I get your point but according to the way we are trained we have to be positive and we only goin by the book when we inform you to either ring back after 5 days or 48hrs which ever the case. but i can asure you that a great percentage of the cases are solved within the period specified
...er trained?
And why do WE have to keep calling for updates on problems CAUSED BY YOU - Orange @7.5p a minute???
I'm supposedly on a 'VIP' list having had my broadband f#cked up for nearly 6 weeks now, where Orange are to update me every day on the progress. I have so far received not one call ... I have to chase , only to be told the same broken promises and lies...
Maybe it's because I live in that small out of the way town called LONDON.
I'm supposedly on a 'VIP' list having had my broadband f#cked up for nearly 6 weeks now, where Orange are to update me every day on the progress. I have so far received not one call ... I have to chase
I'm also on the VIP list (2 weeks) never get my daily calls either - just call them to get told we're investigating - I've still got exactly the same problem as over a month ago. I also have torepeat what's goingon on nearly every call - do they not have notes?
If you have nthe free broadband package, and are dealt with by Orange mobile staff in Tyneside or Bristol (by dialling 550 from your mobile) who are now broadband-trained then you've got a good chance someone will take ownership of your problem and call you rather than tell you to call back every 48 hrs. They might not be able to help but at least they're honest with you. Remember, they've been part of a successful, customer-focussed company for years (Orange mobile).
If you haven't got this package then you're stuck with the usual broadband customer service, which is appalling. So either leave or get the mobile / free broadband package.
Orange are nothing more than a disgraceful, incompetent, lying bunch of robbers.
This is proven by the THOUSANDS of people who post complaints into ISP forums (including myself) with endless lies and excuses from Orange.
I lost my connection for 2 weeks and was given lies, told to ring back in 48 hours and rubbish each time I rang.
The truth is they don't give a monkeys about their customers, only their profits. If they cared they would do line tests and sort problems, not leave people without broadband for weeks and months.
but i can asure you that a great percentage of the cases are solved within the period specified
So, as my isues are still ongoing - since April - I can assume that I'm one of the percentage who has been left to twist in the wind?
I agree with Spiney and in fact the other posters on this thread. I was told my situation was being looked at by FSD, not one iota of information more was afforded me. I HAVE TO CALL TO CHASE. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. I've also asked for a MAC key Three times, each time I was denied it through still being within contract or no one being around to issue me with one. WHAT'S UP WITH THAT?!
Also, in agreement with 1-step, sorry, O-fan, he's right, that's not honest and you should have more integrity than to defend the misdeeds that are going on.
Joined: 13 Aug 2006Posts: 1689Location: Marylebone Central London
Perhaps if Orange trained their staff better that would be a start because when you get someone at tech support asking what a router is they have no chance of getting anywhere near solving peoples problems perhaps a good start would be to ditch the tinpot liveboxes .
If a great percentage of cases are solved within the period specified then customers on this and many other forums are missing something (oh yes they are missing their hard earned money they pay Orange) .
Regards
_________________ ex Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange Blog
Joined: 20 Sep 2006Posts: 15Location: BRADFORD, WEST YORKSHIRE
Like many of you out there I have had quite an eye-opening experience trying to communicate with the people from Orange Tech Support. It strikes me that the vast majority seem to be "script followers" who are unable to deal with matters which are not on their list of "options". For "Orange Fan", I will gladly state that we should not tar everyone with the same brush. There are certainly some individuals who are knowledgeable and helpful, particularly those who responded to my emails, but everyone is nevertheless constrained by the "system".
My problems started on 30th August when, unbeknown to me, I was upgraded from a 2Mb service to an 8Mb service. I thought that it was a problem at our end initially and when I contacted Orange on 1st September we had to go through the usual suspects list checking settings etc etc. We normally connect via a Zyxel Prestige 662-HW wireless router - always choose quality it is is easy to set up and is reliable, however before we could start the basic tests we had to re-install the Speedtouch USB modem. Be warned though - unless you have optimised this ltlle beast with the driver download and installed the latest PPP diagnostics, the little blighter may not be able to cope with a higher broadband speed anyway!
