Originally Posted by Theodoric

I'm afraid that my very recent experience of ntl Customer Services and complaints procedure is the direct opposite of Ian&Huth. To put it bluntly it is appalling and a disgrace. However, I think that I may have discovered some of the ntl rules for dealing with customers.

1) Never mind not giving out your name, which I could understand; refuse point blank to give any sort of job number that the customer could use for future phone calls. That way you can ensure that he has to start from the beginning every time.

2) There is one exception to rule one; occasionally give out the name of a manager and say that he will phone you - of course he has no intention of doing any such thing, but it sounds good.

3) Promise the earth to get the customer off your back. However, you must have your fingers crossed while you do this, otherwise you might, heaven forfend, be required to honour your promise.

4) And now, an extremely important rule. Never, ever, under any circumstances phone the customer back to explain why your promise, or the engineer's visit, never took place. I strongly suspect that to do so may be a sacking offence in ntl.

5) Never mind if you don't have any qualified engineers available; send out a couple of the nearest trainees. What, they might trash the customer's system? No problem, we'll just ignore it.

6) If on occasion you are actually forced to arrange an engineer's visit (you won't earn any bonus if you do that too often), always give the poor engineer incorrect information (just ignore what the customer has gone to great lengths to explain to you) so that he cannot do anything useful when he reaches the customer.

I could go on and on; really, I could.

Originally Posted by LaupSavea

Thanks for that contact it may be useful in dealing with my problems at a tactical level, its really appreciated.

I am not sure that is a strategic solution though. Its an odd strategy to have lots of broken customer facing processes which upset lots of customers who wont complain, but will ultimately move away, leaving a few who will complain for a while and then give up and, finally, very few who will, for whatever reason, persist and get their problem sorted by forcing NTL away from its normal processes to deal with them in an ad-hoc way which costs them a lot.

The big lose for all is that NTL dont seem to have any mechanism for capturing the learnings about where things are failing and so never fix the process and so it keeps happening over and over.

I have asked all the staff I have dealt with from NTL over the last couple of months what NTL will do differently now that we identified a problem at NTLs end - none of them could answer, whatever their level, all they would do is a combination of (1) apologise (2) put it right tactically (3) offer me some form of compensation. What a waste.