Ineptitude

What the FUCK is wrong with the service sector in 2006?

In the last month i've undergone my 5th house move in 5 years but never before have I experienced so much poor service and error from almost every company i've had the unfortunate necessity to deal with.

NTL, to nobodies suprise, remains far and away the worst. Nobody expects NTL to get things right. They never have, and I doubt they will when they rebrand themselves Virgin in the near future. In short - failed to book appointment with engineer, failed to retain phone number despite offering service, failed to restore broadband at correct speed, failed to honour retention offers (naturally I threatened them with cancellation) with actual services. Awful.

British Gas - Last year they sent me bills for no fewer than three previous occupants. How they don't realise that if a new account holder is setting up in a house the old account holders will no longer be present is beyond me. This year, they managed to mess up my final bills, sending them not just to the wrong forwarding address, but to entirely the wrong person. My name is not Colin.

Perhaps more upsetting than mistakes made by individual companies such as those above is one defining issue, and it applies equally to the above as it does to anybody else. I could understand if a company wanted to implement a policy stating that they will not call customers back personally. As strange as it sounds, I could live with this. What I cannot stand is that in the past month i've been promised a call back by no less than five different companies, and each and every one has failed, in most cases repeatedly, to live up to this.

Everybody believes they have their own special way of dealing with the poor bastards in the call centres, but really, no one way, for me at least is proving any more effective than another. You can be assured that if you're rude, particularly if you make it personal, that the person you are speaking to will do whatever they can to hold back whatever it is you want them to do for you without actually revealing to anybody that might be watching that they are in fact proving anti-customer service, however, being pleasant, even complimentary doesn't seem to hold any weight anymore. Perhaps it's no longer taken as sincere, given how frequently people try it.

The modern service sector certainly isn't customer focussed. Trace the root causes of this far enough back and I can't help but wonder if any company can hope to compete with good customer relations any more. The largest companies retain customers through apathy and convinience (read: fear of inconvinience - how long do you want to go without a broadband connection if you cancel your current provider).

Maybe I have a blinkered view. I bemoan the apathy and convinience but am speaking mainly from personal and very much present experience. I am seriously considering finally severing my ties with NTL, but I probably won't. After all, its working.. at the moment. It'll be fine until I have to move again, and by the time I have to move again, i'll have forgotten just how bad the experience was this time around.

If anybody can give me the name of a broadband provider, a landline provider, and a dual-fuel energy provider that will give me genuine customer service, it would be much appreciated.

And with a glance back to the subject I realise 2 things. First, way too much distance from there to here, again. Concice I cannot be on this issue. Second, completely drifted from my original intention. I intended to explore the mindset of the people on the other end of the phone, but maybe its really not complicated enough to explore. They're heavily monitored on the length of calls, not much else. If anybody is recording their calls its probably only to select a few at random for the trainees.