No Engineers Until Monday: WTF

[Tardis]

Hi All,

Within the last hour my Digital TV Service has crashed. I'm getting nothing on any channel and my STB is showing nothing but a single light.

Anyway, my aggro is that after finally getting through to CS I was told that they cannot get an engineer out to me until Monday the earliest. which is just not good enough.

I love my football and this weekend there are 2 ppv games on, of which I had the previlege of paying an extra £50 (in advance) to watch these games.

I have told them I want compensation for every day without cable and I want a refund for the 2 games I'm gonna miss if my cable has not return by this coming Saturday by 12:00 noon. I have threatened to reduce my full package to the minimum package if I choose to remain a NTL customer if I have to wait until bloody Monday.

I have posted this because if anyone else lives in the London W3 area you know what to expect.
I just find it puzzling that they can't get anyone out until Monday

Any suggestions: have I gone the right way about this? Should I have said something else, etc?

Tardis

[ian@huth]

From the tone of your post, if it was less than an hour since your problems started don't you think that you may have got onto some poor customer service agent with all guns blazing and maybe not given them a chance to sort out your porblem.

There have been times when I had NTL DTV that I lost all channels for a while but they came back within an hour or two. Did the person you spoke to try to find out what the problem may be or check to see if it was a local temporary outage?

Whilst it would be nice to have your own personal NTL engineer sitting in his van round the corner from you waiting for your call it is not economically viable. Holidays and sickness can affect the availability of engineers who might also be experiencing above average callouts at the moment.

[quadplay]

Besides which, Thursday to Monday (two working days) really isn't that bad! When I had Sky in Essex a few years back, and had a problem, it took nearly two weeks to get an engineer!

[Graham F]

waiting till monday to get your tv fixed is not long really is it!! I had to wait 4 days to get my boiler at home fixed by British Gas and i would deem that more important than TV so i think you are being unfair on ntl. they should credit you back though for your time without it including the £2 that the 2 games on PPV have cost you

Would you pay more to have an improved engineer service? They could employ more engineers and have them stand idle just so you could have a 1 hour response time.

In the end its not exactly a vital service and you could always go down the pub and watch it, now theres an excuse!!

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by gary_580

Would you pay more to have an improved engineer service? They could employ more engineers and have them stand idle just so you could have a 1 hour response time.

In the end its not exactly a vital service and you could always go down the pub and watch it, now theres an excuse!!

I know its no excuse but ntl engineers are being worked very hard these days, the sheer amount of service calls has meant the Network Engineers are nearly all attending customer service calls these days.

It's all a viscious circle as more customer service calls are generated because the networks are not being maintained. The networks possibly have nothing to do with your fault, but cost cutting means people are having to wait longer and suffer reduced quality of service these days to make the figures look good for the shareholders.

This example wouldn't of happened a few years ago, simply because people weren't running around then like chickens with their heads chopped off and achieving nothing! to the tune of managers who dont know their ar*e from their elbows.

[Marge]

It's so difficult cos we have a certain number of slots that we can book, put quite simply in theres no slots we can't book an appointment. It does sometimes work quite well, I had a lady last night who at just after 7.30 pm I could have booked a morning appointment for today. She was unable to make it but was really impressed as she didn't think there would be any chance of anything so soon. I do sympathise with you as I'm sure you're frustrated, might be worth a call maybe tomorrow morning to see if there have been any cancellations ??

[Maggy J]

Originally Posted by Tardis

Hi All,

Within the last hour my Digital TV Service has crashed. I'm getting nothing on any channel and my STB is showing nothing but a single light.

Anyway, my aggro is that after finally getting through to CS I was told that they cannot get an engineer out to me until Monday the earliest. which is just not good enough.

I love my football and this weekend there are 2 ppv games on, of which I had the previlege of paying an extra £50 (in advance) to watch these games.

I have told them I want compensation for every day without cable and I want a refund for the 2 games I'm gonna miss if my cable has not return by this coming Saturday by 12:00 noon. I have threatened to reduce my full package to the minimum package if I choose to remain a NTL customer if I have to wait until bloody Monday.

I have posted this because if anyone else lives in the London W3 area you know what to expect.
I just find it puzzling that they can't get anyone out until Monday

Any suggestions: have I gone the right way about this? Should I have said something else, etc?

Tardis

Frankly you have no idea what frustration is.I refer you to this thread where it took considerabley longer than a weekend for that member to finally get a result as shown in this thread.

With all due respect waiting four days for an engineer seems hardly worth a moan.

[Tardis]

Thanks for your comments.



