I called the telephone number and eventually got through to the Full Fibre support team - having been requested after calling the number to switch to SMS text and then to on-line chat via a link. The first technical expert, Mitesh, reviewed the information provided and then appears to have immediately cut me off as I got kicked back to the initial on-line chat bot. I'll put it down to finger trouble at his end rather than the "too difficult" option because I'm a nice person. It may just be that the timeout on the on-line chat is too short and times out while waiting for the agent to reply.
The bot reconnected me when I replied - this time to a second expert, Prachi. I repeated the fault description for him and... he sent me the page that explains how to use CallSafe. What a complete and utter waste of time given that I had already explained what I had done to try and activate it. The support technical knowledge seems completely absent and limited to working through a script.
He eventually passed me on to what I guess is second line support - Sachin. He then asked sensible questions to identify the hardware that I had and then tried to reconfigure the VoiP adapter remotely. Finally someone who understands the system? However after doing the Power off, wait, Power on dance a few more times we were no further forward. He did say that the checks for Digital Voice configuration can take up to five minutes so we waited. Then tried it again - no change.
Sachin then passed me on to customer support and billing - Neha. She took details of the fault and then said she would pass me on to their dedicated team. So now I'm right back at the start again and almost three hours in - this time chatting with Shruti. He restarted the original script asking about the fault. At this point I gave up having completely lost the will to live. I asked Shruti to record my call as a formal complaint regarding the support service. He transferred me to Anas to whom I have requested that a formal complaint be raised.
I've now spent yet another 3 hours of my life on the chat with technical support with zero progress and apparently zero understanding of how to fix it. This level of support is just awful - no, far worse than that! It reminds me of why I left Virgin Media several years ago and would never go back.
It's best to abandon Talk Talk's CallSafe service and buy a hardware box to block calls, I think. Life is just too short. If I can't get it fixed as an "IT expert" then what chance do normal customers have.
The Talk Talk website also has this page: https://service.talktalk.co.uk/CallSafe which says "CallSafe is not available with digital voice". Since some people already have it working this also seems wrong. Hey ho.
Other than the CallSafe the rest of the full fibre service from Talk Talk seems pretty good so far. It's just a shame that the technical support / fault finding is so abysmally terrible with anything other than the normal user problems.
Alastair
