Customer service worth shouting about?

Seth Godin had an apposite post yesterday.

Apposite for me, in any case, as I had to call Orange, my ISP, to get technical support for my router. Like Tesco, if you are an existing customer and have a problem, you go to the end of the queue (the sequence of buttons to press, by the way, in case you are a Home Broadband user with a Livebox problem, is 1-5-4-1-1). Not quite the nine button presses Seth had, but equally frustrating to know that you are not valued.

But, in fact, it got worse. In my case, they were answering and it was enough for me to finally pull the plug on our relationship.

I called them yesterday to follow up a long-standing problem. My router loses its LAN connection intermittently (often enough to be an annoyance) and I wanted a replacement box.

But Orange won't replace your Livebox - and to add insult to injury, you have to convince no fewer than TWO people of the same facts: the fact that it's not your PC or the cable and can ONLY be your router which is at fault - and then they want to send you a recovery CD.

This arrived today and it won't run on your version of XP (requires XP SP1 or higher...but SP3 is NOT compatible).

So you have to call them back up and speak to someone, who, at every point, asks you what you can see on the screen. When the USB recovery failed to work, he put me on hold. So I tried the Ethernet recovery, while I waited, and got the same results - nada. I'm not sure what the trigger point was, but when the guy got back to me, I couldn't take any more (I had been on for 25 minutes) and I hung up on him.

The best was yet to come, however.

I then phoned customer services and my first request was for a MAC code. Now I know that these service agents are trained to talk you round and convince you to stay with the ISP.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: I'd like a MAC code, please.

Agent: Certainly, sir, but before I do that, let me just look at your history. I see you've had some problems with your router and we sent you a recovery CD.

Me: Yes, which doesn't work. I spoke to your technical support, but I had to hang up.

Agent: OK, well we were only trying to sort this out.

I tried to steer the call back to the issue of the MAC code and, at some point, she then offered me a router. I said I hadn't been offered a router when I asked for one and now I just wanted my MAC code.

I'm unsure what was said next, but it was basically two people having two different conversations simultaneously. She threatened to end the call - presumably, because I was sounding irate (I was). I told her in no uncertain terms I simply wanted my MAC code, to which she replied that they would never refuse that request:

Agent: Do you want it posted or emailed?

Me: Emailed.

Agent: To the address we have on file or another?

Me: Another address.

And this is the point I went into meltdown:

Agent: Well, do you want to give it to me?!

I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible.

They don't have supervisors or managers in the Orange customer service call centre, apparently. When you've finally lost it, you have to have your call escalated to someone who has had a modicum of customer service training and can actually handle your request.

Bye, bye, Orange.