Interesting but not exactly unexpected news that BT and TalkTalk are not advising customers correctly on what their broadband speeds might be post installation. Obviously it is somewhat of a dark art, something Ofcom seem to ignore, to gauge exactly what speed a customer might achieve using DSL based technologies, but it stands to reason that a client should be given a realistic expectation. It is like wondering into a car show room and after picking your car finding out that the engine can produce 200 bhp but in your individual case you will only get 100 bhp.
Problems only got worse when BT introduced their flat charging scheme for tails with the introduction of ADSLmax (ADSL2 technology) which meant customers paid the same price for a 1 Mb/s line using that technology as another customer who might achieve 7 Mb/s. I think customers today would be much more forgiving if they paid less because technically they couldn’t receive the faster service.
What I don’t understand is that in this day and age with customer service taking such priority that you still have businesses selling products that are being obviously missed sold. What do you achieve apart from an upset customer who is only going to jump on every forum and bad mouth your company?
It is one of the reasons that when entering this industry we put integrity as one of our key values and focused on advising customers as much as possible as to what could be achieved. We also made sure that where service was still way below expectations that we did whatever we could to improve it or let the customer cancel. We also focused on using short contract terms (as little as 1-month for some products) to ensure that an unhappy customer could move away should they wish without penalisation.
I don’t believe that this approach would be damaging to the likes of TalkTalk or BT as I am sure the cost in losing a new customer is a lot less than the cost of supporting them in the future or dealing with their complaints. And for businesses that spend so much on marketing surely keeping negative press like this to a minimum also has a financial reward.
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