The letter below outlines my problem (or many many problems) with Orange. I will not go into it in detail here as you can read it all for yourself below.
I used to be a big Orange fan as their customer service was brilliant. Now, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole and none of my friends will either.
My main problem was that they were in breach of contract (failing to provide a contractual service) and they would do nothing to resolve the issue.
As a result I stopped paying for me phones (and stopped using them). One of the phones is a business phone and has a relatively large monthly spend (circa £300) so at the time I owed them quite a bit of money for phone calls - I hoped this would incentivise them to sort out the situation.
I send over 15 letters to every address that I could find - PR department, executive office, call centres etc.
I also sent repeat letters every week.
The response I got was entirely unsatisfatory (mainly automated)
After 8 weeks I received a response from the executive office saying that that I was still in contract for my phones I would still have to pay.
I replied that as they were in breach of contact I didn't have to pay. (maybe put in stronger terms than that)
They replied and said okay they would terminate the phones and broadband contract but I still owed them money.
I said no.
They offered me to write off half the money.
I said no .
They eventually gave in and closed the account writing off all of the money that I owed them (in January 2007).
I am now a very happy BT broadband customer and totally recommend it. Ofcom have totally screwed the broadband regulation and make BT the only viable broadband supplier as it takes too long.
If you are going fight them, you need to be tough. Write to the executive office and don't give up. Be polite but be aware of your rights.
Thursday 28th September 2006
To whom it may concern
Cc: Head of Marketing, Head of Customer Services, Chief Executive, OFCOM, Guardian Consumer Champion, Office of Fair Trading
I am writing to inform you that due to the lack of any broadband service in the evening for the last Three months, and a complete lack of service for the last week, I am withdrawing from my contract with Orange and will not pay any further line rental on the account for either of my phone handsets. Additionally I expect Orange to issue me a formal apology immediately and to volunteer reasonable compensation for the costs I have incurred through your negligence, incompetence and dishonesty. The combined lack of service and will to rectify the problem places Orange in clear breach of contract. I am simply not prepared to pay for a service that has not been delivered.
I have been a customer of Orange on various contracts for the last five years. I have been a customer of Wanadoo for the last approx 2 years. My average monthly phone bill for the last 3 years has been a minimum of 150 pounds sometimes rising to over 500. I have also recommended a number of friends to join Orange in the past. In short I am a high value customer. I dread to think how you treat those you considered less ‘valuable’.
As a long-standing Orange customer, I feel utterly failed by your inability to rectify the problems that I have with my broadband. Your customer service staff and procedures seem designed to cause maximum frustration and waste my time whilst deliberately avoiding responsibility for the real reason behind the lack of service provision. The end result being that you have not fulfilled your side of the contract to provide me with a working broadband service even though I have given you plenty of opportunity and personally invested a significant amount of time and effort on my own part.
In the rest of this letter I will outline the reasons why I have finally chosen to take this course of action. I should add that I will not change my mind on this matter and will be prepared to go to court to state my case, and also give Orange’s total failure and dysfunctional culture of customer service maximum publicity amongst the consumer press, not to mention my entire peer group.
I have 3 key complaints:
1. Dishonest renewal of mobile and broadband contract without my permission.
2. Complete failure to provide a key component of the contracted service
3. Abysmal and ineffectual customer services, that take no proactive role in ensuring the product paid for is provided
1. Orange Wanadoo crossover and dishonest renewal of my contract without permission
I renewed my Wanadoo contract when I moved house in May of this year. Soon after, I heard the news that Wanadoo were being taken over by Orange and I would be entitled to free broadband.
I received a couple of letters telling me to call up and claim my free broadband. I dutifully did this. However, anyone I spoke to seemed to have a massive problem with the idea that I already had broadband from Wanadoo so I just needed them to stop charging me for it, rather than issue a request for a new broadband service.
This went on for quite a long time and over a number of different phone calls. Eventually I got someone to understand and they told me that this would mean I would be signing up for a new contract, which I agreed to. Nobody explained to me that this contract would affect my phone as well as my broadband, so of course, I assumed it was just for my broadband.
Concurrent to this problem I had been having some problems with my N70 phone, so the next call I made that day was to the Orange phone team and asked if there is anything they can do to help me (i.e. provide a new N70 or different phone etc). They opened my account and asked me when I was due for upgrade. I said I didn’t know and then on the off chance queried the conversation I had had with the broadband team regarding the contracts. This person then explained to me that I had renewed my contract for both my phone and broadband so I wouldn’t be able to upgrade my phone for another year. In my view the failure to mention this in the first instance is a serious error. It is not possible to agree a verbal contract if the vendor does not make perfectly clear what the contract involves.
