douglasb

Why does talking to anyone at Sky involve huge amounts of lies and bull droppings?

A few months ago I asked a question (on here) about Freeview DVD recorders and Nimbus suggested that a Topfield Personal Video Recorder might be a better idea. Nimbus was absolutely right and the Toppy is proving to be an absolutely brilliant piece of kit.

As I suspected at that time, I haven't used Sky since buying the Toppy. Cancelling Sky would mean that the Toppy pays for itself in 12 months so I called Sky to cancel the subscription. When I eventually got through to Cancellations they wanted to know why I wanted to cancel my subscription (fair enough - that's just good market research). What follows might not be a completely accurate transcript of the conversation, but it gives a very good idea of a wasted 20 minutes of my life....

"Because I bought a Freeview PVR three months ago and haven't used Sky since then."

Bull point number 1 - "Do you realise that you didn't need to buy another box and could just have continued to receive the Sky Free-to-Air channels?"

"Yes. But how would that allow me to record up to 80 hours of programmes?"

"Well, you could have bought a DVD recorder."

"And that would allow me to record 2 Sky digital channels while watching a third one?"

"Well, no."

Bull point number 2 (and a lie) - "Do you know that the analogue TV signal is getting switched off next year?"

"I'm aware that it is being switched off, but in my region it doesn't happen until 2009."

"Your PVR won't work when the signal is switched off."

"I don't want to get into an argument, but if you are suggesting that switching off the analogue TV transmission will stop Freeview receivers working, I think you are mistaken."

Bull point number 3 (and a lie) - "You'll need a digital aerial to pick up Freeview".

"I'm aware that the quality of the signal is important for Freeview and that some people might need to upgrade their aerial, but I've had the Freeview box working for the last three months; it's been working very satisfactorily and I didn't need to upgrade the aerial. WILL YOU JUST CANCEL MY F*ING SUBSCRIPTION AND STOP GIVING ME THIS CRAP!"

TDT

With Sky Customer Services I would have thought the first lie was:

"My name is Bill".......

douglasb

No. The first person I spoke to said "My name is Rashid - how can I help you?" - with a very Scottish accent.

Torquesteer

Well after nearly 5 months, I am still waiting for them to contact me regarding free broadband.
I gave up calling sky customer service when I waited 30mins to be put through, only to be cut off after a 10 second conversation!
GRRRRR!!!!

dreamer_girl

Write to them instead - I had a similar problem when I tried to cancel my subscription, so I just wrote a quick letter. Had a response and my refund cheque within a week or so Don't bother with the phonelines - they'll try every trick to try to get you to continue your subscriptiona nd I CBA or afford the long wait to speak to anyone!

GrahamG

sky cs are ****e... thing is they must get so many calls, they just don't have enough staff.... saying that when i called up technical support they were very helpful, even though my call went to india.

Nimbus

Glad you are getting on well with the Toppy. I've convinced someone at work to buy one as well.

hail-hail

Funny how thing works out, just called customer services and got through after a couple of minutes pressing buttons. Sky + box not recording, bitty playback, can't watch and record a different channel etc....

Went through the usual checks but still not working.

"Box is out of Warranty sir, there is a £65 charge to send someone out"

"yes, but I have Sky HD, Sky+ multi room and I want you to fix my problem for nothing"

"ok, we'll have an engineer out on monday"



don;t know what you lot are complaining about

Onan The Barbarian

Got to agree with hail-hail

I got the call from Sky telling me that the warranty on my digibox had expired and that I needed to pay £11 / month to cover it

I told them to sod off

A couple of months later it packed in and they wanted their £65 to send someone out

I explained that I wasn't going to pay £65 to call an engineer out and that they could either come round and fix it for nothing or I'd unplug the box, chuck it out of the front door and call up NTL and get them to come and install their cheaper digital TV service

The engineer arrived 2 days later

Then, a couple of months ago I decided to just get a freeview box and phoned up Sky to cancel and they asked me if I would consider staying with them if they dropped their price to 75p / month

Excellent customer service if you ask me

Tam the bam

If you want to cancel **** like sky etc, just tell them you are moving abroad, job done no questions asked

druddle

You think Sky are bad, you should try Talk Talk's customer services.......

douglasb

The latest "That's amazing" thing that I've found is the ability to start recording a programme currently being broadcast - and to start recording from the start of the programme - even if you weren't watching the programme when it started!

(I realise that this only works if the Toppy was tuned to the same channel and there is a limit to how far back it can record, but it's still a "WOW!" feature).

I think my sister may have bought one by now. I've also been telling anyone who will listen about how good these things are.

douglasb

But very different to my experience of outright lies and bull****.....

By the time that I'd heard the crap from them, even 75p per month wouldn't have persuaded me to keep Sky. If I haven't viewed any of the Sky channels in the 3 months since I've had the PVR, why pay anything for something I don't use?