I was supposed to be getting Sky+ installed today. It didn’t happen. Sky’s customer support has been useless. Here’s a letter I wrote to complain:

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you in connection with my order for Sky+ and Multiroom, which was due to have been installed today (14 December 2006), job reference xxxxxx. So far, this has resulted in a steady stream of errors and incompetence on the part of your staff and systems, as follows:

1. On the confirmation letter, my telephone number was incorrectly listed, despite having given you the correct number on the order. When I phoned to correct the error, using the number on the confirmation letter, I was held in a queue for many minutes and then disconnected before getting to speak to anyone. I tried again using the normal customer service phone number, and did eventually get to speak to a human but once again got cut off before getting confirmation that the change had been made. I then sent a request for the number to be updated using the online form (which has a stupidly short message limit of only 128 characters – what numpty programmed that?), and got a response saying it had been done but no confirmation that this had been passed to the install team.

1. This morning, we didn’t get a call from the engineer to give an ETA, possibly because he hadn’t been given the correct phone number. I called your support number to check when he was arriving, but your support rep – who identified herself only as ‘Emma’ – was distinctly unhelpful and, on being asked to escalate the call, refused to allow me to speak to a supervisor on the grounds that they were all “in a meeting”. I’m sure you’re aware that this was a deliberate untruth, and was obviously so at the time. Eventually, she put the phone down on me rather than make any attempt to assist. Emma’s attitude was well below the standard I would expect from someone trained to give customer support, and reflected very badly on your organization. This is all the more unacceptable given that I immediately called back again and spoke to a different member of staff who was prepared to help and find me the information I wanted.

1. When the engineer did arrive, he declined to carry out the installation on the grounds that the satellite dish was too difficult to access for him working alone – despite the fact that it had originally been installed by a single engineer with no specialist equipment other than a long ladder! On calling to re-schedule the installation, I find that the lack of specialist installation teams means that the new date is the end of January – well over a month away from today. And the engineer who attended today was of the opinion that even a specialist team may be unable to carry out the installation, due to the unusual shape of the roof (I presume that he’s never previously encountered the design of semi-detached house common in this part of the world).

In the light of these failings so far, I have little confidence that the installation will be completed on the rescheduled date without any further problems. I would, therefore, like your assurances that the installation team scheduled to arrive on 23 January (job ref: xxxxxx) will be fully equipped to deal with even the most convoluted of domestic residence design and be authorised to use their initiative when it comes to solving the problem of how to use a ladder effectively. Given the inconvenience I have already experienced, I think it would be reasonable for you to find a way to bring forward the rescheduled installation, ideally to some time this side of Christmas – the Sky+ installation was originally intended as a Christmas present for my wife, hence my original choice of an installation date in the middle of the month.

I would also like you to give serious consideration to your customer support procedures, which appear to have left an untrained or inexperienced support rep with no option but to blatantly lie to customers when faced with a question she was unable to answer and no backing from her more senior colleagues when asked to escalate the call. As a former manager of a customer support department, I consider it entirely unacceptable to leave a frontline member of the team with no-one to be able to pass the call on to when a customer needs to speak to someone more senior. And expecting a support rep to trot out such hoary lines as ‘they’re all in a meeting’ to try and fob off customers is not only indicative of a lack of imagination (you can surely come up with better excuses than that) but also suggests that your staff don’t really care about being caught telling untruths – which in turn shows a far greater disdain for your customers than the lie itself.

Finally, I expect that you will ensure that I am not charged the additional subscription fee for Sky Multiroom until such time as I am actually able to use it. I also feel it would be reasonable for you to waive any additional installation fees that would normally be charged for a specialist installation team, and/or to offer a free package upgrade as compensation for the inconvenience caused.

I look forward to your response.

——————————-

We’ll have to wait and see what happens next.