SKY are a complete joke!

Sebastalona

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Just thought I would share this experience..........

Ordered Sky+HD on the 5th October. The account is under my name, but payment comes from my wifes account.

The sales person could'nt get their head round this at the time, but we eventually managed to place the order and given the installation date (today 15th).

Was told at the time that we would be called either the day before installation, or in the morning to inform us what time engineer will arrive.

No call on Tuesday, or this morning so I gave them a call. Expalained I'd had no call and because I have two kids couldn't wait in all day. The person I spoke to went to check, and after waiting 5 minutes on the phone was told my order had been cancelled TODAY because there were 2 accounts at my address!!! They had taken the payment however, and were in the process of refunding it today!!

I now have to re-order the box and probably wait another 2 weeks!! Absolutely bloody ridiculous. Surely all it would have taken was a phonecall TODAY to clarify everything was in order and then let the installation go ahead.

I am raging................:mad::mad::mad::mad:
 
Great to see that Sky customers ervices are up to their usual tricks....they are bloody useless but it does add to the fun of belonging to Sky.

Don't get disheartened once it's fitted (eventually) you'll love it.

Honest:smashin:
 
Yeah, I know mate. I just had to vent my anger! Just composing myself before I get back on the blower.......
 
Were only human and things can and do go wrong.
However i would maximise on this error by them and get them to put half price subscription for 6 months on your system.
Just tell sky you want some sort of compensation as you took the day off work and lost £100 in your wages by waiting in for sky to come.
If they are not willing to do this ask to be put through to the turnaround department and explain the issue / what i said and i bet they offer you half price subs or something similar! ;)
 
Here is the e-mail I sent to every department I could. I'll wait and see what transpires, if anything.

My wife and I recently ordered the Sky+HD package on the 5th October, installation date 15th October. Having received no phone call the day prior to install or on the day (as informed we would) I called your phone number for existing customers.
After explaining my situation and waiting 10 minutes, your customer service advisor 'advised' me that my order had been cancelled THAT DAY because of some confusion surrounding the names on our account (my wife pays the subscriptions from her account, the Sky account was in my name).
I am no expert in customer service, but surely:
1) This issue should have been picked up and queried at the time of the order?
2) If not, then why did it take until the day of installation to pick up on it?
3) When it was picked up, surely the correct thing would be to telephone the customer and explain the situation to them. After all, I was at home ALL morning waiting for the engineer to arrive.

My main issue is the fact that I have now lost a full days earnings because of having to wait for the engineer to arrive, as no time was specified.
I would rather have spoken with someone in person regarding this complaint, but your automated telephone system advised me my call would be answered in no less than 35 minutes. Unfortunately I have already wasted enough time on this today.

I am very angry and frustrated, and would appreciate giving this your immediate attention.
I have re-ordered the package, and can only hope that your customer service team are more competent in processing my order this time.
Regards
Andrew Sebastian
 
Ha ha ha - that's nothing......

A few years ago I noticed that my bill was incorrectly addressed to a Paul X and not Lee X...easy to fix you may think as they had simply used my middle name by mistake...

Well, what happened was the "customer service" droid insisted that the account holder must fix the error....a Paul X.....stating that Paul didn't / had not and wouldn't ever exist only to be consistantly rebuffed I had to change tack....state "oh, silly me...there's is a Paul X...let him speak to you...I then spoke with an obvious fake, deep voice and I was allowed to change the names.

Mind boggling. :rolleyes:
 
Excuse me for asking this question but why didn't you just put the account under your wife's name in the first place?

Granted Sky's handling of this has been poor to say the least but I can't understand why you'd need and/or want the account in one name but payment coming from another name.
 
Excuse me for asking this question but why didn't you just put the account under your wife's name in the first place?

Granted Sky's handling of this has been poor to say the least but I can't understand why you'd need and/or want the account in one name but payment coming from another name.

Both were under my name originally, but then we changed which account the payment came out of. If I'd known I certainly would have changed the lot. But to be honest, why should it pose such a problem? Seems pretty straight forward to me.
 
...... Seems pretty straight forward to me.

