What conclusions would you draw from the following interaction with a home broadband provider:
- Your broadband degrades over 48 hours and becomes unusable. Your checks don’t find any fault and so you call your provider suspecting a fault on the physical line.
- After 30 mins on the phone waiting, you speak to a person who says their systems show no fault on the line. They suggest waiting 24 hours to see if the situation improves.
- It doesn’t, and after another 30 minutes on the phone, you speak to a person who says that there is, after all, a fault on the physical line. They arrange a time 3 days hence, the soonest slot available, for an engineer to visit. Progress, but it means being without home broadband for a week before it’s fixed.
- With no advanced warning of any kind, the engineer simply doesn’t show up. After spending another 30 mins on the phone to the provider, you speak to a person who offers no explanation. They simply rebook the engineer for the earliest available slot a few days later.
- Again, the engineer fails to show up. You spend another 30 minutes calling the provider, but when you speak to a person, they are sympathetic, arrange another date and time for the engineer’s visit, and insist that it will happen.
- With no advance warning again, the engineer fails to show up. It’s now 3 weeks since first contacting the provider. You spend more time on the phone before getting to speak to a person who says the engineer couldn’t visit because ‘they only had a partial address for you’. You point out that the provider routinely uses your full address on their bills, and that the engineer could have called the mobile phone number registered with them to check.
- The person ignores the point and goes on to say that the fault is not with the physical line, but with the provider’s hub in the home. They say a new hub will be dispatched within 48 hours and that the fault will be resolved by simply unplugging the old one and connecting the new one.
- You control your annoyance and calmly make a formal complaint.
The Badger concludes that the provider’s customer service is 20th century, their IT support systems are likely woeful and not joined up, that resourcing must be a problem, and that against such a backdrop the introduction of more AI-centred technology is unlikely to improve matters for customers. OFCOM’s recent report on complaints about providers probably paints a rosier picture than reality when it comes to typical customer experiences. It’s thus perhaps hardly surprising that many, like the Badger, are making the jump to smaller, modern, local fibre broadband providers where both service and value for money is substantially better.
The Information Badger 