UPC Ordering

CheGuedara

After a few months of living in three channel land having moved into an apartment with the 'sorry we've an arrangement with NTL/UPC' monopoly in place I've finally had to give in, go to the dark side and pony up with the Ryanair of tv providers - UPC.

Tried to order online but had to ring through in the end to what was actually quite a pleasant human on the end of their sales line (as opposed to the demonic troll-like denizens of their largely unreachable customer service dept) who in fairness told me why I couldn't proceed with the online selection I had made. Fair enough. And I was given the options (either go up or down a TV choice) when I was also placed with

Sales Guy: 'now you know if you place the order online there's an eight week waiting period'
Me: 'no, didn't see that anywhere. Jesus that's a long wait.'
Sales Guy: 'well it's not so bad, if you place the order over the phone now we'll be able to get an engineer out to you in 3 to 4 days'
Me: '....Great - I'll do that so..'
Sales Guy: 'Now there is a €30 fee for placing the order over the phone...'

Now, I'm a patient man (I am, honestly) but eight weeks is a fair chunk of time and more than enough for UPC to have misplaced or forgotten a job or even to have started billing me before actually getting the service so I bit my tongue and placed the order with the (newly out of favour) sales guy adding an extra e30 to the bill. The 'engineer' is coming tomorrow at random o'clock.

I can't be the only one who thinks this eight week delay in dealing with web based orders (where you do their job for them in signing you up with all your address and billing details) or extra charge in exchange for a more rapidly dealt with phone in order is BS - anyone else get the same story?

Paulw

CheGuedara wrote: »

I can't be the only one who thinks this eight week delay in dealing with web based orders (where you do their job for them in signing you up with all your address and billing details) or extra charge in exchange for a more rapidly dealt with phone in order is BS - anyone else get the same story?

Same story for everyone.

I think their online booking systems are separate and don't go through the same sales process.

A phone call is actually a lot quicker to get the work done, especially for just an extra €30.

jeckle

It mightn’t be such a bad thing that your complex is locked into an agreement with UPC, considering some of the horror stories I’ve read over on the Smart Forum about people in various different apartment complexes who are locked into an agreement with Smartvision.

I use Smart for my broadband & phone & have never had any major trouble, but I would not like to have to put up with anything like what I’ve read about their TV service.

UPC have a separate section for online sales which you can ask to be put through to if you have any problems with online orders, or to place an ‘online order by phone’ which is handy to know if you were ordering online to apply some sort of advertised discount & it wasn’t available when you went to do it.

This happened to me recently as I was trying to upgrade my mothers analogue for her to the basic digital – when I went to do it online there was no option to do it on the site, despite it being advertised that you would get a €10 discount if you did it online. I just rang & asked for online sales & they processed the order & she got the €10 credit.

I don’t know whether there is any more or less of a delay depending on how you order, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people are just being told that in order to get them to order straight away.