Today’s post is aimed at providing useful advice and also venting frustration to a certain degree.
We are a local telecoms service provider and pride ourselves on service quality, great rates and transparency most of all.
I previously wrote a post about not getting stung by contracts and I wanted to revisit this as we’ve dealt with a few competitive issues of late on behalf of some of our customers and I believe most come down to a lack of transparency offered by some telecoms providers.
- Rolling contracts can catch you off guard. When you enter into an agreement, first and foremost you should sign an order/contract to agree to the services, investigate terms and conditions thoroughly and understand exactly what you are getting for your money and how long that contract is for. In some circumstances your supplier may just have rolled on your contract without signature or agreement on the phone (with a recorded WAV file as proof), sometimes into long 3 year or 5 year deals at worst. To add insult to injury, if you didn’t terminate the service within the specified notice period, you can’t do anything but complain to Ofcom. My advice is know when your renewal date is and what notice you need to give
- Penalties are applied by suppliers if you are in contract and you try to switch supplier. You will receive an official letter probably stating that you owe £XXX for terminating your contract early. My advice is always ask for a signed contract or call recording to support the claim. If they cannot provide either then dispute the penalty. You don’t have to pay if you’re not in contract.
- Beware of Calling plans I approach this with caution as in very few circumstances do these work. In the majority you are prepaying for calls that you may not even use and unused minutes do not roll over from month to month. Anything over and above is charged at a higher rate, you may incur high connection charges also. My advice, this comes down to transparency again. There is plenty of opportunity for hidden costs and most of these plans are simply marketing ploys to retain or win business. Always look at the small print and the general rule is “if it is too good to be true” it probably isn’t good!
- Slamming is a term known within the industry as taking lines and calls from a customer without consent. This is a shady practice and often wrapped up as a system error! Yeah right!!
I urge my readers to think local, act local and one more bit of advice. If you take away the brand and the big name would you still stick with a supplier if they did the following to you:
- Rolled on your contract even if you didn’t agree to it
- Throw huge penalties at you to force you to stay with them
- Expect you to call into an offshore call centre to handle your enquiries
- Leave you in long call queues to answer your questions
- Take no accountability and are extremely slow to react to faults
I know I wouldn’t, biased or not, it just doesn’t stack up. Thanks for reading.
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