Never in my life....

....have I had the misfortune, until this week, to deal with a company who are so utterly unable to deliver anything like an even half way satisfactory level of customer service.

We have all come across poor service, technical help lines that are neither technical nor helpful, impolite staff and inefficiency beyond imagination but the prize for outstandingly shoddy service must surely, thus far in my life, go to Wanadoo.

Friday morning I woke to discover my broadband connection had mysteriously disappeared, I conducted the normal basic checks and still nothing, I checked it on the laptop.... nothing and so PG had a try....still nothing. At this point he took over, hardware is his forte not mine but what ensued was an utter customer service nightmare.

Without exaggeration one or other of us spent over seven hours on the phone on eight separate calls. Each one took over forty minutes to get a reply, each time we got a different person in a different call center and each time they refused to speak to PG because he is not the account holder, despite my having set him up on three previous occasions with the appropriate authorization. None of these employees seemed to be either able to read information on their screens because each call necessitated we begin the story from the beginning or too input it in the first place. We were repeatedly taken through the same 'hoo ha' of testing one or other modem, of uninstalling and re-installing software and ultimately no-one could shed even the slightest glimmer of light on what was causing our connection to remain staunchly absent!

Finally, having got hold of a particularly helpful guy at BT, Wanadoo agreed to carry out a whoosh test on our line. If you have ever been through this carry on you will know that one cannot request this test on one's own BT line, if the ISP is anyone other than BT, the ISP must make that request.....only they don't appear to be very keen to do it!

So, whilst this test is underway, not even a dialup connection can be made and at midday we were promised a result by 14.00hrs. At 14.00hrs it was promised at 18.00hrs. At 18.00 hrs at 21.00hrs, at 21.00hrs at midnight....all this despite repeated 'promises' that 'this time it would happen'!

Along the way we had asked on a number of occasions to speak to a manager or supervisor but were met with complete refusal, apparently Wanadoo's superiors in the customer service department don't sully their days with real customers or real service!

At midnight PG blew his stack, enough was enough..... but still no joy, still the 'trained monkey' approach, though we were instructed to leave the pc connected and idle overnight and assured that by the morning the results of the line test would be available.......but you know of course what happened don't you. Morning came and no test had been done, in fact, a little investigation via BT revealed that it hadn't even been requested!

I think you can probably begin to see at this point why the prize for 'lifetime crap service' is being awarded to Wanadoo!

Among all of this the majority of Wanadoo's technical help line staff were bordering on the rude, they most certainly cannot be described as having any real technical knowledge or know-how, twice when we had their backs verbally against the wall and they had no answer they hung up on us, necessitating another forty minute wait for our call to be answered and having to start from the beginning of the whole sad tale again. They were mostly, at best disinterested, often rude and had absolutely no concept of the basic customer service principles of taking responsibility for, and ownership of, a customer's problem. They were inflexible, behaved like trained monkeys spouting company policy blindly, no one seemed to have any authority to do anything nor the wit to think for themselves and use initiative........and still, on top of all else, each time we called we had to go through the getting authorization for PG to discuss the issue palaver.....despite by now, that authorization having apparently been noted on the account on four separate occasions!

And so, yesterday afternoon, finally we were give the results of our whoosh test....and guess what ...those results were 'inconclusive'!!! Arghhhhhh. Methinks there is some fibbing going on there, I doubt it was ever done, a result of 'inconclusive' seems very 'convenient'! Wanadoo's solution to our still non existent connection is too give up, they can't fix it and have handed the issue over to BT, convinced it must be their problem. Memories of trying to deal with BT in trying to get this connection enabled at all three months ago, have come flooding back and BT's promise of a fix within forty eight hours is not being taken too seriously in gemmak's-ville!

In the meantime Wanadoo are not prepared to provide us with a dial-up connection gratis, nor pay anything other than a fraction of our phone bill if we connect via a pay as you go connection so finally, exhausted and beaten by this companies ineptitude and inability to provide any kind of customer service, we have had to pay another ISP and set up 24/7 dial-up connection to keep us online, for however long it takes to sort out the broadband debacle! ....oh, and to add insult to injury, Wanadoo it transpires, have fixed my email address so that I cannot send from it, via a different ISP's connection!

One thing is for sure, I will happily 'cut my nose off to spite my face' with this issue now and regardless of cost etc. etc. once this is sorted I will wriggle somehow out of my contract with Wanadoo and go elsewhere, come hell or high water I will not remain a customer of this bunch of buffoons any longer than is absolutely necessary!

Oh....and hell, I had forgotten just how slow dial-up is.....but at least I have a connection of some sort again now!