This is a personal outpouring which
nevertheless plays into my professional position as a change
strategist.
Over the last 5 years my wife and I
have moved to O2 for all our comms: 2 mobile phones, home
phone+broadband, and mobile broadband for when we're sailing. You
might say that's risky – eggs & basket – however we thought
the risk was outweighed by convenience (and discounts) of one
supplier, given our perception of the high quality of the O2 brand.
Until 10 days ago the service was great
… well, in the sense that we rarely needed service. The occasional
call on 202 or visit to an O2 shop went pretty smoothly. One problem
using the mobile broadband dongle was resolved through an online chat
with a Guru. The broadband in particular just worked – never
needed to touch the router, wi-fi the same.
12 days ago on 9 Oct the phone and
broadband just went dead. Called 800 230 0202 late in the day and
they initiated a 2-hour line test straight away. Next morning it was
all working again, so I called and told them this, and off we went.
That seemed like good service.
The next day broadband was very slow
and got worse until on 13 Oct the broadband and phone were dead
again. This is where we entered the madness, and I'll spare you the
blow-by-blow. Suffice to say that O2 kept saying they would call
back with test results or next action and they almost never did –
it was usually me calling them. The only thing in their favour is
that they always answer the phone on the first ring, and the calls are free. Other factors
in the frustration:
- their telephone equipment is awful because you get huge background noise and distortion, which combined with strong Derry accents makes it hard to understand them
- the number they had in the database to call us on was the home phone which is broken - duh
- an engineer wasn't booked because of some problem on their system
- I have never managed to speak to 'second level' who I believe interface with BT OpenReach, I can only get the call centre who have limited information and influence
An Openreach engineer finally came on
16 Oct, checked everything ok at the house, definitely a line problem
somewhere, put in a call for someone to check the Exchange, promised
he'd call me with an update … and that was the last I heard of any
of that.
On 18 Oct a manager at the call centre
said he'd get Level 2 to call me that day to discuss status (after
putting my mobile into their database) – never happened.
On 20 Oct I spoke to another manager at
the call centre, having been notified of an engineer booking for
23rd – I expressed my frustration and anger at some
length, he sympathised and agreed I was not being unreasonable, I
said if it is not fixed by 21st then I will be going onto
social media with this, he said there's nothing he could do to get an
engineer earlier. The only offer I got was that he said he'd cancel
November's charges as compensation.
Now it's the 22nd and I'm
expecting an engineer tomorrow morning. No pressure, but by golly he
or she had better deliver.
The wider background to this, of O2
selling their broadband service to Sky, is where the change strategy
comes in.** The irony is that I have just written a general blog
about KIS n Tell change management, which means Keeping It Simple and
communicating it well. Unfortunately O2 and Sky have failed on this,
quite dramatically in my view. In the past few months I have
received letters and emails advising me of the sale and reassuring me
that the deals will be at least as good under Sky (so I'll still get
the discount with Sky for having an O2 mobile, will I? Fantastic),
and that the transition will happen by April 2014, with 2 months
notice. The main thing I want is no
interruption to service, as well as no cost increase of course.
Not far into the madness summarised
above it occurred to me that the transition may have started, and my
breakage is a result of that. This is reinforced by the fact that we
receive up to 3 emails a day branded Sky but sent from
customer.service@o2broadband.co.uk,
which simply say “sorry, still working on it” with no contact
details other than the head office postal address, and with links to
Help and Terms which fail because o2-mail.co.uk is not found! We
receive the same number of texts a day, saying the same thing, from
'Mybroadband” and it's not clear who that is. They both give the
number of the call centre who when I asked said they ”are still
O2”. My only channel of communication is with the call centre who
just follow the process and cannot talk to me about the fault. Oh
and they suggested I contact the complaint review service.
So in summary it's very confusing, I
don't know who I'm really dealing with, and I don't have a decent
channel of communication to talk to someone who knows what's really
going on with my fault.
** If you are interested in change
management and change strategy, you could do worse than to look at my
professional site at www.nicvine.com
