Let Me Rephrase That…

There’s a fine line, I think, between a company making a couple of innocent mistakes and there being some level of incompetance involved. Everyone makes mistakes, it’s part of human nature, but surely it’s statistically improbable for three or four people from the same company to make mistakes for the same client?

I’m not here to dissuade anyone from using Sky or their services, because in the past few years I’ve had their services they’ve been fantastic as a company and their customer support has been top notch.

So what, I have to wonder, went wrong for us recently? Last week I had a phone call from Sky to inform me that the price of my Sky Broadband supscription was going up to £15 a month from the £10 a month it currently is.

“Excuse me?” I thought, “I’m not on Sky Broadband?” I said to the chap.

‘Well, I wouldn’t be calling you otherwise, sir.’

“Well, no, but I haven’t been on Sky Broadband for almost two years now. I’m on Virgin Broadband.”

‘According to our records you’re on Sky.’

“Let me get back to you on this. Thanks.”

So, a little confused I got my mother to dig out the paperwork for Sky. We did have Sky Broadband back in late 2007 but they had promised us that we’d receive 4mb/s connection speed but we only actually ran at about 0.7mb/s so we sent a letter outlining the hassle we’d had trying to get the issues sorted out and received a letter in January 2008 confirming our cancellation of Sky Broadband.

Fantastic! Well, so we thought. It transpires that somebody at Sky thought that we really should be on Sky Broadband, so without telling us they re-started our Sky Broadband subscription in July 2008. This was only made known to us last week. Yeah, that’s about 22 months of service payments for a service we don’t have, at £10 a month. It was nice of them to tell us!

This actually took two phone calls to get cancelled because when I was being transferred they cut me off. So I had to go back through the wretched automated “Press 1″ menus, and reciting my postcode and phone number. I wouldn’t mind this so much if it actually put you through to the person you want to speak to. But five minutes of menus are really annoying, only to be transferred to the right department.

So the broadband was cancelled and they’ve tried to credit our account with the money we’d been paying.

We are, as you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, having an extension built at the moment for my grandmother to move in with us. We’re going to be providing her with a Sky box so she can have the joy of many channels to watch. We have a Multiroom subscription, which is grand, and we wanted to change our package slightly and add another box.

Sounds simple enough, no?

So I outline the fact that 1) I would like to remove Sky Sports and the Music package from our account – keeping Variety, Knowledge, Style & Culture, News & Events and Children’s (for my nephews) and 2) I’d like to add another box to our Multiroom subscription.

Again, sounds simple enough? I thought so at least. But somewhere along the lines – and I’m not being racist but I’m wondering if the foreign call centre had something to do with it… – there was a commications error because that night my sister told me the Children’s channels had vanished.

I was told that I’d receive an email where I could finalise my Sky box order. I received this the same evening and when I followed the instructions, the information provided to me was for new customers to build their Sky packages and order their set top box. Is it really this difficult?

Now, let’s address this racism thing from a paragraph ago. I do not care where your call centre is located, nor do I care who you employ, what their race is or what language they speak. The only thing I require is that they have a good enough grasp of the English language for them to actually understand what clients are relaying to them, and to perform their duties so the clients don’t have to phone up (yet again!) to correct their mistakes! Surely that is not too much to ask?

Asking for Sky Sports and Music to be removed, then removing the Children’s pack is a pretty moronic mistake to make.

The reason I have a feeling the foreign call-centre had something to do with it was because I phoned up and spoke to an English speaking chap somewhere in England, who had re-added Children’s, double checked our packages, ordered us a new box and sorted us out an installation date in roughly the same amount of time it took me to try and get the packages removed in the first call.

If Sky hadn’t been so good over the past few years, these recent cock-ups would have had me looking at cancelling to move elsewhere because the mistakes that were made are so ridiculous it really is saddening and frustrating.

/rant over.