forward this is where the monthly BB charge would be applied ..... Wrong!
Yesterday morning I received in the post what must be the most unprofessional letter I have ever seen from NTL telling me that two direct debits they had presented to my bank over a two month period for my BB access have not been accepted. On the letter, my name was all in lower case, their message was very unclear, there was no telephone contact number and a different account number reference from the usual one we see on our bills?
I rang NTL yesterday morning and after much hold music spoke to a young lad in customer services (I am not including his name in this email, although I do have it). He gave a very confusing explanation which I understood to mean that my BB charge could not be applied on the same bill as my other services as I have a stand alone modem? WHY I do not understand, but there you go.
What I would like to state at this stage is that I am not disputing atall that I owe NTL an amount of money for supplying my BB access.
I told him that I had not seen a bill atall for the BB service, other than the credit for the first month and was told that the seperate bill is sent monthly to my email account. I said that I had not received any billing emails in my account. This is when the young lad lost his temper with me and quite unprofessionally snapped that they had been sent (implying I was lying about not receiving them?).
He said that if I did not pay immediately over the phone, that my BB service could be suspended! I said that if he made that happen rather than resolving my issue of receiving no bills, then he should send an engineer to my home today to remove ALL other NTL services as I would cancel everything. As I previously stated up until this point in my NTL relationship I had found them to be pretty good at resolving problems and his attitude was such that I did not feel like an NTL Customer anymore.
He continued by saying "you can't cancel anyway as you have signed a 12 month contract". Now that is interesting, I have not even seen a contract for my BB service. This was actually remarked upon by the engineer when he came to install the service, he was surprised I had not had the contract and said that it was probably held up in the post.
Customer Service telephone calls are supposed to be recorded 'for training purposes' I would like to highlight to someone in NTL's Training Department that yesterday's conversation would be great material for a training session on 'how not to interact with a customer' forget expensive John Cleese videos!
This lad had obviously decided he did not want to continue speaking with me (HIS CUSTOMER) and muttered that he was putting me through to the Technical Team.
The guy in Technical was far more professional and said he would send me a test email, which arrived immediately, as I expected as the email works just fine. I said that this test has not resolved the issue of me not receiving bills, but has proved that my email system is working. This means they would have to investigate what was happening at their end as I was not getting the billing emails if they were being sent. The odd thing is that I have received one email from NTL about a week ago warning me of the myDOOM virus, so they obviously have my email address correctly entered in their system.
The Technical chap said he was going to explain to someone in Customer Services and after a short while I was transferred, thankfully to a different person than my first experience!
I told this person that I am not in dispute about the amount owing and as soon as I receive the bills they have supposedly sent I will settle immediately. As it has been implied that I have received the Ebills I have asked for the original emails containing date stamps to be resent to me, this will prove to me they were actually sent. This was entered in a note against my account and he told me I should receive the emails today ... guess what, 26hrs later still no emails!
Now my worry is this .... If i do not receive the Ebills from their automatic email billing system today, what are they going to do to resolve that problem? Without action, I will continue to not receive anything.
I am in conversation with my bank, as it is their usual practise to inform customers of rejected direct debit attempts yet I had not seen anything relating to the supposed two attempts NTL have made? What I can't understand is that I have always paid NTL via direct debit for my other services over five years without a single problem?
Some questions I would really appreciate answers to from you professional people at NTL (I do read these forums so I know that there are some good customer facing people within NTL):
1) Should I have received and signed a contract for the Broadband?
2) If the Broadband charge is seperate from my other services, should I also have received a new direct debit mandate? (I suspect NTL have presented these charges to the direct debit that I already had set up for my other services, but if my bank see anything different, such as a different account reference, they obviously will not allow the transaction to go through).
3) How can I be sure that I am going to receive future Ebills?
4) Is there a customer complaints procedure within NTL?
As a footnote, I would like to add that I am a Manager of a customer facing telephone team within a Global Company who pride themselves on an extremely high level of Customer Service. What I experienced from one individual in NTL (I have his name) did not make me feel like a customer atall. I hope NTL use their telephone recording practice to good use.
Thanks in advance for any help received.
