Simon English: Telecoms’ grubby truth is profit from terrible service

The customer service at every single telecom company in Britain completely sucks. You know it, they know it. And now I have the figures to prove it.

In the past year, there were more than a million complaints in London alone that reached the ears of Ombudsman Services, the body that handles disputes which have been going on for eight weeks or more.

Add the number of complaints that did not last as long and complaints that were never filed, and you seem to have a position where pretty much every customer is unhappy (some of us are on the verge of tears).

Ombudsman Services research shows that one in five Londoners is resigned to poor telecom service. It is what we expect, so we don’t complain. The thing is, we should. Disgruntled Londoners claimed back towards £500,000 last year from telecoms companies, so it can even be worth the pain.

Lewis Shand Smith, chief ombudsman at Ombudsman Services, says: “Londoners need to ensure they know their consumer rights and don’t put up with bad service, whatever the sector. Many people feel disillusioned with the service they receive when they complain.”

No kidding. The truth is we don’t want a fight. We want kit that has become essential to our lives to function like it should.

Listening to other people’s tales of telecoms woe is not fun, so I’ll keep the details brief: My TV hadn’t worked properly for weeks. After lengthy rows between Sky and BT about who was at fault (the other lot, they both said, repeatedly), it turned out the culprit was a shrub in the backyard, that was, said Sky’s technical expert “too tall”.

What was required to improve the TV connection was a pair of garden shears. The man at Sky said he wasn’t trained in their use, but at least he figured it out, having tried all other options.

The entire telecom sector reminds me of life insurers in the bad old days. It sells us something we need, or in many cases are obliged to have. But the business model is about driving new sales, not servicing old ones.

Moreover, like banks 10 years ago, they are all as bad as each other. There is not one that can plausibly claim good service as a differential factor, a reason to go there. We can have flashier kit, more films, newer buttons. Better service? It’s not an option on the drop-down box.

Occasionally, you have a good experience with a firm and think it alone has cracked it. This always turns out to be a one-off, an accident or a particularly able customer assistant. Then you’re back in a logjam again.

Being this inept can’t make sense as a business strategy. Or can it?

The other day, I lost my phone. I cancelled it. I was willing to pay more or less whatever it cost to have a new one up and running the next day, same number. It cannot be done, it seems, despite promises from O2 and Carphone Warehouse that it could be. My question to them was this: How much money do I have to give you before you can get a functioning phone in my hands today? There is no amount of money that could make it happen. It is hard to think of another industry that could operate like this.

In this particular instance, the O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores are next to each other. But far from TalkTalk, they spent the entire afternoon telling me how useless the other lot are. Or framing objections to a solution that basically meant “this is your fault”.

The effect is that, with anger, I am now willing to pay even more than I was to get it sorted.

Perhaps that’s the grubby secret about telecoms: the lack of efficiency for us is where the bulk of the profit lies for them. They have no incentive to make it better.

They make the sales pitch about the difference between a Samsung and an iPhone, persuade us that our choices in this area says something about who we are as people.

The actual bit we want — speed, functionality, proper service — well, that’s not what they do, is it?