What a storm we’ve been having in Ireland and the UK. Driving down from Belfast yesterday was fun 😉 I arrived home to find I had no signal on my satellite TV antenna and that I’d no broadband connectivity since Thursday, hence downloads from my personal site were not working.
I got up early and had two phones on the go at once while waiting on call line queues. Eventually I got through to BT Ireland, my broadband provider. I had a signal on my router but I wasn’t getting an IP address. I was getting an authentication error. I just figured it was something to do with the weather and I had no idea what would transpire in the coming hours.
The first person I spoke to was in Technical Support. He went through the usual steps and then checked my account. Someone had cancelled it th day after I had paid for my next 3 months subscription. Crazy! I told him I didn’t cancel it … it was illogical to think i would. I told wanted it put back the day it was seeing as they accepted and worked on a cacellation that wasn’t from me. Here’s what he told me "You can call sales to start a new order or you can go to another company". Great. That’d leave me without broadband for 30 days and I’d have lost the money for my 3 months subscription. I was mid sentence when he put me through to sales.
The second person I spoke to was in sales. I told her what the story was and she immediately put me through to Customer Support.
Person number three was in Customer Support. This was the thrid time I explained the situation. He went off and checked my file again. He came back and said another broadband service provider had requested that my account be transferred to them. This is what happens if you change providers. The problem here is that I never contacted anyone. I’m quite happy with the actual broadband service provided by BT. It’s competitively priced and stable. I asked him to think logically. Why would I pay my next 3 months subscription and then log a call over a down connection if I had cancelled my subscription. he refused to listen and started blathering on about how I had the right to change providers, have a different broadband prvider than phone service provider, etc. He kept repeating that I had to contact the service provider that had taken my account. Interesting approach considering that I had no idea who this was. I asked him to think this through but then he hung up.
You can probably see that I was pretty infuriated at this point.
I wasn’t giving up easily. If I’d had internet conenctivity I would have googled the phone number of the telecoms regulator and kinked up a huge stink. Instead I rang through directly to customer support. Now I was on rep number four. This guy was a bit more reasonable to deal with. I had to go through the entire mess and I carefully reaffirmed that I had no idea who had done this nor who the provider was who stole my account. He went off to check the file and to contact a manager. This was much better. He came back and told me that the case was now escalated to a manager who had already started looking at my account. The cancellation process had started but had not been completed. I was told to expect a call on Monday and that things would be resolved quickly.
I’d mucked around with my router early in the morning and put everything back the way it was. About an hour later… I had internet access again. It went and came back so I’ve no idea what’s going on.
Oh yeah… I spent 40 minutes waiting to speak to a human when I called Sky to get my satellite TV sorted out. My problem didn’t get resolved but the one person I spoke to aranged to get an engineer out to me.