Dave G.

Today I left Talk Talk after a running battle with their customer service team.

I want to stress that my decision to leave is not related to the data breach although that indicates a level of incompetency that should automatically rule out ever using them as your ISP.

The reason why I left was down to incredibly poor customer service. The key points are highlighted below -

- Requested a house move with a deactivation date of the 26th and an activation date of the 28th at the new residence.
- The line was disconnected on the 20th (6 days early).
- From my call logs I can see that I spoke on a number of occasions to the 'technical team' to the tune of 2hrs 30mins with no explanation given as to why the line was deactivated early.
- The best they could come up with was 'turning off my router for 30min'. Something that they advised to do on three occasions.
- During one of the completely fruitless calls I hear children screaming in the background. First of two calls when this happened leaving me to believe that they have outsourced their tier 1 support to homebased Indian resources who are charged with being as helpful as a brain aneurysm.
- Upon deciding to just wait it out until the reactivation I received an email saying 'Sorry that you cancelled your activation' on the day before the activation.
- At the same time I received a text message stating that my activation was scheduled for tomorrow.
- Once again I spoke to the customer services team who had no idea why this happened but assured me that it would occur on the 28th.
- After taking a day off work an Open Reach engineer did indeed turn up and after 1.5hrs, he ran into a fault as the information given to him by Talk Talk was incorrect, he was satisfied that the line was connected and working fine.
- WHILST he was setting up the line Talk Talk call to inform me that I've missed my appointment so now need to set-up another time to get an engineer around. This was the first of two similar calls over the next 24 hours...
- When I try and test the connection I notice that my Routers default information has been lost in the move so I need authentication details for my account.
- Queue three hours of calls with Talk Talk customer services who told me that my account would not be 'activated' until midnight and that there was no way for them to activate it manually.
- Needless to say the next morning arrived and still no connection.
- Queue another call wanting to schedule another Open Reach appointment to set-up my already set-up line!
- Once again I speak to the team at Talk Talk and specifically ask them for the authentication details on my account. They are unable to provide this and can only direct me to My Account seemingly unaware that has been down for a week and as I write this review is still down.
- I end up speaking to the retention team who finally inform me that it looks like there's a fault on the line; even though the Open Reach engineer was adamant that it was working fine and they either needed to authenticate me or activate me on their systems.
- Next step is to get the engineer back out but they can't book this because the booking 'system' was down. That was the final straw...
- Contract cancelled and Talk Talk lose a customer who has been with them for over 2 years.

It is difficult to come up with words that explain the level of incompetency and at times rudeness of the customer services team. And when you finally get speaking to the retention team that sound like they're based in the UK they don't have the systems to do the job.

Bottom line do not use these guys. There are plenty of other providers out there who now do similar price deals so being the cheapest is no longer a differentiation point and trust me you really do not want to go through what I experienced.

Complete and utter shambles.