Later it was established that there was a line fault and this was being checked out. I have since been told to call back at varying intervals of 24 hours, 48 hours and 5 days. No-one can really tell you what is going on as it is always another department who is carrying out the remdial work and you are never allowed to speak to these faceless individuals. Any suggestion that they might actually NOT be doing any work on your fault has scorn poured on it - how could you possibly think that? In the time that my fault has been in existence it should have been possible to re-wire the whole exchange never mind fix one fault.
Orange have admitted to me that there are many people who are also experiencing problems and for periods longer than I have suffered.
Have you all had my experience? I want to talk to someone in authority? Not possible - cannot transfer you - cannot call back etc. Well, today I was given a contact....
Eric Abensur
Orange UK PLC
PO Box 486
Rotherham S63 5ZX
The telephone number, however, connnects you back to the call centre so I will not waste my time posting that. Mr Abensur, if he exists, will get an epistle from me and hopefully from the rest of you.
Give them grief - it's only fair. After all that is precisely what we are getting from them.
Joined: 20 Sep 2006Posts: 15Location: BRADFORD, WEST YORKSHIRE
Like many of you out there I have had quite an eye-opening experience trying to communicate with the people from Orange Tech Support. It strikes me that the vast majority seem to be "script followers" who are unable to deal with matters which are not on their list of "options". For "Orange Fan", I will gladly state that we should not tar everyone with the same brush. There are certainly some individuals who are knowledgeable and helpful, particularly those who responded to my emails, but everyone is nevertheless constrained by the "system".
My problems started on 30th August when, unbeknown to me, I was upgraded from a 2Mb service to an 8Mb service. I thought that it was a problem at our end initially and when I contacted Orange on 1st September we had to go through the usual suspects list checking settings etc etc. We normally connect via a Zyxel Prestige 662-HW wireless router - always choose quality it is is easy to set up and is reliable, however before we could start the basic tests we had to re-install the Speedtouch USB modem. Be warned though - unless you have optimised this ltlle beast with the driver download and installed the latest PPP diagnostics, the little blighter may not be able to cope with a higher broadband speed anyway!
Later it was established that there was a line fault and this was being checked out. I have since been told to call back at varying intervals of 24 hours, 48 hours and 5 days. No-one can really tell you what is going on as it is always another department who is carrying out the remdial work and you are never allowed to speak to these faceless individuals. Any suggestion that they might actually NOT be doing any work on your fault has scorn poured on it - how could you possibly think that? In the time that my fault has been in existence it should have been possible to re-wire the whole exchange never mind fix one fault.
Orange have admitted to me that there are many people who are also experiencing problems and for periods longer than I have suffered.
Have you all had my experience? I want to talk to someone in authority? Not possible - cannot transfer you - cannot call back etc. Well, today I was given a contact....
Eric Abensur
Orange UK PLC
PO Box 486
Rotherham S63 5ZX
The telephone number, however, connnects you back to the call centre so I will not waste my time posting that. Mr Abensur, if he exists, will get an epistle from me and hopefully from the rest of you.
Give them grief - it's only fair. After all that is precisely what we are getting from them.
Eric Abensur exists alright, though somehow I don't picture him opening the post in lovely Rotherham...
The fundamental issue that O-rangeFan confirms, is the inability of Orange Tech Support to communicate effectively with Alcatel who have the contract to supply and maintain the LLU equipment.
In cases like my own, once a technical fault has been narrowed down to the LLU equipment or settings at the exchange, Orange cannot get Alcatel to react in a timely or effective manner. TS just have their "Fault Manager" software and when we phone, again and again to see if there's been any progress in diagnosing or rectifying the fault, the only answer TS can give is "computer says No" - or stall us with more line tests etc etc ....
This is not a new issue. It has been going on for months. Put simply: Orange have put in a system that they are incapable of supporting. The fact that they are aware of the problem, but appear to have done nothing to rectify it, looks more like organisational negligence than any lack of technical ability on the part of TS staff.
