House move hell

[Velimte]

I moved house on Friday 28th having set up my move date and everything to go live on the day I was due in. 

I had spoken to talktalk when I set up my move and explained that the line at the property we were moving to was likely disconnected as it has been unoccupied since 2012. They assured me that everything would be taken care of and it would go live on our live date as planned. 

I’m now in the property and, surprise surprise, neither the phone line nor the internet work. They’re dead. No dial tone, busy tone when I call our number from my mobile, nothing. 

I spent 2 hours on a call to talktalk yesterday, during which I was hung up on twice and had to go through troubleshooting several times. Eventually they closed their service center and the advisor hung up on me again after attempting to transfer me somewhere. 

I’m pretty confident that the phone line simply needs reconnecting via openreach or something similar, but I’m not confident at all that talktalk will resolve this, and though I still have some time booked off I do need to work from home on Wednesday next week, so I need this resolved as soon as possible. 

Does anyone have any advice? 

[Velimte]

What a shambles this company is. I verified some 3 hours ago now, and yet no further follow up has been provided. 

I’ve since been in contact with your twitter team, who it appears are similarly hamstrung by poor processes. They attempted to take be through the same troubleshooting/line test again, and still have no further updates to provide me with other than that their systems might update to show further information at 6pm. By this point, of course, the customer service team will have left, so once again - a wasted day for me. 

I am staggered at how poor this experience has been. It’s unbelievably bad. By tomorrow my go live date will have been 7 full days ago, and I have had to pay for a 4G dongle to try and provide me with some way of doing my work, and this isn’t even mentioning the fact that my son has a medical condition for which we should really have a working landline to ensure we have a reliable way of contacting emergency medical help if we need it. 

Talktalk are pitiful. I’m disgusted. 

[Velimte]

Thanks Ady. I’ve replied. 

[Ady-TalkTalk]

Hi Velimte, I'm very sorry that your topic hasn't been picked up. I need to do the old ID verification before I can take a look at this for you. I've sent you a personal message to get more information. 

Ady

[Velimte]

3rd Feb update, 6 days after go live date. 

I still have no internet and no phone. An engineer from openreach came at 1pm yesterday and fitted a new master socket but told me that he needed a UG (underground) team to do the rest of what needed doing with the connection to the cabinet. A further engineer arrived at 5:15pm, who wasn’t from the UG team, but attempted to fix the problem anyway. He worked until 8 and was unable to get me connected, and said he’d arrange for a further visit from someone today. No one has arrived yet. 

In the meanwhile, I had asked for a complaint to be raised and I was due a callback from a manager at talk talk regarding this. They were meant to call me back the day before yesterday but no one bothered. I suppose that’s par for the course with this company. 

[Velimte]

So it’s 11:02 now and the engineer slot that was booked for me ends in just under an hour. I’m not sure if they’re meant to come to the premises or not, but there’s no change in my line status either way so far. 

I haven’t heard anything from openreach, which is slightly concerning as I’m sure on previous occasions when I’ve had openreach attend at my old address I had a message confirm when they’d come. Perhaps the process has changed. 

Any optimism I had is now ebbing away, and I don’t think I’ll realistically get this resolved today. I’m tempted to explore whether I should end my contract with talktalk and simply try and get a contract with a rival provider, but the difficulty is that it’s not clear what needs to happen to the line to get it working and I suspect that moving to another provider might take longer than I can realistically continue relying on my mobile internet for work. 

[ferguson]

I am somewhat disappointed that nobody from the support team here has yet picked this up, I will escalate it again for you for what it's worth. 

[Velimte]

I’ve just spent another 60 minutes on a call with them again. 

Apparently the openreach engineer cancelled the appointment first thing this morning because ‘the property doesn’t have a copper line, so it was the wrong kind of appointment’. Of course, this may have been why talktalk were trying to call this morning, but either way, I don’t want the problem, I want a solution. 

They’ve now booked another (presumably different) engineer for tomorrow morning as a ‘priority case’. I have no idea if he’ll just show up and say ‘yep, no copper line here’ and then have to book someone else to do the work, or what, and I’m not sure anyone at talktalk really knows either, but that’s where we’re at. Again, this should have all been taken care of a long time ago and would have been had the house move team paid attention to me when I mentioned the fact that the line was very old.

