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Story: Orange, TalkTalk voted worst for customer service
TalkTalk worst for customer service
I would certainly agree with these claims that TalkTalk was the worst for customer service. Firstly I have a HND in Software Engineering, I went for a job interview about a year ago at TalkTalk as Broadband Advisor and am so glad that I didn't get the job. I couldn't believe how unprofessional they were, first thing was the interviewer was an 30 minutes late for the interview, then at the end of the interview we were given a test to complete, the questions on the test were totally irrellevant for broadband, questions like "such an error code comes up in Windows 95 what does this mean?" - erm... yeah Windows 95 is so pre-historic and like I am going to know straight off the top of my head what an error code means in Windows, normally to get this answer I'd google it, when I got home I did google it to find out, it turns out it means the phone line is disconnected on a DIAL-UP connection, now hang on a minute here I was going for a BROADBAND advisors job so why the hell would I need to know about DIAL-UP errors on such an old OS as Windows 95 (it's even more funny when you find out that their ADSL modems they give away don't work with anything less than Windows 98SE anyway - although if you know what your doing you can get them to work with Xubuntu).
Then to make matters even worse, a few months after being turned down for a job with them I get a call from a friend who'd just switched to them, she said she was getting no-where, she'd just switched to them and all they were telling her was to contact LinkSys as it was her router that wasn't connecting to their service, and LinkSys were telling her there is nothing wrong with her router and to contact TalkTalk, so she called me! Five minutes later we had the router working with TalkTalk - the problem - very simple one, when you change ISP you also need to change the username and password on the router by going to the "Default Gateway" (quite often 192.168.1.1) and logging in with the routers username and password (quite often either admin, admin or user, user) and then changing the ISPs username and password in the ADSL section, now if only TalkTalk had asked sensible questions like this on their test, they might actually have got technicians who knew how to fix such a simple problem like this instead of referring people between various "premium" rate phone numbers. One of my other friends also switched to TalkTalk, her problem though was slightly a bit more technical - she was using a really old laptop for her son who was about 8 (she didn't want to spend loads 'cos he might break it) and the laptop would only just about run Windows 98 (and very slowly!), so to solve this problem I installed Xubuntu onto the system and got the modem working, with Xubuntu skins it now looks very similar to Windows XP and works far faster than Windows 98 (ok that one is really technical and probably not something you could tell someone to do over the phone as you need to find the firmware for the modem and set up and edit a few text files to make it all work fine!)
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