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Here's the letter I wrote to Aizad Hussain:
Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:59:14
Dear Mr Hussain,
I am writing to you after having a very disappointing experience with your
customer service team in Cambridge. On Friday last week I noticed that my phone
service had been disconnected. No engineer was available to fix it until
Monday, so my family was without phone service for the better part of 4 days.
This is the second time this same fault has occurred (on the first occasion the
service was disconnected for a week and we got a months rental as compensation)
and the problem is entirely an NTL one - our number is apparently being treated
as temporary and reallocated periodically.
When I phoned customer service to ask for some compensation, I was offered one
pound, on the basis that line rental is £9.50 and this works out about 30p a
day. A supervisor confirmed that this is all that would be offered to me. The
supervisor would also not confirm that the same problem would not occur again.
This may well be a policy decision, but it is not good customer service. There
are two key things here: firstly, if I can't get a phone service from you that
is reliable, I shall have to go back to BT - I switched so I could bundle
cable, phone and (in the future) broadband from one provider - I don't want to
go back, but having a working phone is a necessity. Someone needs to assure me
that the necessary steps are taken so that the same problem doesn't happen
again.
Second, it isn't really about the money - I'd much rather have a working phone
and pay you a fair rate for it than have to write this kind of email. I just
want a token acknowledgement that you made a mistake. BT would offer a months
rental in these circumstances. A pound is an insult.
Finally, I ought to just point out the outstanding service I got from Neil
S, the engineer that visited us both times this problem has occurred.
Thank you for your time. I hope you can help me with this matter.
yours sincerely,
Matt Freestone