Today was Friday 11th March

It is after 8pm and I do not want another day like this.

I have spent over three hours this afternoon on various holds trying to get through to our broadband provider.
Let me backtrack to this morning, when I spent 50 minutes on hold trying to get through to someone about our ‘expired’ contract.
Eventually, I spoke to a human being and he was able to arrange a new package similar to what we have now, but it wouldn’t start until 25th March. I pointed out that our existing contract didn’t expire until April 8th, not March 10th as per their email, so did not see why we should pay a higher premium for the two week interval. He said it was something I would have to take up with billing and offered to put me through, with a wait time of 9 minutes. I said I had an appointment so would have to call back. No direct number, but he said to select Billing from the options (apparently for faults you would select Faults, so this was promising).

Miss Naive here rang this afternoon and there are no such options on their auto message on any of their contact numbers. So I have wasted four hours of my life today which I shall never get back, listening to inane music and recorded messages about faster broadband, unlimited packages and if you were due to be connected today, it could take up to midnight, after which if it didn’t, to give them a call. What a f***ing joke.
I have worked in Admin. I have experienced the chaos and confusion of new systems and changeovers, but I have never in my life experienced such a shambles as what happened today.
So we have decided to call time on them and call in a professional provider.
Trying to get through to someone to cancel the contract we had agreed to this morning was horrendous. Hold, then the girl couldn’t help me and put me through to customer service with a wait of  ‘4 minutes’. You can add a 3 in front of that though the guy who eventually answered said I’d only been on hold ten. I said I started this hold at 4.03 and it was now 4.34 on the clock I had directly in front of me, and he said nothing.
I was furious when he said he couldn’t close our account and would have to put me through to someone else and I asked to speak to his supervisor. Fat chance of that and on hold again for almost an hour and no reply.
I wonder if they get brownie points for the ‘longest hold’ or if they deliberately put people on a dead line in the hope they’ll just hang up, which is what I did and called another number to close accounts which Hubby found on their website. OK, a different initial spiel, but once again, inane music and I was in a hold queue. Thank god it’s a free number and they pay!
Forty five minutes later we were through to a lady who knew what we wanted, knew what she was doing, and within minutes our new contract had been cancelled with no fees payable as it was within the 14 day cooling off period (14 minutes actually, must be a record), and confirmation emails sent as we were still talking. We were nice, we were polite, she was professional and she got the job done.
Our account, landline and broadband will discontinue as from April 10th, so I may be offline for a couple of days while we get sorted with someone else. My phone budget will probably triple in the process, but reliability and professionalism comes at a price.

We never had a problem when we were with The Post Office Broadband. Rates were reasonable, download speed was perhaps a little slow, but customer service was good.
Shell Energy took them over last March and that is where they got the expiry date for our contract from………. one year from their takeover.
They need to get their act together because although their prices may be cheap, their service sucks. I’m sure we’re not the only ones to have walked, and reading the reviews of their service was all too familiar as to what we experienced today.

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