Page 1 of How Crapp is Talk Talk

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I've recently had the displeasure of becoming a new customer of talk talk internet services; there customer services appear too based in a province of India where the dialect is particularly poor. My first encounter with a customer support agent named Minge-eater who had a very poor grasp of the queens English and wanted to know my MAC code so they can proceed with my connection, despite telling Minge-eater that I was already connected to the talk talk internet service and that despite send my MAC code to them 3 times by every means possible (excluding carrier pigeon) that I really was connected she insisted that she could not proceed my order without the MAC code. I now believe there is a special school somewhere in India that churn out half wits with zero charisma and freshly lobotomised to deal with enquires of normal people. I'm sure that Jeremy Beadle is making a new series and these people purposely aggravate us into ranting madmen. They try to use the phonetic alphabet badly using terms like Annie for the letter A instead of Alpha unfortunately this sound Harry when spoken with a strong Punjabi accent. Talk Talk please employ English speaking people we can understand and treat customers like they matter and not as another number, my only saving grace is that as current customer I did manage to get Talk Talk to agree that I could opt of the service free of charge it proved to be crap and guess what it is.

End of rant what's your experience.

PS: I've nothing against Indian people some of my best friends are Asians I just don't like talking to daft ones who can't speak English.

[quote][/quote]tell me about it. TalkTalk have now bought out OneTel (who I am with) and have to go through the same fiasco. if I hear it is "Dave" from India I hang up now. They can`t go "off script" as they have no idea as to what to do or say.
When my one year is up I am changing to any ISP, that doesn`t have "help" based in India.
I know they are poor and it is a classy job to have for them (it doesn`t solve the problem of the poor anyway),. but I am paying for help assistance and I want exactly that.
Wrong forum though. Not much of a bargain.

This item was edited on Saturday, 23rd September 2006, 00:47

Hope your telecom problem is now sorted but

Quote:
Welcome to our Bargain Buckets Forum. This is for postings indicating current cheap deals, special offers, low priced DVD and hardware, and promotional offers, whether they are from the Internet, high street or mail order suppliers.

I came home from work about 5 months ago. My wife sat me down and said that she had done something. Somebody had called from talk talk and convinced her to go with them for internet and home telephone. Hmm ok I said free broadband is appealing. So I went alon with it. We got sent all the stuff and were told we needed to wait 30 days to get the exchange switched or whatever it is they do. Forgot a wee bit about it then the wife remembered. She called them only to be told that our area is not enabled to get the offer. She went mental.
I could have accepted it if we called them. But they called us saying how great it would, but forgot to tell us that we could`t actually use what they were selling us. Luckily we managed to to get our contract cancelled after 3 months and I will never go back to talk talk or the carphone warehouse.

Hey you guy`s

Just an update on my experience with Talk Talk and the `Free Broadband` deal. As an existing customer with my phone I upgraded to the Talk 3 International package at a cost of £9.99p per month together with my line rental transfered from BT at £11 per month. I applied in May and was processed quickly for the phone and charges with the promise of broadband by 10th August. For this time i still had to pay for broadband from my current provider. A Migration code was given late May as requested by Talk Talk. 10th August came and went with a further promise of Broadband by end of August. By 5th September still no activity and still no sign of the modem and activation package. Contact via E mail made again with the reply that another MAC code was required and if I forwarded this to them they would process as soon as possible and within a further 10 days give me an indication as to when the broadband would be activated. This on my estimation would put a possible date for broadband activation at the end of September if I was lucky. During the whole of this period however Talk Talk have had the benefit of my upgrade fee since May with no `free broadband` I feel I have been had over and wonder if anyone else has had similar problems. ( like most companies these days the problem can not be sorted via phone due to language difficulties! )

A further update from Talk Talk
Dear Mr Welsh,

Thank you for your email.

I once again apologise for the lack of service which you ave received.