I took up their Broadband offer in December with the first months service free. The £24.99 credit for the first month appeared on our usual bill for the telephone & tv and I assumed that moving forward this is where the monthly BB charge would be applied ..... Wrong!
Yesterday morning I received in the post what must be the most unprofessional letter I have ever seen from NTL telling me that two direct debits they had presented to my bank over a two month period for my BB access have not been accepted. On the letter, my name was all in lower case, their message was very unclear, there was no telephone contact number and a different account number reference from the usual one we see on our bills?
I rang NTL yesterday morning and after much hold music spoke to a young lad in customer services (I am not including his name in this email, although I do have it). He gave a very confusing explanation which I understood to mean that my BB charge could not be applied on the same bill as my other services as I have a stand alone modem? WHY I do not understand, but there you go.
What I would like to state at this stage is that I am not disputing atall that I owe NTL an amount of money for supplying my BB access.
I told him that I had not seen a bill atall for the BB service, other than the credit for the first month and was told that the seperate bill is sent monthly to my email account. I said that I had not received any billing emails in my account. This is when the young lad lost his temper with me and quite unprofessionally snapped that they had been sent (implying I was lying about not receiving them?).
He said that if I did not pay immediately over the phone, that my BB service could be suspended! I said that if he made that happen rather than resolving my issue of receiving no bills, then he should send an engineer to my home today to remove ALL other NTL services as I would cancel everything. As I previously stated up until this point in my NTL relationship I had found them to be pretty good at resolving problems and his attitude was such that I did not feel like an NTL Customer anymore.
He continued by saying "you can't cancel anyway as you have signed a 12 month contract". Now that is interesting, I have not even seen a contract for my BB service. This was actually remarked upon by the engineer when he came to install the service, he was surprised I had not had the contract and said that it was probably held up in the post.
Customer Service telephone calls are supposed to be recorded 'for training purposes' I would like to highlight to someone in NTL's Training Department that yesterday's conversation would be great material for a training session on 'how not to interact with a customer' forget expensive John Cleese videos!
This lad had obviously decided he did not want to continue speaking with me (HIS CUSTOMER) and muttered that he was putting me through to the Technical Team.
The guy in Technical was far more professional and said he would send me a test email, which arrived immediately, as I expected as the email works just fine. I said that this test has not resolved the issue of me not receiving bills, but has proved that my email system is working. This means they would have to investigate what was happening at their end as I was not getting the billing emails if they were being sent. The odd thing is that I have received one email from NTL about a week ago warning me of the myDOOM virus, so they obviously have my email address correctly entered in their system.
The Technical chap said he was going to explain to someone in Customer Services and after a short while I was transferred, thankfully to a different person than my first experience!
I told this person that I am not in dispute about the amount owing and as soon as I receive the bills they have supposedly sent I will settle immediately. As it has been implied that I have received the Ebills I have asked for the original emails containing date stamps to be resent to me, this will prove to me they were actually sent. This was entered in a note against my account and he told me I should receive the emails today ... guess what, 26hrs later still no emails!
Now my worry is this .... If i do not receive the Ebills from their automatic email billing system today, what are they going to do to resolve that problem? Without action, I will continue to not receive anything.
I am in conversation with my bank, as it is their usual practise to inform customers of rejected direct debit attempts yet I had not seen anything relating to the supposed two attempts NTL have made? What I can't understand is that I have always paid NTL via direct debit for my other services over five years without a single problem?
Some questions I would really appreciate answers to from you professional people at NTL (I do read these forums so I know that there are some good customer facing people within NTL):
1) Should I have received and signed a contract for the Broadband?
2) If the Broadband charge is seperate from my other services, should I also have received a new direct debit mandate? (I suspect NTL have presented these charges to the direct debit that I already had set up for my other services, but if my bank see anything different, such as a different account reference, they obviously will not allow the transaction to go through).
3) How can I be sure that I am going to receive future Ebills?
4) Is there a customer complaints procedure within NTL?
As a footnote, I would like to add that I am a Manager of a customer facing telephone team within a Global Company who pride themselves on an extremely high level of Customer Service. What I experienced from one individual in NTL (I have his name) did not make me feel like a customer atall. I hope NTL use their telephone recording practice to good use.
Thanks in advance for any help received.