What a billing mess.........

[Paulie]

Back in May, i cancelled out tv pack to move to skyhd. Took out the £24.99 talk weekend plan to keep the phone and bb (pretty happy with that). Last months bill seemed ok on the face of it, but this months All of a sudden we get all these extra payments....£17.41 here, £30.50 there and £5.50 for something else. Let alone still getting a £17.99 dd comming out for the bb. For some reason CS can only figure out one thing at a time, therefore you cant go through the whole bill with them. I found out also that all thats applied is a discount code for the phone line and that the origonal £17.99 still comes out. Why the hell cant they just sort out one damn dd instead of two. Surely it makes financial sense not to have a multitude of different dd`s comming in all over the place.

Speaking to a customer relations (obviously got moved up a step) fella, i managed to claw back a credit of £91 odd, but will they put it back into my account ohhh nooooo. Said they could write a cheque but that would take a very long time to come through. So i took the credit, spilt over the two accounts (to make it disolve faster).

What a bloody shambles They must know what everyone has got for christs sake, but just cant work out how to bill people correctly.


Sorry for the rant, but this just really has peed me off big time.

[lostandconfused]

the reasons for two accounts is beacuse you have a telephone line on the ICMS billing system and your broadband account through the harmaony billing sysytem. unfortunatly as your broadband is coming through a cable modem its not possible to have them both on one account

[opelfruitcase]

Originally Posted by lostandconfused

the reasons for two accounts is beacuse you have a telephone line on the ICMS billing system and your broadband account through the harmaony billing sysytem. unfortunatly as your broadband is coming through a cable modem its not possible to have them both on one account

Just to elaborate a little on this...

Due to the way NTL expanded their operations through acquisitions, they were left with a multitude of billing systems. There best one (and generally - but not always - most reliable and accurate) is ICMS which they inherited from C&W. Unfortunately its not able to support cable modems and other internet details (email accounts, webspace, etc). Whereas on the otherhand the far more flimsy and less reliable** Harmony system does support internet accounts and does it quite well. Thats why many customers are billed in this way.

However, from three billing systems from ntl's side of the ntl:Telewest business, all customers from all billing system will move over the Telewests billing system which doesn't suffer with as serious quirks and billing accuracy issues. And yes, when your migrated over to this system it will be possible for you to have just the one bill for all services.

The current practice of some customers having multiple accounts is by no means the most cost effective or easiest to understand. Its caused much pain to the company, us humble staff and its customers for years now. Finally we may be seeing something done... then again hot air has been blown around in the past and nothing has been done, but things may be a bit different now we have some Telewest bods sat at the boardroom table.

So yes while I sympathise with the OP for their problems, some of you will hopefully now have a better understanding as to why things are so confusing at the moment and whats being done to resolve it.


**PS - This is all in my opinion, although I'm sure there's plenty of other employees around here who will nod in agreement to this.