The reason for my “tone� at posting my thread was because the CS agent had blatantly cut me off when I had asked to speak to a Supervisor. I was not rude to this person or anything. I have read other threads concerning the way to speak to CS and the best way is not to be volatile. So having the phone put down on me gets my back up like anyone else.



Though I do not expect my own private engineer sitting round the corner from my address I do expect better service when I pay for a service up front. I pay more now for a lesser service than I did a few years ago.



I have never had Interactive TV, which was promised when I went over to Digital from Analogue (Videotron)



CS used to be available 24/7 over the weekends and engineers worked on weekends.



NTL are too interested in installations rather keeping their existing customers happy.



I understand that engineers get sick and have holidays, fine, but why not tell the customer that. They just tell customers that “can’t get anyone till Monday� I’d like to be given an answer not an excuse.



Why do engineers not work weekends, I’m sure some of them would appreciate the overtime. If there were a major gas leak in your area the gas company would turn up within hours. Certainly within 24hrs and work through the night if need be.



As the old adage say’s “you get what you pay for� but are we?

Tardis

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by Tardis

Thanks for your comments.



The reason for my “tone” at posting my thread was because the CS agent had blatantly cut me off when I had asked to speak to a Supervisor. I was not rude to this person or anything. I have read other threads concerning the way to speak to CS and the best way is not to be volatile. So having the phone put down on me gets my back up like anyone else.



Though I do not expect my own private engineer sitting round the corner from my address I do expect better service when I pay for a service up front. I pay more now for a lesser service than I did a few years ago.



I have never had Interactive TV, which was promised when I went over to Digital from Analogue (Videotron)



CS used to be available 24/7 over the weekends and engineers worked on weekends.



NTL are too interested in installations rather keeping their existing customers happy.



I understand that engineers get sick and have holidays, fine, but why not tell the customer that. They just tell customers that “can’t get anyone till Monday” I’d like to be given an answer not an excuse.



Why do engineers not work weekends, I’m sure some of them would appreciate the overtime. If there were a major gas leak in your area the gas company would turn up within hours. Certainly within 24hrs and work through the night if need be.



As the old adage say’s “you get what you pay for” but are we?

Tardis

Although I'm not there anymore, I know locally the big difference now is the on-call engineers do work the weekend but are not sat around on-call as they used to be, they have a full quota of faults to deal with.

In the past the Network Engineers were called to help out when the service Engineers were overloaded, but now network Engineers are basically Service Engineers, they have x amount of customer calls the same as the service engineers do.

Someone just needs to look into why the service calls have gone through the roof!

[Mick]

Originally Posted by Tardis

Why do engineers not work weekends, I’m sure some of them would appreciate the overtime. If there were a major gas leak in your area the gas company would turn up within hours. Certainly within 24hrs and work through the night if need be.





Tardis

I am sure they would appreciate the overtime, not working weekends is not their decision, a decision ntl made last year because apparently there was not enough calls over the weekend to justify people being paid to sit in the call centre and engineers being available to resolve peoples problems.

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by Mick

I am sure they would appreciate the overtime, not working weekends is not their decision, a decision ntl made last year because apparently there was not enough calls over the weekend to justify people being paid to sit in the call centre and engineers being available to resolve peoples problems.

On call engineers in South Wales have to work as far as I'm still aware!
They used to pay overtime to the on-call engineer.

My mate who's a network tech was working last month on a saturday whilst on call, in fact I think he gets a day off in the week for this and no extra pay anymore.

These rules were enforced on them last year.

Originally Posted by Tardis

Why do engineers not work weekends, I’m sure some of them would appreciate the overtime. If there were a major gas leak in your area the gas company would turn up within hours. Certainly within 24hrs and work through the night if need be.

They do. Ive had them visit on Saturdays

Originally Posted by Escapee

I know its no excuse but ntl engineers are being worked very hard these days, the sheer amount of service calls has meant the Network Engineers are nearly all attending customer service calls these days.

It's all a viscious circle as more customer service calls are generated because the networks are not being maintained. The networks possibly have nothing to do with your fault, but cost cutting means people are having to wait longer and suffer reduced quality of service these days to make the figures look good for the shareholders.

This example wouldn't of happened a few years ago, simply because people weren't running around then like chickens with their heads chopped off and achieving nothing! to the tune of managers who dont know their ar*e from their elbows.

I was agreeing. The point i was trying to make is that some people expect gold star service but dont want to pay for it.

When i said "Theres and excuse" i was refering to the fact it was an excuse to get down the pub

[Florence]

Perhaps the redundancies have now started to bite into NTLs engineers as they have cut them aswell as CS.