Chorus / NTL admit how crap they are

Sponge Bob

and more importantly say they intend to do something to make themselves less crap. Only time will tell given the long Chorus relationship with being utterly crap .

The Trib has this article.

UPC IRELAND, the cable company incorporating NTL and Chorus, is hiring up to 140 new staff across all divisions after a rationalisation process begun last year under a new management team resulted in 350 redundancies as the companies were combined.A spokeswoman said UPC was hiring for a number of positions, with the majority in its customer service call centre in Limerick. The company directly employs 900 staff and has 1,300 sub contractors.

So they need to boost their current staff by at least 17% to make a start at being less crap . Thats what it means. They may even intend to answer the phone to their customers unlike nowadays.

The integration of Chorus with NTL to become UPC has been, by all accounts, a difficult affair in terms of technical, financial and staff amalgamation since the companies were bought by Liberty Global in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

They sacked the only competent staff they had, the NTL centre in Waterford. This was closed 9 months back. Since then they have lost customers for being crap.

A competent ( not crap ) company could have integrated Chorus and NTL in a professional manner . UPC , you will remember, are the ones who routed all Irish internet traffic through Amsterdam starting this time last year.

They turned off the NTL Inex connection back then, did it ever get switched back on ??

Dunn admits the next hurdle is improving UPC's customer service responses, and 10m has been earmarked for a new customer care centre.

The boss is now committed to being crap in a nice new building .

Had he NOT closed NTL in Waterford he would not need a new building at all.

In hurdle terms the improvement he seeks is a 30 storey high building not a stick across a few tubes.

Chorus are loathed, no matter what you call them mate. When will Castlebar go live by the way . Its been promised since 1999.

Soundman

Someone likes using the word 'crap'. Hehe. Might I suggest alternatives such as dire, atrocious, brutal?

Sponge Bob

I don't have a thesaurus mate , unlike you Why not even rewrite the whole article and paste in it below with fewer iterations of the 'c' word .

lucernarian

Analogue subscriptions fell by 11,000 and digital subs gained by 5,700. I would say that this net drop in the numbers was more than "cleaning up the database".

Marlow

To_be_confirmed wrote:

I would say that this net drop in the numbers was more than "cleaning up the database".

[RANT]
What database ? Most of the time NTL doesn't even have a working DNS server
[/RANT]

/Marlow

dub45

"There's a lot of moving parts and we're still fine tuning, " said UPC chief executive Robert Dunn.

Moving parts in a cable network? :rolleyes: It is incredible the balderdash these CEO's spout in the hope of impressing people.

UPC seem to be like politicians who keep announcing the same Govt. spend under different headings. Didn't they announce the opening of a new customer services unit maybe 6-8 months ago at the height of the Joe Duffy show debacle. If I am not mistaken they even had an announcement on their pre revamp site about this new unit with promises of improved customer services etc?

Meanwhile I am sure we all look forward to the 'new' relationships with UPC promised in the Irish Times last Friday:

"We want to build a new UPC culture internally, based around simplicity of service," Mr Dunn said.

"This is an opportunity to re-establish a strong, vibrant relationship with customers and to leave old relationships behind."

This from the sensitive caring company whose first acts as UPC were redundancies and attempts to impose direct debits and paper bill charges on customers and who have made little or not attempt to communicate with their customers since the take over. (Well they do write to me at least once a week offering me their digital tv:))

Freddie59

Sponge Bob wrote:

and more importantly say they intend to do something to make themselves less crap. Only time will tell given the long Chorus relationship with being utterly crap .

The Trib has this article.



So they need to boost their current staff by at least 17% to make a start at being less crap . Thats what it means. They may even intend to answer the phone to their customers unlike nowadays.



They sacked the only competent staff they had, the NTL centre in Waterford. This was closed 9 months back. Since then they have lost customers for being crap.

A competent ( not crap ) company could have integrated Chorus and NTL in a professional manner . UPC , you will remember, are the ones who routed all Irish internet traffic through Amsterdam starting this time last year.

They turned off the NTL Inex connection back then, did it ever get switched back on ??



The boss is now committed to being crap in a nice new building .

Had he NOT closed NTL in Waterford he would not need a new building at all.

In hurdle terms the improvement he seeks is a 30 storey high building not a stick across a few tubes.

Chorus are loathed, no matter what you call them mate. When will Castlebar go live by the way . Its been promised since 1999.

Important figures there are over 2,200 people employed. It never ceases to amaze me how some people would almost like to see them go out of business altogether. I was reading on enn.ie on Friday last that UPC now have 67,000 broadband customers. That's a fifth of the amount Eircom have, and they're at it a lot less longer.

Hopefully they can resolve their difficulties with customer service, as they now seem to be becoming a credible independent service to Eircom. And that can only be good for the consumer.

bk

Freddie59 wrote:

Important figures there are over 2,200 people employed. It never ceases to amaze me how some people would almost like to see them go out of business altogether. I was reading on enn.ie on Friday last that UPC now have 67,000 broadband customers. That's a fifth of the amount Eircom have, and they're at it a lot less longer.

