Multithreaded

Well, Orange have finally agreed to close down my broadband account, 3 and a half months after installing it. At no time was the service fit for purpose. At best, I would get several line drops an hour with an immediate reconnect, at worst no service at all. From the morning of December 23rd until now I have had no connection at all.

I finally managed to persuade technical support that raising another line test request was not going to be worth it. They tried to tell me that they couldn’t raise a cancellation authorization as no line test had been done in December. I politely pointed out that the reason no line test had been done in December was because it had taken their engineers four and a half weeks to respond to the fault which was raised at the end of November. Eventually, after consulting his supervisor, the support guy, who really was very helpful and stayed calm despite my ranting, told me that he would raise a cancellation authorization. However, his system was down which meant he couldn’t do it there and then but he promised that he would put in all the details and that I should give customer services a call an hour and a half later to complete the cancellation.

Actually, I waited until the next day as 40 minutes on the line with Orange was all I could stand that day. When I did call, much to my surprise, the cancellation authorization was there on my accounts records and a very chirpy young lady agreed to start processing it. Too good to be true, however. When she contacted Customer Care (the Orange department naming committee clearly have a strong sense of irony) they told her that they would not process the cancellation since “not enough diagnostics had been carried out and they needed to send me a new modem”. She argued my case, even consulting the official procedures manual and pointing out to them the bit which said that if tech support had raised the authorization then they had no choice. Customer Care responded that they could override the cancellation if not enough diagnostics had been done. She took the matter up with her supervisor who insisted that CC could not refuse to cancel and even spoke to them directly whilst I held to clear the matter up and finally came back to me to say that Customer Care had agreed to do the cancellation and that he would clear the outstanding balance on my account (I cancelled my direct debit last month) and that if I had any problem I could contact him personally.

So finally I seem to be free of the abomination that is Orange Broadband. There’s something I don’t understand, though. Why would a company treat its customers like this? What do they possibly hope to gain by subjecting them to atrocious levels of service, making them hold for 15 minutes or more in order to speak to people who have no control over the situation; holding customers to the letter of a contract when it is clear that the service is not working; continuing to take money from people when they are not providing a working service with the threat of legal action if they default.

Even had Orange sorted out the problems and got me a working service, I would have terminated it at the end of the contract anyway. I have been an Orange mobile phone customer for over a decade, which is why I signed up for their broadband in the first place, but now I want nothing to do with them. I am actively seeking another provider for my £250-£300 per month business mobile phone services. In other words, because of so doggedly trying to hold on to £20 per month of broadband income they have alienated a loyal customer so much that they are going to lose more than 10 times that revenue in another area of their business.

If Orange do not sort out this situation quickly I think they do not have a very bright future. Somehow, though, I don’t see them getting it sorted. The automated switchboard message had changed when I called yesterday. It said that it was taking 8 to 10 days longer than usual to send out new live boxes because of the extra large number of sign-ups they were dealing with. All I could think of was poor sods who are going to have to go through what I did.

Can anyone recommend a good mobile phone provider in the UK?