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September 19, 2008
Getting their wires crossed
What on earth possessed me to transfer my mobile, office and broadband lines in the same week? How could I be so naive as to think that it would all go smoothly? 
After a lot of frustrating calls to premium rate numbers, working through countless automated menus and listening to a lot of dreadful "on-hold" musak, my office line did get successfully transferred, but the mobile and the broadband were not so successful. Both look set for a delay of at least a week.
What has frustrated me most in my dealings with the FOUR telephone companies involved is the failure of anyone to take any ownership or responsibility for resolving THEIR issues. Instead I have been passed from pillar to post in my quest to sort things out for them.
It seems that everyone I speak to has a very limited remit and is incapable of talking to their colleague or even transferring me to the next department. Why do that when you can bump the customer and give them another premium rate number to call which places them in another queue they have to endure?
I now know more about the internal workings of the ordering process at these companies than most of their staff do and certainly more than I care to. Each of them has some form of single customer view in place and references me by my telephone and account numbers, but none of them appear to be truly joined up and the customer service staff have access to information that is incomplete at best and frequently incorrect. They may have the same identifier on the records, but their systems and processes are certainly not working in a joined up way, leaving the customer to assemble their own single view of the enterprise when things go wrong. As far as I can see, the only saving grace for these organisations is that they are all as bad as the others. Perhaps they should be called miscommunication companies...
Posted by Steve Tuck at September 19, 2008 10:15 AM
