12LEE

Today was the last straw. After 12 years in IT selling to, through and for telco-related companies, I sought revenge as a customer. Here's an email I sent to the two head of sales & operations for residential and business customers respectively at Telewest, cc'd to their CEO, the CEO of BT (coz they pi$$ed me off 2 years ago), the hack that writes the satirical business column for the Sunday Times, Watchdog and Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

"Dear Mr. Jansen & Mr. Smith

I have been a Telewest residential customer for around six years from 1995, excluding an eighteen-month period when I worked for BT as during this period I received free bandwidth as part of my employment package.

I have also been a Blueyonder subscriber for well over a year, and find the product satisfactory although have had my fair share of difficulties with your customer service organisation.

It is a conversation today with Blueyonder customer services that has prompted me to write to you. My cable modem has been experiencing intermittent loss of connection over the past few days - a pattern that started several weeks ago. I called your customer service line this morning and agreed to their recommendation that it would be appropriate for an engineer to visit. The earliest appointment possible for your engineering team is in five days' time - Saturday 20 April.

Conincidently, this lunchtime, a Telewest Blueyonder engineer was working at a neighbour's house. I asked the engineer if there was a broadband fault in the area. He did not know and suspected that it was more than coincidental that two houses in the same street were experiencing problems.

This conversation prompted me to call your customer services organisation again to check whether there was indeed a geographic problem or a localised problem with my cable modem. The call centre advisor was relatively unhelpful. She was unable to confirm whether the problem was geographic or localised and implied that the modem "could" come back in operation of its own accord and that it was probably best to wait for the Saturday visit from the engineer. I enquired whether I would be entitled to a refund of the service charges for the outage period between today and the engineer's visit and was advised that I should call back once the service was working in order to receive such a refund.

I was rather frustrated by the lack of firm, timely action able to be offered by your customer services team and mentioned that it was very frustrating to have uncertain internet access for at least five days as I use the internet for business. At this comment, your call centre agent mentioned that as a residential customer, I shouldn't be using my account for business use as I was in breach of the usage contract! I asked the agent for the number for business sales. She erroneously gave me the number for residential sales. The residential salesperson gave me a "not-in-use number". I called the Telewest operator (on 100) and asked to be connected to business sales. "Telewest business sales?" she queried. I verified this. The call centre that she connected me to answered "NTL sales".

Here is the first area where I would really appreciate your advice:

1. Do you intend to take legal action against me for using my residential broadband access subscription in connection with my business activities?

2. What business product could you move me to that offers me access-only at a similar price? I don't need the "added value" of your broadband business packages.

3. If you don't have a suitable business product, how can I get appropriate levels of customer service when I am being forced to use a residential product?

4. Would it be better for me (or you!) to terminate our contract (as I am in breach) and for me to move to BT's ADSL to fulfill my broadband requirements?

5. Just as an aside on the issue of being connected to NTL by a Telewest operator, is it your employees' training that's letting them down, are you experiencing recruitment difficulties, or do you and NTL share outsourced operator services which are being poorly managed? If it's your employees' training is at fault, is this a sign that you are experiencing HR recruitment difficulties?

I would much rather not go back to BT. When I moved house a couple of years ago, BT's contract terms regarding relocation of my Home Highway connection (i.e. impossible to do - early termination and reconnection was the only, expensive, possibility) made me decide to never take any BT product again. Consequently, the only BT product to which I subscribe is a Cellnet contract which will be transferred away from them once the contract period has expired. Real-life evidence of the importance of customer care, CRM systems, etc. (as an aside - I spent several years during the mid-1990's working with two of your senior customer service executives as we developed the infrastructure for your customer service operations at United Artists Croydon, Cable Corporation Langley, etc., and am well versed in the importance of customer satisfaction).

BT's attitude towards me as a customer has lost them my revenue forever. I may reluctantly have to go back to them for ADSL, likely through an ISP such as Clara, if I find that I can't get a solution from your company. If I go back to BT for ADSL, I will relinquish my two Telewest phone lines. Although I would like it, I haven't taken a Digital TV service from you as your package bundling is unfavourable to my viewing preferences.

6. When will you be able to offer me a free choice of channels at a competitive price? - for as long as I have to pay for a premium bundle in order to receive the few channels that I wish to receive, I won't subscribe.

If I did have your TV service though and was forced back to BT, I would switch to BSkyB. The reason that I would move away from Telewest on a total basis is that I have enough difficulty with your accounts department receiving funds from my internet bank on two products. If I am forced to deal with yet another service provider with mediocre CRM, I would look to minimise the number of relationships that I have with such organisations.

So, here's another area where I would value your opinion:

7. I use the internet for banking. Broadband access makes such services very convenient. I trigger a payment to you every month from my internet bank when I receive my bill. I regularly get final demands from you as you haven't received payments from my internet bank. Your accounts team tell me that it would be better to not use the internet to pay my broadband bill. Do you see the irony in the revenue-collecting department of a company that makes money from bandwidth discouraging use of applications that require bandwidth? This is the stuff of Dilbert cartoons.

I've been in the CRM area of IT for a long time. As a salesman, I've earnt commission from selling you *really* smart CRM systems. It's painful to see your company, and so many other service providers, fail in your effective usage of such systems. Please re-read Peter Murley's customer service handbook.

I don't want to give BT my money. Having been a customer, sold to them and worked for them, they don't deserve my money. Please don't make me do something that I don't want to do.

I would appreciate your answers to the seven questions that I've posed you above. If you would like me to spend time with you giving you an in-depth understanding of a) how to treat customers to minimse churn, b) the obstacles that you've created in your organisation that prevent you from doing this, I'll gladly write a consultancy contract with you. My rate is in line with "big-5" partner rate but I contend that I will bring you far more value as demonstrated by the end result that they've created for you, and so many of your corporate peers.

Yours sincerely

Lee Harris.

P.S. - this email was sent from my BT openworld PAYG account as my cable modem is still down. Please reply to lee.harris@blueyonder.co.uk"

Wonder if I'll get any response?

boxst

Hello

What a great letter.

I hope that you get some satisfaction from Telewest.

Steve.