Mathew is mighty pissed off, and that’s putting it lightly. In November last year I took out Tiscali’s TV, broadband and phone package and not a day has gone by since where there have not been issues.

I have, therefore, decided to document my experiences in the hope that others will see this and avoid like the plague.

A few comments before I begin:

» The products that Tiscali offers are actually very good. I have no quibbles with the TV, broadband or phone.
» The service that Tiscali offers is, in my opinion, terrible.

In the beginning

In November last year I moved to London and towards the end of the month I got my BT phone line sorted and then went to Tiscali to set up my package. The sales guys were very helpful and so I took out the package, with provisioning due to take a couple of weeks.

Shortly after this I received a letter advising that they would need to push back the installation date, so I called to make a new appointment. The new appointment date, a few days after the original one, came and nobody turned up. So, again I called Tiscali and they advised that they had not arranged for a visit.

Slightly annoyed at having stayed home all day to deal with this, I arranged another visit. This time I needed to work from home to enable this to happen. Again, the day came and no engineer visited. Again, I called Tiscali and was informed that the visit was not arranged because of a system issue of some kind. The agent I spoke to gave the impression this was commonplace.

Finally, with some degree of cajoling, an engineer came (!), set me up and went on his merry way. We were finally up and running.

I was genuinely annoyed with the service I had received (it was I who had to call Tiscali to sort everything out, I was inconvenienced etc) but saw no advantage in complaining at this point. After all, the service was finally installed and that should have been the end of it.

Then came the bill

In January I noticed that BT had taken a payment of nearly £150 from my account. I logged in to my account and the bill was a cancellation charge for terminating my contract with them early.

This came as a surprise to me. When I took the package with Tiscali I had explicitly asked about this and was advised that they would be taking over the billing of the line but that nothing else would change. There would be no charges associated with the change apart from their installation fee.

I called Tiscali to see what was going on and was advised that it was not their problem as BT had billed me incorrectly. BT, however, said that Tiscali had cancelled the contract and taken over the line. As such their charge was valid.

So, once more on the phone to Tiscali. Once more the indication was given by the agent that this was a common issue and that I should email them the details and a copy of the bill and a refund would be provided. I duly sent an email to complaints@uk.tiscali.com and awaited a reply.

Nothing.

So, again I called them and they advised that even though I had received an acknowledgement from them that the email was received it was, in fact, not received.

So, again, I sent the email as they requested and waited.

Nothing. This happened three times before an agent agreed to raise the complaint for me over the phone. To back myself up I also raised it on their online help area as a question in the hope that at least one of these would result in someone looking at my issue.

Dealing with the complaint

Of course, after over a week without a response I contacted Tiscali to see what was going on. They advised that they had the details of the complaint but couldn’t provide the refund until they had a copy of the bill from BT. This is the bill that I emailed to them several times AND attached to the complaint using their online system. This is the bill that I could see attached to the complaint right in front of me whilst on the phone to the agent.

Finally they realised they did have the documents they needed and then promptly passed the issue to another department.

I was assured that the complaint would be dealt with within 10 days and the refund would be arranged.

This didn’t happen. I called them again today and was told that the refund had been refused on the grounds that they could find no notes on my account to suggest a refund had been offered or, indeed, that I had been advised that there would be no charges for taking out the service.

The frustrating thing is that had Tiscali provisioned the service in the timescale they originally quoted the BT line would have been cancelled within the cancellation period and no charge would have been due!

Next steps

Now I need to escalate my complaint to the customer services manager, then to their complaints department, then to a regional manager, then to the ombudsman. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

A few suggestions

Tiscali, if you are reading this, here are a few suggestions on how you could have done this better:

» If you are dealing with a complaint make the effort to call your customer a few times. Every single contact I have had with you has been initiated by me, and every time I have been informed that you have taken some kind of action or required some piece of information that I should have been made aware of.
» Listen to your call recordings. Your agents don’t note accounts with every single thing they say so using these notes as gospel just doesn’t work.
» Work on your processes to make sure that complaints go to the right person first time. Bouncing around between departments is frustrating, especially when it is made clear in the beginning what the issue is.
» Make sure your advisors know what they are talking about. Had your agent been honest about the way the service was to be set up I could have easily budgeted for the cancellation charge or decided to take a service elsewhere.

And now..

And now I escalate my complaint, hope beyond hope that they deal with it and end the matter. Either way I will be posting what happens here.