Okay, first of all, I was one of the people migrated from Shell to TalkTalk. This occurred shortly before I switched from TalkTalk to another provider; I mention this because it could be the cause of some error here.
I got an email on the 7th of September stating that my contract "ends on 19 August 2024". Somewhat belated, but I don't know if TalkTalk is at all obligated to tell me at the time of, or in advance of, when my contract ended – I feel like they surely must if the cost is changing as a result, but who knows.
Anyway, I changed provider that same day to another ISP that uses Openreach's network, and assumed that the service would be cancelled automatically, as has been usual for around ten years now. I didn't think about it for a while, until I noticed that TalkTalk was still billing and charging me months after the fact.
TalkTalk's chat support is very poor. At one point I got disconnected after three minutes for not responding, despite the fact that I had not been asked a question and was waiting for the agent to respond after bringing up my account. In general it was obvious that the support was relying heavily on scripts, and that bringing up anything outside of the scope of those scripts was futile. I had to explain and rephrase the issue several times after agents incorrectly described it back to me. The agent would take a longer time to reply than the time that had resulted in me being disconnected. In the end it went nowhere and all they would tell me was that I had to notify them if I wanted to cancel.
I also contacted the new ISP, and they could not confirm whether or not they had contacted TalkTalk to cancel my service. This seems strange, you'd think there'd be a record, but I'm not sure what I can do about it.
Curiously, on the TalkTalk website, it still lists:
My package
18 month fixed term contract ends:
19 Aug 2024
This seems erroneous and is another reason I feel like this has to be an issue on TalkTalk's end possibly related to the migration from Shell. I mean, I get told that my contract ends weeks after it has ended, and on the site it still lists that I am in this contract that is due to end months prior?
I was annoyed that TalkTalk was taking money for a service that was not actually being provided, so I cancelled the direct debit. I later begrudgingly went to pay the bill on the site, figuring that it'd be better to raise a complaint and get legal advice first, but the payment application on the site doesn't work. It just shows a loading graphic indefinitely. I'm not downloading anything else, there is very little traffic, nothing that should be causing this – it just never loads the application.
When I made a thorough complaint to the email address listed on the site as one of the possible avenues of making a complaint, I got a stock reply directing me to use this community forum, use the online chat (already tried to complain this way, didn't go anywhere), or call by phone (I'm going to be honest, I have autism and I'm not going to pick up a phone or generally communicate well via speech at the best of times. Even the chat support is pushing it a little.)
Anyway, this is where I'm at. I'm not sure what other avenue I can take with this.
