Saturday, August 18, 2007

Techno Niggles and Phone Gripes continued

Firstly, I spotted a problem on the new Sky HD installation (and the Sky+ Multi-room) which is apparently a known issue. Basically part of the installation sees you getting a new viewing card and it appears the engineer has paired the wrong cards up (i.e. the new card is in the old sky+ box and the old card in the Sky HD). The consequence of this is that the old Sky+ box will not playback any of the recorded programmes and for some reason, the SkyHD won't record anything, despite having a nice 160GB drive.

A call to Sky beckons tomorrow. I only really spotted this as the HD channel support has come online.

Phone Gripes; well it appears that Carphone Warehouse are steadfast in their position of not letting me get a similar phone and offering a Pearl or a (admittedly nice, Nokia n95) - so I'm going to take the Pearl and see how it goes, with the intention of cancelling my contract with them as soon as it's up in a few months and most likely get an iPhone.

I'd also been having a run in with O2 who have messed up Trina's phone upgrade and rather than attempt to speak to their customer "help" line, I wrote them a pretty strong letter. I've been having to write a few strong ones of late...

With all the set-up of the kit it'd have been nice to get near it, but the kids have been hooked on "Defense Force" (by D3) for the 360, mind you, it's nice to see Jack having a break from Warcraft.

Kitchen-quote day tomorrow, so I'll take a chair to sit on when we hear.

3 comments:

Ben Paddon said...

Having worked for a large telecoms company in the past, I feel obligated to tell you this harsh truth: Letters, generally, don't seem to accomplish anything. When I was working at NTL (now Virgin Media, soon to be SOmething Else Entirely) we on the call centre staff were often given big piles of correspondence to separate and file. More often than not, anything we "processed" got put in the bin. We also had a bit of a laugh at some of the letters we read. One one of them was effectively a suicide letter from a pensioner who was distressed that she'd had her cable cut off and consequently couldn't watch Countdown. I'm not making this up.

You're usually better off with a phone call. Yes, it's time-consuming, you've got better things to do than sit on hold listening to The Best Eighties Tracks In The World... Ever! (which seems a contradiction of terms, but there we are) but a good phonecall with the right person goes a long way. Trying to be friendly, maybe having a little joke with them as well, sometimes does the trick.

That Countdown thing, though. I still wonder if she actually did it...

Martyn James Brown said...

Actually my experience is the total opposite, especially when a letter goes to the person you dealt with AND their manager. Things tend to happen because there are suddenly working implications. I guess it also depends how you approach it.

I only ever write a letter (and as a rule, I write few letters of complaint) when I've exhausted the entirely tiresome customer-support centres which are absolutely and utterly frustrating (multiple choice routing, holding, getting wrong person/department - and that's a good one that isn't a call centre).

Whenever I have written a letter, I've had results.

Ben Paddon said...

Well, it must just be the poor way NTL was managed, then. That wouldn't surprise me, actually. Two weeks before they made us redundant they trained us on how to use the new computer system they were moving everyone on to, and then didn't let us use it. Then we left, obviously. Money well spent!