From our point of view, as customers not receiving the service we have paid for, this arrangement actually suits both Orange and Alcatel very nicely thank you. If Alcatel can only be contacted through "Fault Manager", and "Fault Manager" gets stuck, then Alcatel can just say "no problem our end, must be the customer". Much cheaper than sending an engineer to the exchange. At any one time there is only a certain number of open faults, Alcatel stay within their SLA, and the problems do not appear on our Eric's radar - and absolutely nowhere near the board so they don't give him an ear-bashing either.
It is almost certainly cheaper for Orange to lose a few grumpy customers like us than renegotiate the contract with Alcatel so that they put in place some other method of communicating fault incident information between them.
I can't see the ISPA, who nominated Orange "ISP of the year 2006" (makes your mind boggle doesn't it), having any clout. Their charter seems fine in terms of basic services you'd expect from an ISP but they make no mention of having adequate technical and customer service to support them. Maybe Ofcom are the only hope?
I am experiencing my second major hiatus in Orange/Wanadoo service - lost the connection on Monday afternoon and have so far made 6 calls to Tech Support to try to get the problem sorted out.
The story so far:
Call one: wife on the phone about 40 minutes to call centre in Mumbai. Apart from the information that it's monsoon season over there and there is 30 ins of water in the streets, no result except an ineffective attempt to reset the LiveBox.
Two: later that same evening, spoke to a Saffer (probably not in Tyneside or Bristol) who got me to reset the LiveBox and then said they would do a line test and I should call back in two hours.
Three: gave up at about 11pm after half an hour holding for TS. This is expecially annoying as a) you get a recorded message every two minutes suggesting you may be able to resolve your problem on the Orange website; b) listening to awful muzak.
Four: Morning call to TS. Line test result = there is no fault! They will do another line test though and I am to call in the evening. Magic word: my problem will be escalated!
Five: After half an hour on hold, the line is cut off.
Six: Phone again and after 20 mins or so speak to another TS person who says the fault has been referred to BT. The fault seems to be at the local exchange and that in the next 24 hours a BT engineer will go there to fix the fault.
I am now waiting in suspense for this evening to find out if I'm back on.
Good to get that off my chest. Sven is quite right that there is no point mouthing off at the TS people, but on the other hand:
1) You need to be very wary of going though lots of hoops unplugging your LiveBox etc - get them to stick to the point, demand concrete action and a deadline.
2) The length of time you have to hold suggests either there are lots of people having problems or Orange do not have enough TS staff.
3) You HAVE to keep calling - otherwise nothing will happen.
4) The great injustice of this is that you are paying for a service Orange is not giving you. Imagine if the mobile phone network or the BBC periodically went up the spout and wouldn't come back unless you rang them on a daily basis to fix it?
Exactly the same crap that I have been put threw, word for word, the exact same.
Its crazy, in all the 40-50 calls that I have placed which they tell me to call back the following day and maybe 2-3 times daily, I have only spoken to 2 or 3 people who I can honetsly say that actually knew wtf they were talking about and genuinly did care, then there was this pakistani hoe called cheryl who I would get a lot when I called, she would change her name to suit her mood and if she couldnt help or get any info then she would invariably hang up on me after pretending to go get her boss and she would put me "on hold" til her boss answered, she hung up on me about 3 or 4 times because she had exhausted her scripted answers and she just couldnt handle any problem/s that were not in the scripted answers.
I called customer service/ billing dept, and told them that there pak1 tech support was useless and that I would never call them back again, and the very next day I got my very first call back from Orange UK support even tho i never asked for it, they did a 1 hour line test and I am still waiting the results of it.
I refuse to call pak1 tech support as all they do is waste my time and cost me money, and I am no more advanced in my fault finding than i was before I called.
The lesson here is to dicth Orange asap and to never ever give them your business again, no matter what Orange-fan says.
The race and location of TS is irrelevant. Focussing justifiable anger on individual TS ops will not change anything, nor will racist comments get any sympathy from anybody in a position to do anything about the problems.
In theory, outsourcing TS to India etc is a good thing for customers - it allows companies to provide support outside of UK working hours - which is when most residential customers need it.
I'm sure that TS fix a high percentage of problems that get called in. It would not be the first time I've made a silly typo in a config box, or plugged a cable in the wrong socket. Using a script helps ensure a methodical approach. All good stuff.