I quickly phoned back the broadband team and explained that I had changed my mind and now didn’t want to renew my contract and I was happy to pay for the broadband, until after I had upgraded my phone. The customer service operative told me that this was fine and that the contract was thereby cancelled. They also told me to ring back once I had sorted out my phone and that at that point they would happily issue a new contract including free broadband service.
Since then I have been working abroad a lot and haven’t had time to pop into an Orange shop and decide which handset I wanted. So I still have the problematic N70.
This brings us to the 23rd of September when I demanded a refund for all the money I have been paying for broadband whilst not receiving the service. The operator then revealed to me that actually I haven’t been paying for broadband. I was okay with this until, in a later call, I was reminded of the fact that when they failed to cancel my request for free broadband I entered into a new contract with Orange and was therefore expected to pay a monthly fee regardless of their lack of service.
I phoned customer retention and got through to James (ext 27185) and informed him that I would be taking my business elsewhere after recounting the whole ugly situation one more time. He had a look at my account and put me on hold for a while – then came back and informed me that as I had renewed my contract four months ago I would not be able to cancel my contract. There was nothing further he would be able to do. I explained that until earlier this morning I believed that I was paying for my broadband and that I have specifically requested to not renew my contract until after the phone upgrades had happened.
His reply to this was that I should have ‘noticed earlier that the request for the contract to be rescinded had not happened’ and there was nothing he could do without my paying off the rest of my contract. He also insinuated that is was my word against theirs that I had requested this – and the contract still stood, so basically it was either tough or I was lying.
In my opinion James (ext 27185) is wrong that it was my ‘responsibility to notice that the contract hadn’t been rescinded’. If my verbal agreement is sufficient to renew a contract, then an Orange employee’s verbal assurance that a contract has been cancelled is equally sufficient. He also seems to think that I should continue paying Orange regardless as to whether Orange delivers the service I am paying for. I would be interested to know about the disciplinary action that Orange will be taking against James (ext 27185).
In the first instance I believe that the renewal of my phone contract was dishonest. However, given that Orange are now maintaining that it was renewed and that the provision of free broadband was the reason for it’s renewal, I believe that your lack of service delivery invalidates the contact you are now trying to hold me to when it comes to payment. You cannot have it both ways. Either the contract was never agreed in which case I am under no obligation to make further payments, or the contract is in place and Orange have broken their side of the agreement through persistent lack of service.
2. Complete failure to provide a key component of the ‘contracted’ service.
As a longstanding Wanadoo customer I chose to renew my contract in May 2006 when I moved to my new address. Since that date I have experienced worsening connections to my broadband line during peak hours and over the last Three months, no connection at all during the evening or at weekends.
This lack of connection is a source of significant frustration to me and my partner who both rely on the Internet to work at home in the evenings.
This, I am now told by the customer retention team is due to contention rates, which I understand is the result of too many users attempting to connect to the broadband exchange at any one time. Some people get to access the Internet, some people don’t. I don’t.
In the last two weeks I have been told that the only thing the technical support guys can do is to leave a request with engineering to see if they can solve to problem. I have been told that realistically there is nothing that they will be able to do. However, please can you call back in 24 hour, 48 hours, 5 days, next week, at 5am etc to see what they report. I have dutifully done this in the hope of getting some kind of solution – all to no avail.
I am bored now. Very bored. I have spent too much of my time sitting talking to people in call centres about why my broadband doesn’t work, telling them what they problem is and hearing them tell me that there is nothing they can do about it.
As far as I am concerned, Wanadoo (Orange) have failed to provide me with the service they have promised me and therefore are in breach of contract.
3. Abysmal and ineffectual customer services, that take no proactive role in ensuring the product paid for is provided
I have made a significant number of calls to Wanadoo / Orange technical support who have never been able to resolve my problem, generally citing a problem with the computer set-up or virus software. At first I believed this could be the case and dutifully followed the advice of the call center operative – disconnecting, uninstalling the software, switching off, reconnecting, re-installing etc etc. However, I know now that this procedure is the standard ‘get of jail’ free card within the script and no matter how much I pleaded that I had already undergone this procedure numerous times I found it a procedure nonetheless impossible to escape.
