Customer Service

I get my digital tv service from ntl. You hear a lot of people complaining about ntl, but in general it’s all worked pretty well for me.

Then on Saturday evening at about 7:30 I discovered that one of the set-top boxes had a problem. I was missing most of the channels that I subscribe to. I had the same problem about a month ago. That time I made a call to ntl customer service, they pumped some signals down the cable to the box and everything was fixed. So I expected the same thing would happen this time.

I didn’t expect to find that the customer service department (including the fault reporting line) had all gone home for the weekend. They weren’t back until 8am this morning. When I called them this morning the problem was fixed in about five minutes. But my cable service was out of action for thirty-six hours for no good reason.

It turns out that the restricted opening hours were introduced last September as a cost-cutting exercise. But surely, if you’re providing a 24×7 service then you need to provide 24×7 support. Or am I expecting too much?