Reg reader bombarded by 3 sales calls
10('Ah, go on')
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
Sales calls from operators are common enough, but 3UK seems to be overdoing it slightly after calling one El Reg reader ten times within a couple of hours on Monday evening.
Our chap's contract with 3 expires on Sunday, so a call or two asking him to renew should be expected. But having received a few calls from the "exclusive benefits team" last week he contacted the operator to ask them to stop calling, which worked until Monday night when the phone started ringing.
The calls started at 18.23 and continued until 19.47, during which time the poor chap was trying to get his kids to bed and rejecting all the calls to voicemail. HulloMail, his voice-mail provider, logs all calls even when no message is left, so the times and dates are pretty-much irrefutable.
We spoke to 3 who, to be fair, reacted with suitable outrage and immediately rang our chap with an apology and promises to find out what went wrong: we're still waiting to hear how that goes, but the company clearly believes an errant employee is to blame rather than any systemic failure.
Operators hate contract customers leaving, to the point where those who don't threaten to leave at least annually risk missing out on the best deals on offer, but like everyone else network operators are also trying to make more use of their customer base to upsell services. Vodafone has even been ringing round customers to offer special deals to friends and family, treating customers as just another sales channel.
The cost of calling a mobile phone used to prevent the majority of sales calls reaching one on the move, at least in Europe, but increased hassle from people trying to sell us stuff might be the price we have to pay for cheaper calling. ®
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
COMMENTS
Irony...
Phoning someone up to apologise for phoning them too much..
"We spoke to 3 who, to be fair, reacted with suitable outrage and immediately rang our chap with an apology"
:D
3 arrghh
Ah! i hate 3 they customer service was terrible.
They would never do anyting, they refused to escalae calls to supervisiors!
The most bizzare was that if you wanted to complian formally, they would insist you WRITE to to them! Yet, they are happy to push for you to interact with them electronically.
as for the exit process, i never could work out after treating you the customer like ***** and with uter contempt, once you requested a PAC code their benefits team used to ring you with "exclusive" or "special" deals.....
often, you could go to the high street and see better ones advertised in the window of the 3 shop!
They could never undersand why you were leaving hem on the basis of customer service, and would even pay more at another telco if reqd. They thought it was all about price and minutes.
oh, and dont get me started on the 3G dongles..... such a sorry saga, thye didnt seem to grasp the fact that as it wouldnt work on my laptop running XP it was useless to me and there response to follow up with the huwei, or wait for the (never forthcoming) patch just got painful!
ALthough I found it interesting for the laucnch period the technical support whent to a lovely and helpful call centre in Ireland, it soon went to a unhelpful script driven agents of the devil in a far off land!
Three
The changed their T's and C's by charging for itemised billing. I backed down
They changed them again with the Europe rate being cancelled. I argued for 45 minutes and got my PAC code 9 months early.
I get to keep the HTC Kaiser too.
I alomost felt sorry for those Indian call centre girls, until I realised that their whole job was to make life difficult for you. Bollocks to em
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Data control in the cloud