Hopefully they can resolve their difficulties with customer service, as they now seem to be becoming a credible independent service to Eircom. And that can only be good for the consumer.

Of course non of us want to see them go out of business. Most of us would like to see them grow and become real competition to Eircom.

However many of us are angry because we saw these problems coming when UPC bought Chorus and NTL and many of us warned people about these problems right here on this forum, yet our warnings were ignored.

I remember telling people right here on this forum, that Chorus was dire, far worse then NTL, that Chorus customer service were awful and that NTL cs were actually very good in comparison. And what did UPC go and do? They fired the NTL CS staff and moved what used to be good NTL CS to the awful Chorus CS people.

They also turned one of the best broadband services in the country into one of the worst, by peering in Amsterdam rather then the INEX and by throttling torrents.

From what I've seen it turned out to be Chorus taking over NTL, rather then the opposite which is should have been. Basically the NTL management was replaced by the dire Chorus management.

Many of us, could see these problems coming, yet the highly paid execs could not seem to see these problems coming, it makes the mind boggle.

dub45

Freddie59 wrote:

Important figures there are over 2,200 people employed. It never ceases to amaze me how some people would almost like to see them go out of business altogether. I was reading on enn.ie on Friday last that UPC now have 67,000 broadband customers. That's a fifth of the amount Eircom have, and they're at it a lot less longer.

Hopefully they can resolve their difficulties with customer service, as they now seem to be becoming a credible independent service to Eircom. And that can only be good for the consumer.

With all due respects to your goodself that is nonsense. No one wants to see UPC go out of business - what anyone with bit of cop on wants to see, irrespective of which isp they are with, is for them to make a big splash and shake up the whole bb scene. Unfortunately they have achieved the reverse if anything. In this day and age of obsession with good pr the bad press they achieved for themselves in such a short space of time is no mean achievement. If there was some sort of award for shooting yourself in the foot they would have won it effortlessly.

Smart shook up the whole bb scene when they entered and offered adsl2 faster speeds and a good package. Even where people could not get Smart they benefitted from the pressure on Eircom to increase the basic speeds.

Eircom in a recent article in the Irish Times (I think) admitted that part of the upgrading in their network is due to the fear of what UPC could offer.

As I have written here befoe Eircom surely cannot believe how poor their rivals have been so far.

Whats worrying though is the obvious contempt for the customer that exists
at the higher management levels of the Chorus management. The decision making so far as in the case of the billing and the direct debits - the complete lack of communication with customers, the long delays on the phone, the long delays in sending out an engineer all display a total insensitivity towards the customer and in spite of the pious platitudes that accompany the quarterly figures about improving customer service there is absolutely no reason to believe that it is likely to change any time soon.

mike65

I have written here befoe Eircom surely cannot believe how poor their rivals have been so far.

True you can be lucky in your enemies. Thankfully I have'nt ever sought any extra services from NTL/UPC since Go Digital (and that saga was the topic of along running thread) my sisters household has switched to Sky after no end of waiting for NTL to fix poor quality installation. They still have NTL services dispite the cancellation and proberly will get billed for it knowing that lot.

Mike.

RangeR

Chorus have one less customer today.

mwb101

I have had a very frustrating experience with ntl. Over a 4 week period they tried and failed twice to install broadband in our house. As soon as the installation engineer encountered a problem he washed his hands of it and walked away saying that he wasn't really ntl at all but just a subcontractor. Each time this resulted in a network callout to check the line. I was told numerous times that I would be contacted to keep me informed of the status of the problem and I was not contacted once. After taking two days off work and more time on top of that chasing them it was only today that they finally admitted that ntl broadband was not available to us after all. All I got was 'sorry for the inconvenience' and I was then cut off.

It would be great to have strong challenger to eircom but my experience means that in future I will try to have as little to do with them as possible. Life's too short.

dub45

mwb101 wrote:

I have had a very frustrating experience with ntl. Over a 4 week period they tried and failed twice to install broadband in our house. As soon as the installation engineer encountered a problem he washed his hands of it and walked away saying that he wasn't really ntl at all but just a subcontractor. Each time this resulted in a network callout to check the line. I was told numerous times that I would be contacted to keep me informed of the status of the problem and I was not contacted once. After taking two days off work and more time on top of that chasing them it was only today that they finally admitted that ntl broadband was not available to us after all. All I got was 'sorry for the inconvenience' and I was then cut off.

It would be great to have strong challenger to eircom but my experience means that in future I will try to have as little to do with them as possible. Life's too short.

You really should (although I know its awful bother) pursue them for the cost of your two days wasted - its appalling incompetence on their part. Aren't they required by Comreg to have some form of complaints procedure that you can follow and then refer the matter to Comreg? I certainly would send a registered letter to their Chief Executive looking for the money!

On a different note wouldn't this type of thing and their insistence on sending out an 'engineer' to every complaint make you seriously wonder about their costs and cost control. From what I could make out of the post there was two physical installation attempts and two network call outs - the cost of that type of thing for a non installation must be quite significant and ultimately us customers pay for it through our subs while worse their staff have paid for it in the past through loss of jobs.

dogpile

Funny thing happened on the way to the forum...