Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
TalkTalk gets the Wooden Spoon award for worst customer service AGAIN
-
11-01-2012 8:21pm#1Couldnt happen to a nicer bunch of cnuts tbh. Hope they continue to get this 'award' for many years to come
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/bills/article-2084868/Customer-service-TalkTalk-gets-Wooden-Spoon-award-AGAIN.htmlYou voted in your thousands for the company with Britain’s shoddiest customer service in 2011 and the winner — for the second year running — is TalkTalk.
More than one in four of all votes cast were for the home phone and internet provider. HM Revenue & Customs was second and Spanish bank Santander was third.
TalkTalk became the first company to win Money Mail’s Wooden Spoon Award in consecutive years. In the past, a winner has taken the wooden spoon as a wake-up call and improved its customer service.
Looking miserable: TalkTalk chief executive Dido Harding
The trophy is one every company or organisation dreads winning. Your votes shine a light on their inept service and the often appalling way in which loyal customers are treated.
Money Mail receives hundreds of letters and emails each week about poor service and in December we gave you a shortlist of the eight organisations whose customers had consistently contacted us to tell of poor service over the previous 12 months.
For a month your votes poured in. Last week, we presented TalkTalk chief executive Dido Harding with the trophy for 2011. The gong for winning the Wooden Spoon Award in 2010 already sits on her desk.
The firm is so embarrassed by its ignominious double that Ms Harding refused to be photographed with both awards. She was visibly unhappy at winning again and acknowledges its customer service is ‘not yet good enough’.
‘I apologise to those we have let down. We are working very hard on improvements for all customers,’ she says. Despite the company’s promises to better the lot of its customers, 2011 was another shocking year.
The problems with TalkTalk
Readers complained of paying a monthly fee, but receiving no connection or service for weeks; promised callbacks that failed to emerge; and anger at repeatedly phoning call centres to register complaints and having to repeat the details every time. There was also frustration at not being able to understand call centre staff and unexpected bills of £120 or more for engineer visits.
We received a deluge of complaints at a botched offer to save £51 off the cost of line rental. What the company failed to tell customers was that they needed to be an online customer to be eligible. Many of those who complained didn’t need or want broadband, and had to waste time calling the company to discover this simple piece of information.
And when Money Mail intervened to highlight the unfairness of this, TalkTalk said it would honour any requests by landline-only customers — but staff still rejected applications.
Ms Harding stresses the company is performing better than last year and making progress. ‘We do see our service improving, but clearly we are not good enough yet — and we’re the first to recognise this. I don’t accept that we haven’t moved on,’ she says. ‘Regulator Ofcom, too, has pointed out that we have improved in the past year.’
To boost its performance, the company says it has begun to roll out a process to make it easier for customers to take TalkTalk’s service between different properties.
‘We are aware our home-moving service isn’t yet good enough. Overall, we are better than we were a year ago, but we want to be better.’
She says the company is focusing on improving customer services for online and phone customers. For those happy to manage their account online, this means greater flexibility, such as being able to set up your own parental controls against unwanted websites. And for those customers who simply have landlines for phone calls, TalkTalk says it is stepping up its efforts to fix faults on the first occasion.
‘A year ago, we were able to fix faults at the first go only 45 per cent of the time; now we’re at 75 per cent and want to get it higher,’ says Ms Harding.
Last August, TalkTalk and its subsidiary Tiscali were fined a record £3million for incorrectly billing 65,000 customers for services they had not received. And it continued to top Ofcom’s tables for most customer complaints during the year.0
Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Advertisement