From BBC News

Background

My parents have been with Pipex internet for 5 years, having excellent service, and never having to call support.  Then in July of 2007 Pipex was bought out by Tiscali.

The Issues Start

Everything went fine until without warning in February of 2008 Tiscali transferred them to their LLU product.  This is when the trouble started, Tiscali’s idea of transferral is unplug from the old service and forget to plug into the new service.  So a number of calls later, and almost a week of no internet later they work out that they have made a mistake and reconnect us.

So it gets to September and our current subscription with Pipex/Tiscali runs out, two weeks after they first can’t take the money they send us a letter demanding a years internet at £281.30.  Unhappy with the service my Dad calls up Pipex to cancel the contract at this point, and even though he is the card holder and phone line holder Tiscali will not talk to him because I opened the account.  Eventual they agree to call me and I authorise them to talk to my Dad.

After much argument and a number of phone calls Tiscali agreed to a new deal with us, £7.99 a month with three months free (basically their new customer deal).  So dad paid up for the year (£71.51) thinking that would be it.

The mystery £19.41

So a few months later we get a letter from Pipex saying we owe £19.41… Which is odd as when Dad set up the new deal they said that he was all paid up for a year.  So back on the phone to Pipex, and once again they won’t talk to my Dad, so I have to talk every time we call to give all my details over, details which my Dad would have known anyway, in fact details any one with a little knowledge of me could have worked out.  The only difficult part was the account number, but one stolen/dumper dived letter could give you that.

The Kansas City Shuffle

“What’s a Kansas city shuffle?”
“A Kansas city shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left”_Smith

Pipex/Tiscali have their own version of the Kansas City Shuffle, The Kansas Phone Shuffle.  Call Customer Care, Customer Care says you need to call Credit Control; Call Credit Control, they say you need to call Billing Enquires; Call Billing Enquires get told you need to call Customer Care; repeat ad nauseam.

11/01/2009 More charges?

On the 12/01/2009 I was writing this article and I checked our statement again, and what would you know, a new charge of £7.99 has been added to the account, not only are they unable to do maths now, they feel the need to charge us for a service we have already paid for.  So Dad got back on the phone again, again they said everything is sorted, and Dad enquired again about cost of all these phone calls.  Tiscali is willing to only give £10 in credit for the cost of all the calls we have made, they gave Dad a number to call for cancellation, because we are so fed up we are willing to loose the £75~ we paid for the service in the first place, but because we have paid for a year in advance (so why are they charging us monthly?) we will have to pay a £25 cancellation charge.

13/01/2009 – Back on the phone

Two more calls today, from the number we were given yesterday, first one of course could not help.  But we did get our MAC code so we can move to a different provider.  However we will still have to argue this out with them, because they are threatening to blacklist my credit, which is a little harsh seeing as it’s their mistake.

The Telephone Calls

• Cancellation Dept – 0871 222 6367
• Customer Care – 0871 663 3300
• Payment Line – 0871 221 2212
• No idea -0800 294 1647
• Sales – 0800 781 7000
• Another No idea – 0871 222 5550
• Tech Support – 01707 299 507
• Billing Enquires – 0845 077 2455
• Another random number – 0871 222 6608

Average call length 15 mins 27 29 Calls average call charge £0.10p/min, over £40 in calls charge.