0 + 2 = 1

update Aug 11th – just had a call from UPC after DM’ing a message on twitter yesterday wondering where my status update was. The update I got was that they have no reports of faults since July 15th, in spite of having talked to me about a fault on August 3rd. What appears to occur is if there is not an actual fault logged at exactly the time the UPC customer rep is talking to you they do not record a fault as having occurred. Now I’m not sure about you, but that strikes me as a rather large gap in the CRM and call logging systems, but I digress.

The explanation I got is that the area manager feels the fix made on July 15th fixes my fault and others, and as they have not logged any new faults the problem is fixed. Of course while this gives someone in UPC some nice stats to present in a monthly review it masks an underlying problem by ignoring reports of intermittent faults. The mind boggles. On the upside I haven’t seen an outage in the last few days.

update Aug 3rd – so after UPC asking for the contact details they already had I got a phone call this afternoon, to be given a new and interesting twist on my previous intermittent network fault. Apparently there was an external fix for a line fault on July 16th, first I’ve heard of this, despite being told on the July 15th they would keep me informed. The person on the line did not seem have an idea about the previous set of outages I reported, and now they are checking to see if anyone else reported a fault in the area.

update Aug 1st – predictably I didn’t hear anything further back from UPC on July 26th bar there checkbox acknowledgment. Over this weekend I’ve seen four outages so far, generally seems to be for about an hour at a time. I have no doubt however that UPC will let me know that its an ‘intermittent’ failure once again. Tweets on the four outages are below, as you can see I am gradually getting more and more exasperated. Their only saving grace at the moment is that the main alternative is Eircom.

@weareupc and outage no 4 that I’ve noticed so far this weekend is currently occurring #fail – joke of a service

@weareupc and a third outage in one day, what a joke #fail

@weareupc and broadband is gone again, twice in one day – incredibly poor service. #fail #outage

@weareupc seriously what the hell is going on with UPC broadband in D3 – gone again #fail

update July 26th – and the service is gone again as of 7:20 this morning and was definitely not back a little after 8 as I was leaving, more updates when UPC come back to me, can’t say I would be their strongest customer advocate at the moment.

@weareupc suffering that exact same outage again right now folks. Any sign of a solution?

update July 16th – UPC got back in contact with me yesterday (July 15th) and are working on the issue, and will inform when its resolved. In addition they credited my a/c with a months broadband. To give them their due that is much more responsiveness than I expected.

I have been having intermittent outages with UPC for the last few weeks – my natural assumption was their network was acting up – they are doing a lot of upgrade work at the moment, and I grinned and beared for the better part of a month. On Saturday July 10th I tweeted about this, honestly not expecting a reaction.

@weareupc what is going with upc broadband? Service has been appalling for the last few weeks, down, slow connections etc #fail #timetomove

On Monday 12th I was rather pleasantly surprised with a request from @weareupc for some more details, which I duely provided and got a follow up phonecall, where the technician stated it was a problem with the hardware I had,scheduled a tech to come out and visit for Wednesday 14th. All good so far, I even commented to some of my colleagues about the improved customer service from UPC.

However on Tuesday 13th the warning signs started to kick in. Firstly I got two automated calls telling me that the fault that I had was fixed, which struck me as unusual considering the day before I had been told it was with the physical hardware in my home. There is an obvious gap in UPC’s automated phone system in the fact it cannot deal with voicemails.

Later that afternoon I got a call from a different technician stating the same – he also did not seem to have any knowledge of the previous call, bar the fact a tech had been scheduled to come out and visit me. At this point I requested that they still send the technician out to confirm it wasn’t the hardware, which was agreed and I thought that was that.

On Tuesday evening I arrived home around 11 or so to another outage, which may have cleared – but the following morning I still had an outage, as tweeted…

@weareupc thanks for sched eng to visit, outage right now looks like this http://pix.ie/p/7wAG

All okay, I worked from home via my 3G connection, slow, but passable as I waited for the UPC tech to arrive. And waited, and waited. Somewhere around 11:30, while I was on another call, a call came in from a blocked number which didn’t leave a voicemail.
At 12:20 or so I rang UPC and sent a request for the tech to call me back via their automated system. The tumbleweeds started to pass. Rather unsurprisingly @weareupc had gone totally silent at this stage. Presumably engaging in the conversation is only done when its easy to engage.

hmm, @weareupc experience going back downhill – eng supposed to ring and confirm he is going to show up, but no call #fail

Just after one, and admitably out of frustration at this point I tweeted once again

@weareupc and no one from UPC turns up in the allocated timeframe, guess a company can change its name if not its spots

And followed up with a call to UPC once again. After a few minutes I got through to a technician in their broadband support section to be informed that it was a network fault after all – exactly what I had suggested initially, no one would be calling to me, and the field tech had attempted to contact me (via said blocked number and leaving no voicemail – so I can’t confirm if it was actually UPC either way).

All and all an incredibly poor customer service experience. UPC staff engaged in call management, and while their stats may say they contacted the customer and cleared the call they do not reflect customer satisfaction – and I can state my satisfaction levels are at a very low level currently.

While this is major advance on the old days of NTL in the fact someone answers the phone, it was seriously a waste of my time. As for my time with UPC, I’m off this weekend to evaluate some other service providers – I may or may not change, but my experience has most definitely not garnered any additional customer loyalty. For what its worth to anyone in UPC management who read this, I work in the same business park as your head quarters, I’m happy to call over and go through the details if someone wants.

So @jymian pointed out that its a year since I posted anything… time to put up the occasional bits and bobs about music I guess…