Not, unfortunately, to Sky, always on the lookout for 'irregularities' that could indicate fraud. You obviously persuaded the original agent that all was well with the application for an instal. The matter would then have been referred to a higher level at Sky who then decided that all was not well with it, and at that stage the decision was taken to cancel. You should certainly have been contacted, and the matter fully discussed with you. Bad form not to:(.
 
Not, unfortunately, to Sky, always on the lookout for 'irregularities' that could indicate fraud. You obviously persuaded the original agent that all was well with the application for an instal. The matter would then have been referred to a higher level at Sky who then decided that all was not well with it, and at that stage the decision was taken to cancel. You should certainly have been contacted, and the matter fully discussed with you. Bad form not to:(.

Hmmm.....I can appreciate that Sky have to take steps to ensure no fraudulent activities take place. However, you say 'persuade' as if there was some sort of haggling taking place! I called up, gave existing details, placed order. If they are always on the lookout for irregualities, then I'm afraid their system is very flawed.
 
Ok I know I'm going to hate myself for doing it because this will sound like I am defending Sky but having worked in this business area I have to say always try to avoid any possible confusions like this, the call centre droids can't handle it.

Not to provide any excuse for Sky's customer service but phone centres are almost universally staffed by minimum wage droids (considerably less if it's an Indian operation) with little or no freedom or training (you could add intelligence but that's unfair in some cases) to do anything but answer the phone and fill in a computer form accordingly. If the form accepts what they put in then that's the end of their job and they move on to the next call, sure Sky could staff it's phones with smart well educated and trained staff with initiative and the brains to sort any and all problems right away but such people would also be demanding £20-30,000 a year and your subs would be double or triple what they are now.

We all want the best service at the lowest price and unfortunately that often means low paid, poorly trained (insert other perjoratives of choice) staff that will get things more or less right most of the time but leave a minority of upset and annoyed customers, it is simply cheaper and more profitable to have some upset customers such as yourself than to provide a system that has none, particularly as no matter how much you spend somethings can and will go wrong.

If you want an example as an enginner I actually had to do a specific course desgined to calculate the economically optimum number of people to kill in accidents each year when working in hazardous environments, because you can never spend enough to save everyone. It seems funny until it is nearly you and it nearly was me once.
 
Not to provide any excuse for Sky's customer service but phone centres are almost universally staffed by minimum wage droids (considerably less if it's an Indian operation) with little or no freedom or training (you could add intelligence but that's unfair in some cases) to do anything but answer the phone and fill in a computer form accordingly. If the form accepts what they put in then that's the end of their job and they move on to the next call, sure Sky could staff it's phones with smart well educated and trained staff with initiative and the brains to sort any and all problems right away but such people would also be demanding £20-30,000 a year and your subs would be double or triple what they are now.

We all want the best service at the lowest price and unfortunately that often means low paid, poorly trained (insert other perjoratives of choice) staff that will get things more or less right most of the time but leave a minority of upset and annoyed customers, it is simply cheaper and more profitable to have some upset customers such as yourself than to provide a system that has none, particularly as no matter how much you spend somethings can and will go wrong.


Thanks very much, you've just offended myself and every other person that works at Sky. :mad::thumbsdow:(

I work for Sky, and I am not poorly paid for call centre work, I do not 'answer the phone and fill in a computer form then move onto the next call if the computer likes what i've filled in'. Neither am I thick as two short planks as you seem to imply and I am not as 'poorly trained' as you seem to think I am. While I admit I've never been to University I'd like to think of myself as well educated and intelligent. I also am free to use my brains and initiative while at work although there are certain things I must do. None of these involve following a script or being a trained Monkey. While I do agree that some of the staff Sky employ wouldn't know their arse from their elbow the overwhelming majority of staff do 'have a clue' and would be very upset and annoyed by your sweeping generalisation. To have staff trained 'to fix any problem' would mean training in the region of 3-6 months which isn't really viable considering the sheer number of products, systems, other companies and policies and procedures that Sky has. I'd love it to be the case where I can sort any problem the customer has and fix any issue but it's just not viable. I manage to sort 90-95% of calls I asnwer in a shift and any i can't sort I make damn sure they get passed to someone who can sort the issue or pass the details on to someone who can fix it. i try to get everything I do right but sometimes, wether that be through miscommunication, misunderstanding or faulty equipment or system limitations it's not always possible. