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We get sent so many complaints regarding TalkTalk here at The Weekly Gripe that we genuinely don't know what to do with them all. There are many companies out there with a poor track record when it comes to handling customer complaints, but this one in particular seems to be a hot topic. I've included below some of the gripes sent in by TalkTalk's unhappy customers.
TalkTalk complaint again! I have been cut me off without so much as an email, phone call or letter because they didn't take money via the direct debit which has been running for 4 years. I tried ringing their customer services number and the massage says office hours 9 to 5.30 Monday to Friday, same hours as I work. I finally got through, paid on plastic and they then discovered my direct debit details and took money there as well. The final insult was to charge me 125 for cancelling their services. Apparently I had an email telling me to read new terms and conditions in 2009. They can renew your contract every year without telling you and there's nothing you can do about it as otelo the regulator approved this. I've used Opal which is the same as TalkTalk apparently, I signed up originally for two years and I was never told of any cancellation fee. Can they change provider and original contract details without notifying me in writing? Janet
My gripe is with.... yes you have it... TalkTalk. I have been a customer of TalkTalk for 12 years having started with them when they were Onetel. I have had the normal problems with phone and broadband but the latest one takes the biscuit. My 84 yr old sister is a customer of TalkTalk but unfortunately she was diagnosed with dementia a year ago and has been in a care home for the last 10 months. Naturally she has no need of a phone so I decided to have it disconnected. TalkTalk want to speak to her as she is the account holder. I have spoken to at least 35 to 40 customer service advisers explaining that she cannot converse with anyone and I have been told that she MUST talk to them to give her permission or... now this is the clincher... wait until she passes away and then send them the death certificate. I am her power of attorney so I am now sending a copy of POA to see if that works, if it does they will not only lose her as a customer they will also lose me. Ray
I find TalkTalk are so scary because they have no telephone contact number in the UK that I can find. Their call centre has been absolutely useless; the girl on the phone said they were in SA!? Anyway, I couldn't understand them and hung up in disgust. Instead of the bill I was expecting I received a huge one and I am being charged for stupid router that I never asked for it - got my own thank you! I also feel I was mis-sold this package and I'm in the process of trying to figure out my rights and how I can cancel this dreadful service. My home phone now continually cuts in and out No I do not want to call SA to advise them of this. What is the point. Fedup
TalkTalk - what a lot of rubbish in my opinion. Since joining them nearly 2 years I have had problems with Internet connection and they have no quick solutions, plus they're difficult to understand due to the heavy accent. I ended signing up with Geek Squad paying them to sort things as TalkTalk couldn't. Only a month ago I lost connection again and after spending some hours on the phone they said it will take 4 days to sort out - why as they needed to test lines etc. and it could be a problem with my landline. Very strange because I was using it to talk to them with no problem. They do not have the right knowledge to assist people and over the period I have had to pay Geek Squad some 150 to help me. Now I wish to cease my contract but again they will only take my call on Monday and not at weekend. This is an impossible situation and I cannot wait to speak to them to let them know just what I think of them. Anonymous
How to really annoy an existing customer without really trying. Today I got an outward bound sales call from TalkTalk. I'm already a long standing existing customer. I was offered a new package which made a lot of sense and I went with it. Great. I was then asked to hold while the call was transferred to a manager who would confirm my order. (I hadn't ordered anything, but I suppose that's just me being picky!). I then spoke to a 'manager' who then proceeded to read out a script repeating everything that I have just been through welcoming me to Talk Talk as a new customer. I explained that I am an exiting customer and don't need to go through this. "But I have to read this script" she said. It was so irritating, irrelevant and a waste of my time that I decided to call customer services (that's a joke). A nice lady told me that she would log my complaint. When asked if I could speak to someone in more authority, I was told, no, I couldn't and that no feedback was available, unless I wrote in. So I made two complaints about the customer experience. The first about my first call with Talk Talk and the second about their compalint handling procedure (or lack thereof). I notice that last year TalkTalk opened a very swanky Customer Experience Centre. Shame the hype doesn't support the actual experience of being a customer as far as I can see! Joe Espana
