Silly Season in Customer Services Land

You'll be pleased to hear that my TV turned up! My grumble today, however, is about Pipex (the Internet Service Provider), and their incredibly bad, atrocious, awful, jaw-droppingly incompetent and clueless customer service "team".

Firstly, I suppose it's partly my fault. I wanted broadband in my new flat, so I shopped around, and Pipex looked like value for money at £15 a month for a 10GB limit. I duly signed up on January 9th, and the router, welcome pack etc. arrived the next day, albeit at the wrong address. I waited the 7 working days specified in the welcome letter, and turned the router on - nothing. I purchased a spare micro-filter, and tried a spare router, but still, nothing. Cue two weeks of trying to contact Pipex. If you talk to their customer service people, they'll just say "it's a technical problem, you need to re-dial and talk to Technical Support". If you dial Technical Support, you won't get through. Believe me, I've tried! You just sit in a queue for hours after hours, listening to the same cheesy music. I finally got an email from them last week, saying that they've had a "provisioning problem", and that the broadband would go live on February 15th - five weeks after I ordered it. No explanation as to what the problem is, just "there's a problem". Hmmm....

This morning I spotted how reasonable the Sky TV / broadband prices are, and decided to cancel the Pipex setup. I phoned Pipex, and after 10 minutes in a queue, got through to their cancellations department (says it all really!). I asked for my MAC code, so I could switch to Sky, and was told "sorry, but because your broadband has never worked, there's no MAC code to give you". Interesting... I phoned the BT Broadband tagging team, who laughed, said "It's all Pipex's fault, and it's up to them to remove the ADSL tag request on the line", and wished me luck dealing with them. They also pointed out that the request to ADSL-enable my phone line only came through on January 28th, a whopping THREE WEEKS after I ordered it. So it seems that the "problem" was a case of "we forgot to turn your broadband on".

I now have the joyous task of speaking to the dimwits at Pipex, and trying to get them to remove their ADSL tag from my phone line. At least I'm not alone - check out www.pipexproblems.co.uk

To be continued...