|
|
A little humour/creative mockery often helps in getting the thing passed around as many employees of said company as possible - the full text of a particularly successful (£40 off the bill, I think) angry letter of mine is included below. My favourite bits are bolded for your viewing pleasure: I am pathetically proud of this one.
I hope it's of help if you want to write to the Balti Sun. Nice of them to offer a special gay Commitments section right next to Garage Sales and Help Wanted ...
To: Telewest
address
address
postcode
Dear Sir or Madam,
Re: Bill for account and payment reference number xxxxxxx/1
Account name: Whisky Priestess
Bill dates: 15 April 2002 and 13 May 2002
Yet again I am astonished and perversely impressed by the appalling lows of customer service to which your company is capable of sinking. Some of the highlights of last year have, admittedly, not been bettered: we have not (yet), for example, had our phone line cut off for two months for no discernible reason, suffered the visitation of eight equally incompetent engineers to fix it, and received no compensation of any kind for the inconvenience and expense incurred. I and my housemates can, I am sure you may imagine, hardly wait for some equally impressive disaster to befall our phone or TV service in 2002. And to give Telewest its due, you do seem to be trying.
To receive a bill for £71.24 on 15 April which charged, in retrospect and in advance, for a digital TV service which my housemate Mr Anonymous had attempted and naively believed he had managed to cancel when he moved out in late March of this year, was mildly inconvenient and insulting, but I felt sure Telewest could do better, and I was not disappointed. I phoned your customer service line and after speaking with a customer service representative, managed (finally) to get the full-spectrum TV service reduced to the basic package from that day (4th May I believe) on, and consequently, the CSR informed me, our bill would now be subject to a reduction of £20.
"So I only pay £51.24?" I said.
"That's right," she confirmed.
Off I tootled to the Post Office and paid the reduced amount, (copy of receipt enclosed) in the innocent belief that this would satisfy Telewest until the next bill arrived. What could possibly go wrong? Ask a silly question …
Three days after paying the reduced amount I was a little more inconvenienced and insulted (although not, alas, particularly surprised) to find that my payment of the agreed new total of April's bill had been completely ignored and that I and my household were now expected to pay a grand total of £187.32 – that is to say, April's original total of £71.24 plus May's bill of £116.08 (£72.70 for phone plus £43.38 for internet/TV). Needless to say, I was certainly not prepared to pay yet again, and hoped against hope that Telewest would realise that the problem lay, as usual, with its own bottomless incompetence and disregard for customers' expectations of a reasonable minimum standard of service.
Well, that sure didn't happen, and of course as the phone was cut off due to, forgive the scare-quotes, "non-payment" of April's bill, it was rather difficult, not to mention prohibitively expensive on my mobile phone, to get into contact with Telewest to point out the error of its ways: hence this letter.
I am sure your company is well aware that it enjoys what amounts to a monopoly in my part of London for customers who wish to have digital TV. What other excuse can there be for such abysmal treatment of people who simply want to pay for and receive a service from a company which, last time I looked, claims to be a service provider? The only reason I can imagine or give for anyone putting up with Telewest for more than a few months is that there is simply no alternative.
I am by now resigned to not receiving a reliable or satisfactory service from Telewest or its engineers or service personnel – for whom, by the way, I feel extreme sympathy: the fact that they almost never have a clue is, I feel, the fault of the Byzantine voodoo bureaucracy of your company rather than that of its employees. However, what surprised me about this latest dreary cock-up is that now even my right to pay for what in some parallel universe might laughingly be called a service, appears to have been rescinded.
Quite frankly, if I could afford to lose the hair, I would be tearing it out in despair at this point. As it is, I await your explanation and apology for the above chain of events with eager anticipation.
Yours sincerely,
Whisky Priestess
cc
Consumer Rights Administrator
BBC Watchdog, (A UK programme that investigates dodgy companies)
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS |
|
|