I'm a new Talk Talk customer that wishes he had never left BT. Having set up the account at the beginning of April and given them my full bank details for the direct debit, I get a phone call from their accounts department today 12th May threatening me with disconnection unless I paid my overdue bill! To "assist" me they could take payment straight away over the phone. The accounts monkey couldn't tell me why the initial direct debit hadn't been set up, only if I didn't pay straight away I would be cut off. So I paid straight away, setting up a second DD at the same time. I insisted I be put through to a customer complaints department who then tried to set up yet another direct debit mandate, explaining that Talk Talk hadn't even set up the first one yet. I had to explain quite forcefully that I had already paid the overdue amount setting up a second direct debit mandate not two minutes earlier, and had been transferred from the accounts department direct to her. Absolute stupidity of the highest order. Not only that but the broadband speed is inadequate for streaming video or BBC I player etc. I just wish I hadn't left BT. If they cannot get the account opening procedure right and their accounts department doesn't share info real time with the customer service department, I suppose I shouldn't hold out too much hope for their technical department. Tonyd
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However, I had an engineer out when the Internet was not quite right and he left it as he found it, unable to get to the cause. TalkTalk then tried to charge me for that time-waster. I dealt with that and bought a new BT socket and ditched the one recently installed by BT. Everything was then fine with the Internet and has been for some 3+ years now.
The main issue I have apart from the ignorance of the TalkTalk customer services is the awful TalkTalk YouView service. The box is exceedingly slow to respond to the remote and is liable to intermittent freezes. During such freezes recordings are made, but the TV box has to be reset to gain access to the user interface. I found the service was deteriorating and recordings becoming more and more unreliable and leading to several daily freezes. After struggling with the YouView box for some time, I ditched the TalkTalk 'Not-so-Super' router in favour of an ASUS device. This after it became clear that TalkTalk customer service have scant knowledge of the causes of device problems and rely on scripts. A complete waste of time speaking with them and the same applies to YouView themselves, since they were not aware of the kind of problem I was experiencing.
Currently, the YouView box is working much better and freezes less frequently, perhaps once per month and if it freezes another freeze can be expected within an hour. However, the garbled recordings have gone with the use of the ASUS router, leaving the main problem to be the YouView box having a tendency to stop recording series. I guess this is a problem with staff not entering the correct details in the schedules, or perhaps the data stream to the YouView box gets corrupted. Whatever the cause, the YouView service via TalkTalk does not do what it is supposed to and has fairly frequent errors. My solution will be to go back to Sky in a few months, although only for TV, since TalkTalk have provided me with a good Internet service, despite my misgivings about their customer support. The video quality on Internet channels is also poor and the service compares poorly with Sky.
On the whole, I would recommend TalkTalk if you do not want their TV service and if you are willing to accept poor customer service. This seems to be true of BT as well, although I am put off BT by the price and the attitude of their customer service staff. Customer retention does not seem to be a priority for BT and in contrast Sky, PlusNet and TalkTalk do at least try to appear more interested in the customer. TalkTalk report frequent problems with hackers and admit that data gets stolen, something to consider when giving them your personal information. I find managers are empowered to offer cash or free services, since no doubt that gets rid of customers complaining about the poor service, but does not really improve anything. Anyway, I take the cash or service when offered and ask for it when it is not, but I am inclined to complain when a service is little more than appalling.
So, 1st week of a 1 meg download speed when paying for 50 and all they did was close the ticket. So, why close the ticket ? it makes their Service level agreement responses look good is the only reason.
