Dear Mr/Ms/Mrs Orange or the people at Orange who deal with customer service issues,
I’ve been a costumer of Orange broadband since October 2007. My first year with Orange broadband was great. Your up time and your installation service were great. And your price was right.
In October I moved house and this is where my issue with your service began.
When I called on the 9th of October to inform you that I would be moving house you said to keep the service running as it will be cheaper and easier to just do a home transfer when I’ve moved. So I did just that.
When I had moved into a relatively permanent location I called you to say I had moved, gave my new address, asked for new equipment as the equipment had been misplaced during the move – which I was assured would be no problem. I was told the equipment would come in three to five days and that the internet would be up and running in 15 working days. I didn’t understand the 15 days for what I thought would be a simple switch, but you told me it was in the fine print of the contract I had signed. Fair enough, I would wait. And wait, and wait… and wait.
More then a week later, on the 10th of November, the equipment still hadn’t shown up, so I called your customer service again. I was told the new details had not been entered in the right database and the equipment was sent to the wrong address and so I needed to give the address and phone details again. Fine, a mistake I thought. Won’t happen again, plus the nice lady in the outsourced customer service department said sorry a bunch of times, so I should be okay… or so I thought.
Unfortunately this pattern repeated itself, and I called your customer service number 10 more times over the next month. The call durations varied from three minutes, to 56 minutes on the 26th of November when once again I was told one of your systems didn’t have the correct address, this time for the actual service rather then the replacement . This time it was the logistics team’s database. Unfortunately this was not the last time I heard this as when I called on the 2nd of December I heard this excuse again.
I was told that I would be reimbursed the payments I would have made during the time I was without internet which exceeded the fifteen days. But the ten pounds per month I pay doesn’t really cover the full financial, intellectual and emotional stress my wife and I have been under for the past few days.
Last night I finally had the internet up and running in my house. This was a full 33 work days without internet and 45 total evenings, Saturdays and Sundays – as for us home broadband consumers we use our home internet outside of regular working hours.
I’ve documented the extent of my costs over this time and hope you will reimburse me a fair amount. I’m also posting this letter on my facebook profile and on my blog as I think it will make interesting reading for my friends abroad who don’t suffer these customer service nightmares where they are – or at least not to this extent. I’m also sending a copy of this to watchdog and Ofcom as I think they’ll both find it amusing. And lastly I’ve also found a bunch of fellow alumni from London Business School who work at Orange so I’m emailing a copy to them as well. Hopefully somewhere someone within Orange can do something about this.
But anyway here’s my tab, hope you can pick up part of the bill.
Things I can easily price:
2 payments made to Orange without service - 20 pounds
3 café’s visited for their wifi - 20 pounds, coffees and herbal teas are pretty expensive these days aren’t they?
5 times we’ve gone to London Business School to use the wireless in the library - many thousands of pounds I paid in tuition, but I can’t reasonably charge you for this, so let’s just say 10 pounds for travel and expenses
15 calls made to Orange on local call charges to sort out the issue - approximately 40 pounds
Things I can’t put a price on:
12 times I’ve been told that they hadn’t updated the right database
16 people I’ve spoken to. Deepak, Reena, Darren and the others were all as helpful as they could have been I guess, but for some reason none of them would give me their last name, even though they insisted on my full name, address, postcode and the same 2 letters of my password every time.
5 out of the 20 different songs I was forced to listen to were extremely bad. I’ll grant you that the Amy Winehouse and Jack Johnson tracks were pretty good, but not why I called really . The worst was when you repeatedly played “Before I fall to pieces” by Razorlight, which includes the lines:
“And so I’ll go before I fall to pieces
Yes I’ll go before I fall to pieces
Now I’m just waiting for something that might never come”
Now that’s just cruel and unusual punishment.
Approximately 19802 times I’ve heard the word sorry, the first couple of times it was reassuring. After that it was just annoying.
Also, having to deal with and reassure my pissed off wife over the course of two months is the last item I can’t put a price on.
So that’s 90 pounds of things I can easily value and a lot of other things that I can’t. Maybe you can, I don’t know. But I look forward to your response nonetheless and will put it on my blog and facebook page as well for my friends to see. You can cc Watchdog and Ofcom if you so wish.
Thanks for your time,
Farhan Lalji