Additionally, I’m meant to have a manager call me back (they didn’t succeed in doing this tonight, of course). I’m not sure what that’ll accomplish, but at least I can raise a complaint with them. 

I’m bitterly disappointed by this whole saga. No one in the support side of talktalk seems to know the first thing about any of this on anything other than a very, very basic level, and they rely entirely on scripts to troubleshoot, often without applying any logic to the questions they ask, which is an enormously frustrating experience as a customer as you end up repeating things several times over. 

And now we wait until tomorrow and what will almost certainly be another 60 minute call to talktalk. 

[ferguson]

Not at all, you did all you could and have clearly been let down.

[Velimte]

Although I will of course keep checking, I very much doubt that the service will spontaneously solve itself as the line is dead. There’s no dial tone, no nothing on that line. I did warn talktalk when I arranged the move that the house hadn’t been used since 2012 and the line was likely dead, but they assured me that all would be fine and they’d take care of it. More fool me, I suppose, for not pressing the issue.

[ferguson]

The other thing that occurs to me is that the engineer may not necessarily need to attend your home, keep checking during the course of the day whether your service does go live. 

[ferguson]

I understand your anger. The only thing to console yourself with is that TalkTalk should compensate you for the delay in your service being activated, which will hopefully more than cover any temporary costs you incur. 

[Velimte]

I’m beyond angry with this whole situation. I don’t think I’ve ever had a worse customer service experience in my whole life, with any company. 

I have to work tomorrow, so I’ll have to somehow try and do my best on tethered internet, for which I’ll have to pay more (of course) since my mobile data cap won’t cover working for 8 hours on a laptop using cloud based services. I will be pushing for talktalk to cover any costs I incur as a result of this as it’s simply not fair - I did everything within my power to make sure my connection would be up and running by tomorrow, but they are now 4 days behind on delivering my service, due to an error on their behalf. 

On top of this, to shut down their customer services for nearly a whole day to ‘update their systems’ is just bewildering. There must be lower impact times of the week to run and update whatever they need to take care of, which would have affected customers far less. If it’s an overnight update that overran, I would have expected far better redundancy and business continuity planning. 

This is such a disappointing experience all around and it will mean that I almost certainly won’t stay with talktalk at the end of my contract term. 

[ferguson]

Sorry to see this. And yes, to add to your woes, TalkTalk are having system problems at the moment. I do hope this gets resolved soon. 

[Velimte]

An update as of 1st Feb, 13:00. 

After spending another hour and 10 mins on the phone yesterday the advisor (Caesar) finally concluded that yes, it was a problem with the line. He then chatted to someone else and informed me that the team who agreed to transferring me across to my new address should have booked an engineer before our go live date, but for whatever reason, that wasn’t done. 

Caesar agreed to book an engineer for today between 10 and 13:00. 

No one has arrived.

Talktalk tried to call me at about 9 but the call dropped and when I called back they told me they couldn’t access their system right now (and this appears to be ongoing still at the moment). 

So now I’m stuck with no internet, no phone,  no engineer and finally no way of talking to talktalk. 

[Velimte]

An update as of 14:00 31st January 2022. No response on the topic here (obviously). 

I spent 45 minutes on the phone earlier with an agent who spent some time going over the scenario again (do they not have call notes? I don’t understand why no agent appears to be able to just read up on the case before barrelling on with standard troubleshooting). After some time he told me that the checks were likely to take some further time to complete at his end and rather than keeping me waiting, he offered to call me back in an hour.

He did not. 

I’m now on the phone with yet another agent who has no idea of the situation, and who wants to go over the same troubleshooting again. 

How do I get this resolved? 

[ferguson]

Don't give up hope! It is likely to be an Openreach thing as you say, rest assured that the team here are first-rate and will get this resolved for you. 

[Velimte]

@ferguson many thanks, I’ve updated this now. I’ll wait for them to get in touch via here - I don’t hold out much hope but I’ll also be on the phone to them as soon as they’re open tomorrow too. 

[ferguson]

Sorry to see this. If you would like the support team here to look into this for you make sure that your personal details including TalkTalk landline number and/or account number are complete on your community profile (click here) so that they can link your forum identity with your account and then wait for them to respond. Bear in mind that they won't be back online until tomorrow, but they will hopefully pick this up then.