Raised another ticket, they ran tests, they could see the issue. No sht sherlock. So, arrange for an engineer - gave them 3 dates. all three dates went past, no engineer, no progress, nothing. Rang them again... ticket had been closed. nothing done, not fixed but they closed it anyway...
so, i raised a complaint - someone promised to ring back. Never happened.
raised another complaint, nothing....
after 2 months of nothing happening i said - ok - I am paying for a service I am not getting, we paid to upgrade which ut us back in contract. I quoted distance selling regulations ( can cancel up to the point of installation ). As the installation was not working yet please cancel the contract. Some manager promised to ring back with progress within 3 days. nothing - so I rang them - guess what - they had closed et another ticket. spoke to an actual BT Wholesale support person. They could see that no engineer had ever been assigned a date to visit. By now I had had 6 days off work to sit indoors awaiting the engineer !!! thats six days of my holidays gone....
so, i started the process of cancelling. next day an engineer turned up without an appointment on a Sat of all days !!!
within 2 days all fixed ( after new cooper from pole to house )
the result is that we are now 15 months away from being able to move from talk talk.
hats 15 months of suffering.
in total I spent 15 hours of MY TIME on the phone with a company whose support systems are so poor that when we asked for compensation they said they only do this from the first call reporting the issue and that was 4 weeks ago!!! 4 weeks was the first issue they could find on their system. Luckily I had txt messages from them stating issue reference number - i red this out and 10 mins later they agreed they could see the issue. Why could they not see it before ? well it was hidden!! you mean closed ? yes - closed !!! what a bunch of walls a complete waste of time
any company with a support system as bad as this must be suffering.
the moral of the story - stay away from talk talk
On the 30th August 2014 I made the mistake of ordering a phone & broadband diservice from talktalk !! After a 2 week wait and receiving a confirmation of the order, I'm told that as a stupid customer I haven't place my order correctly !! Than it transpired that there was a phone line problem and it was blamed on BT. Talktalk great customer service employees on one occassion went as far as to tell me that if I don't like it I can go elsewhere (in those exact words) !! When I explained that I need the phone line ASAP as I have a child with a disability and the area I'm living in has a very poor mobile reception, there answer was a sympatatic one but that's how it is. So another ordered gets processed and I have to wait for another 2 weeks. Close to the date I receive another text telling me that there is a problem once more !!! After kicking up a fuss about it I get connected with Michael Moran from their CEO office. THings started to move so I hoped. Eventually I got broadband and a couple of days later a phone line. I thought things were finally over. Compensation three months service, when I said that this wasn't enough for the amount of calls I had to make on my mobile and while travelling on business to sort this out the answer from the CEO office was that I should be thankful as it wasn't their problem !!
A week and a half into using the service I start experiencing problems getting into various websites. So I call Talktalk and am told that I have a temporary service and have not got fibre broadband yet !! Why I ask ?? Oh silly me again I did something wrong in the order again !! Forget all the phone calls and the email confirmations I received !! So I call Michael Moran from the CEO office again and he doesn't answer me for two days. Than my phone line goes dead !! Since I am now totally annoyed I go on twitter and tweet about this - Suddenly Michael Moran calls me !!! WOW amazing !! He than proceeded to tell me that he had told me that it would be a temporary service to which I replied he had not and that this was not correct and I asked for a recording of this conversation ! As a customer, what do I get ? Thsi guy starts yelling at me and treating me like I'm some idiot and when I remind him that I'm the customer he said that he cannot deal with me and is going to ask for my case to be assigned to another person in the CEO office. Well two weeks later and no one calls from the CEO office not even to apologise. I finally get my phone line back after two days ! And my much promised Fibre broadband is due on the 26 October !! So the 26 October arrives and now my internet is completely dead !! Not only do I not have fibre optic but no internet at all. Call talktalk and they tell me to wait 48 hours until an engineer comes over and if it is found that it is my fault (once again) I will be billed 50 GBP !! Amazing customer service at it's finest !! No wonder ofcom has stated that this is one of the worst serviced providers ! Now I know where they got this reputation from !! It's all true !! To be continued ...........
Companies like this use polite language to take the path that suits them best. I have found the word "instruct" stops companies doing things like that. You could have written, "I instruct you to refund the money forthwith and do not permit its use to settle future bills, which I will pay only when due. You could work out the expected interest on the money and instruct them to take that off a bill. (This time it's just more likely to be accepted if you do it that way).
Regina G