The trouble starts when we reach the end of the script. Unfortunately, the Orange script says "repeat chorus" when it should escalate to a whole new second level of diagnostics. This is the first real problem.
The second real problem is that there is no proactive management of fault calls. It is this that causes us so much aggravation: WE have to call for updates, WE have to insist that the call is escalated, WE have to repeat our selves or jump through the scripted hoops again when nothing has changed.
There are many improvements Orange could make in this area. A freefone number would be nice. Two-way communication by email would be sensible. A web interface for customers to report faults and track progress would be wonderful.
The third problem, as sven wrote at the beginning of this thread, is that Orange have outsourced most of the operation. Again, outsourcing in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, however the way it has been done in Orange means that the different parties currently have very poor communications between each other. Hence, for example, the frustration of both customers and TS in getting Alcatel to work on real faults, and to communicate back progress updates. Similarly, if you contact customer service, they do not have access to the fault information - presumably because that is held and run by another company.
I'm sure we can make the list longer.
Orange have the resources to fix these problems. They do not appear to have the will.
Joined: 20 Sep 2006Posts: 15Location: BRADFORD, WEST YORKSHIRE
Thanks for the response from Pipped...
I actually pulled out some old correspondence from Eric Abensur yesterday evening He is listed as
Eric Abensur, Vice President, Orange Home
Orange Home UK plc
Verulam Point, Station Way, St. Albans, Hertfordshire, AL1 5HE
It was the offer of broadband if you sign up for a mobile contract worth £30 for 18 months and yes, towards the end of the letter he does boast that we will be in safe hands with Europe's biggest broadband provider, and The Best UK Consumer Internet Service Provider (awarded by ISPA for the 3rd year in a row)
What criteria does ISPA base its award on? A dubious award if the reports on this forum are anything to go by.
It was quite enlightening to hear the truth about the systems employed by Orange supposedly to support us. It explains why we get no real answers when we call.
Regarding the call centres, of course it is cheaper to use overseas units and this is inevitable with globalisation but I have spoken to call centres in the UK and India getting much the same results. They are impotent - in a way you have to feel sorry for them. It must be frustrating having to turn up to work every day knowing you are going to get the likes of me on the other end of the phone knowing full well that they cannot fix the problem and that (unlike me) many of the irate customers may well give them verbal abuse.
One of my main gripes was how to establish whether an engineer was actually looking into the problem. Orange state that the fault has been logged with the engineers and therfore they are working on it. They cannot proactively chase up the call and have to wait for a response. What is wrong with the engineer updating the system on a 24 hour basis? At least you will know someone is still active. My fear is that the call is dropped from the system and I could be waiting for ever.
This is an extract from one email I got....
The problem is that issue has been in hand with the engineers and awaiting update for too long, so we suspect a software issue. We have escalated this to the team who will be able to clear that out of the system but have no update on this from them, meanwhile, the fault is still stuck in the same status and there's not really anything we can do to move this along for you until the system is cleared. This was done 3 working days ago, so you will need to allow another 2 working days.
Please call Technical Support on Tuesday
I like the idea of a web-based fault reporting service. You could get your call reference and check the fault on-line thus dispensing with the need to wait in a call queue for hours and saving the cost of lots of call centre staff salaries doing a job in which they cannot succeed. The only thing though is you need to get on-line so always have a spare dial-up account or use someone else's broadband connection.
It irritates me too that the onus is always on US. Yes, We have to initiate all contact.
What does strike me as glaringly obvious is that Orange would be well advised to consider employing some of the contributors to this forum in their customer service management. If they were to adopt even a few of the constructive points put forward their service would bound ahead.
ARE YOU READING THIS ERIC?
Must get some work done now before I get round to my ritual call to Orange
Joined: 13 Aug 2006Posts: 1689Location: Marylebone Central London
Good post and good points just to add to
Quote:
Orange have the resources to fix these problems. They do not appear to have the will.
Your right they dont have the will when it comes to solving your problems but they have plenty of will sending you debt collector letters when you stop your payments for no service lol.
Regards
_________________ ex Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange Blog
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