[Chris W]

Originally Posted by dr wadd

It's one thing to moan about the attitude of customers, but until all the CS/TS staff stop treating customers with contempt and assuming they are idiots then no-one at NTL is in a position to complain when customers get frustrated.

not all the the staff do.

I stressed all in the above paragraph as there are decent, helpful representatives at NTL, but as a rule of thumb, if I have to speak to NTL on the phone I can safely make the following assumptions 99% of the time.

so you don't mean all of the staff then... or do the "decent helpful representatives" treat the customers with contempt too...?

1. The person on the other end of the phone won`t actually listen to what you are saying, almost as though they have a "random fault" generator that they use rather than paying attention to the fault you are reporting.

Yes how worthwhile that would be... actually don't bother telling them what the fault is next time, and you can play a little guessing game instead.

2. No matter how much information you give them they are likely to ignore it and follow the set crap about rebooting your PC. Lights out on cable modem, reboot the PC, yeah, that's going to work.

The process is there for a reason- we run reports on the modem and this has to show that it has been rebooted. If it cannot be seen from the logs that this has been done, the chances of the region refusing to book an engineer are much higher, hence customer doesn't get a phonecall back, gets annoyed etc etc. How long does it take to reboot a modem?! 30 seconds... and it takes that long to fill an engineer request in anyway. You might as well just do it. And actually, it very often does work. Why do you think there are IVRs when you call TS telling you to reboot? why do you think we get you to do it...? I can assure you it is not just to waste your time and frustrate you.

3. If you make a specific point that needs to be recorded in notes it isn`t going to be recorded. 4 or 5 calls to NTL a couple of weeks back, specifically stressed that I needed an RGB capable STB for a replacement, each time checked to see if that had been logged in the notes. I think you can guess what the answer was each time.

If someone asks me to note something i will do it, after all, if you want to you can request to see all your account notes (Data protection act) so you would able to see who has/ has not recorded what you asked them to.

4. If you aren`t getting good service and ask for a supervisor the person on the phone will refuse point blank unless you persist on the line for an extended period. It normally turns out that the supervisor is even less helpful than the person you first spoke to.

Not me... if someone wants to talk to my manager that is fine by me! I won't do anything at all to stop you, because i know i am good at my job, and my manager is paid more than me to deal with escalations. Why should i stop a customer moaning to a manager when i want to

5. If you ask for a call back work on the presumption that it isn`t going to happen.

I will not promise a callback, unless i know i can do it myself, or guarantee that someone will do it for me. It does wind me up when people ring up and demand callbacks because they have been waiting... why should we call you back and keep the other XX customers who are queuing waiting even longer? Don't think you would be happy if you were one of the other waiting customers....! If you rung me in TS and asked for a callback, unless their were very good grounds then i would say no. You could complain to my manager as well, but that is your prerogative

There are exceptions, and as I posted on another thread (or possibly this one) the guy I had to deal with on Friday night was polite and went out of his way to be helpful. But in the main I can apply these rules and they`ll be an accurate representation of the process.

Finally, I forgot to mention this in an earlier post, while suffering my woes with NTL over the last few weeks I was forced to make a call from my office. After about 25 minutes on hold one of my colleagues asked me who I was waiting for all that time. I just told her to guess. Her immediate answer was simply "NTL". I had not said a word about who I was trying to call, simply being on hold for that long is enough for people to assume you are calling NTL. They really do have a serious reputation problem.

Agreed, there are always exceptions. But also remember it is the people who have bad experiences who talk- i always remember being taught in business studies-

if you provide good service to a customer, they might recommend you to one friend. If you provide bad service to a customer, they will tell at least 3 of their friends.

I think ntl's reputation (aside from this forum) is not bad, most broadband isp reviews that i look at rate ntl as average, definately not one of the best, but also not among the worst either.

From a person point of view, i would recommend ntl to anyone, and i regularly do (check my sig ) . This is not just because i work for them, but because from a purely customer point of view, i have never had any problems. Never had to wait more than 5mins for CS to answer, only once lost connectivity for literally a matter of hours overnight, and always had a good phone service. So me happy but i appreciate that many others aren't... so come here and express your problems... isn't that what cableforum is here for

Anyway... just to bring this back on topic... the call wait times for TS are indeed very long

MB