My partner is technically capable and insisted early on that the problem was contention rates. Orange call-centre staff repeatedly denied this. Instead they would always revert to the ‘are you on a wired connection? It’s a problem with your wired connection, you should try wireless’ and then ‘are you on a wireless connection, you should try wired’. After significant capital investment on my part in new hardware, I was eventually able to speak to an individual that agreed we had tried all options at our end (Note. If you are put through to an Indian call center – you are immediately placed back in the ‘is it wired – is it wireless’ loop). Frankly I would’ve thought it entirely obvious that a connection that functioned normally during the day, but not at night was failing due to an external factor affecting the line. If the setup at our end were wrong, it wouldn’t have functioned so consistently during the day. The fact that this was made clear on every single technical call, suggests to me that either the support staff are entirely incompetent, or that this information was willfully ignored in favor of attributing blame to the customer and wasting their time in the hope that they and their problem would simply go away. I cannot explain to you how angry this state of affairs made me.
After a ridiculous amount of time spent on the phone to ‘technical’ support staff, we were put into another service ‘loop’. This involved telling us that line tests would be carried out. I have lost count of the number of line tests that have been conducted. Line test after line test after line test. All with the same answer – there is no problem with the line, so it has to be something with your set-up.
The above fails to convey the number of calls and length of time that I had spent up until now on the p hone to both UK and Indian call centres. I assure you that both the queuing time and call time have been considerable. I estimate 20 – 30 hours.
In one phone call it was even revealed to me that a number of the previous line tests had not even been put through to the line test people. What does this mean? Well, one operative noticed that the line test results were coming back 20 seconds after they were requested. In her experience it takes a minimum of two hours for a line test result to come back, so for it to come back so quickly must have meant there was a problem with the line. So why was I being lied to by other operatives?
In fact this is merely one of many customer service failings at Orange:
• I have been hung up on (And no, no rude or aggressive language was used by either me or my partner)
• I have queued for over 40 mins on many, many occasions.
• I have been told to ring back at 5am if I want to avoid queuing.
• I have queued and been told that the individual I am speaking to system has gone down and therefore I need to ring back and queue again, because in India they don’t have the facility to transfer me to another colleague.
• In fact, I have been told that technical support cannot transfer me to customer services so you have to ring back and queue again on many occasions.
• I have been told by colleague A that I am being put through to a colleague called X who has been explained the whole situation, then colleague Y answers the phone who knows nothing and tries to transfer me back to colleague A who then doesn’t answer their extension. I then have to queue for 40 minutes again.
• I have been told by India at the end of a long phone and frustrating call that they can’t deal with this sort of technical query and that I need to phone back in office hours to speak to someone in the UK who might be able to help me
• For a significant part of the 3 months I was informed that I was being charged at national rate for my call, even though my call was to report your lack of service
• I have been told that I didn’t ring back when I was supposed to and therefore we have to start from the beginning of the process again
At no point has anybody at Orange called me about this lack of service. Not a single individual has been proactive about sorting this problem out. The only person who ever tried to resolve this issue with your lack of service was myself. Apparently some of the technical team called to tell me that my line was ‘fine’ (It’s not!) on the number on the BT line – which is only used for ADSL. This had been made perfectly clear to them on a number of occasions.
I would expect that Orange would be concerned about their customers not receiving the service that they have paid for, and would take some action to remedy the situation. This is not the case. The consistent position of customer ‘service’ staff is to blame the customer for any technical difficulty. When that’s been demonstrated to be untrue they then blame the customer for agreeing to a new contract, and finally they threaten that regardless as to whether they provide the agreed service you must continue to pay or they will ‘refer you to a debt collection agency’ and it will be ‘your word against ours’.
Well it is my word against yours, so I suggest you look into the customer service logs, and seriously examine your customer service protocols.
To Summarise
Orange were dishonest in renewing my contract, or they were dishonest in saying that they had cancelled the renewal.
Orange has completely failed to provide a recognizable broadband service as promised.
Orange customer service has been entirely ineffectual and often dishonest.
Orange has utterly wasted my time. 20 – 30 hours at approx £30/hour.
I’ve had enough. I suggest that you stop wasting time creating ridiculous ‘animal’ talkplans and start treating your customers with some respect. We are not stupid and we will not pay for a service that is not delivered, regardless of the threats made by your customer retention staff. I would also advise that you completely review your customer service strategy. In the short term it may be profitable to obfuscate and blame the customer, but in the longer term you will simply lose the only asset, which has any value in your industry – customer goodwill.
I have cancelled my direct debit to Orange to give you some incentive to sort all of this out. I would hope that you would come back to me with some sort of apology and compensation offer immediately.
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