I can confirm that the **************** has been used to reprovision your broadband order and you will be receiving your welcome pack containing your username, password and go live date within the next 7 working days.

I hope that this will now bring an end to your troubles with ourselves and you will soon be enjoying our service.

I am now a further 10days since this message and have heard nothing further, all the threats concerning breach of contract by them have been ignored. The apologies they give are totally empty. I would like to contact the head man of this outfit to establish if he knows what is going on with his company but do not know how to achieve this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Totally frustrated by them and wonder if they realise or care that the public can also be responsible for their demise.

Had to reply and let you know: YES, we have had the same experience!

Almost exactly the same, in fact - applied late May, provided the MAC at that time, got asked to provide it again...tried calling the phone number provided and it was dead...they denied all knowledge of the previous MAC ever having been supplied.

In defence of Indian call centers, I work in a customer support organisation with colleagues in India and TalkTalk`s people don`t seem to be as good as the people I know out there. Please don`t assume all Indian call centers are bad. However, my experience of TalkTalk`s support has been poor (and I told them so). Their infrastructure just doesn`t seem to be set up to properly route or track customer queries - which is the basics of customer support. Also, their people have not been trained to use their brains - they know how to stick to a script.

The way it works in India is that the big name companies get the best people, because of the associated kudos/marriageability (seriously) that association brings the employee. The bigger the call center, the better for the employee, because of the opportunities for advancement. TalkTalk may well be struggling to hire or retain people against other well-known companies such as BT.

Anyway, we finally got connected two weeks ago, but although they sent us a username and password, no modem or software ("in the post"....or so we were told two weeks ago!). We have a wireless modem but having called TalkTalk tech support (10p a minute) they told us we have to speak to the modem vendor to get the settings to make it work with TalkTalk broadband. Which baffles me, as we never had to do this with BT Broadband - it just worked.

We wrote to TalkTalk to complain about having to pay for the Talk3 package in addition to BT Broadband from May to September, which we estimate cost us around £120. In response, they wrote back to us blaming us for late provision of the MAC (which we provided on the day of ordering broadband in May!) and offering a paltry £10 credit to our bill.

Too little, too late. We are now planning to cancel the whole lot, phone and broadband, and be done with it. Which is a shame, because the phone service worked fine and did save us money...

I see that CPW have just won the bid to buy AOL UK. God help AOL customers!

Birch 295. Thanks for your posting,your experience has run almost along identical lines. On 9/10/06 a letter was scripted by TalkTalk to inform me that my Broadband was activated on 06/10/06 and that my connect and go CD together with the modem if not already received would be with me within a few days of receiving the letter. Now 19/10/06 and no sign of the package. The problem was compounded however, by talk talk using the migration code and my previous provider who was paid for the month effectively cutting me off resulting in no Broadband service at all. A call to a lady in New Dehli was made and she assured me that within the next 2 days I would receive the Modem and start up CD. Still no delivery so a further call was made again to India but this time I fell lucky to one who spoke english. She provided me with the settings to configure my router and at last Broadband was initiated. Since May I have paid £14.99 per month for a service that should have been provided free with the phone package. To top it all I have had no service for 2 weeks and if it wasnt for my router would have been longer. That is 2 providers both being paid in some form but providing absolubtly nothing. The frustrating thing is that there is nothing that you can do about it and there is no mechanism to complain. I would dearly like to bring this tale of woe to the attention of the CPW chief executive but to do that you would need to navigate through the Indian call centre first. I cannot believe however that he is unaware of what is happening so I must conclude that he is not bothered about his customers so long as the money still rolls in.

Best of luck to anyone who commences the Talk Talk Journey to the land of Broadband.

My credit card co `s call centre is in India. Its a freephone tel no. They answer it pretty quick. they are highly educated & professional.
I wish I could have said the same for NTL in their Welsh call centre!!!!
Mobile phone co "3" whose call centre is India are crap, as they only allowed to use the "script" but my problem was professionally sorted out by their Duty Manager.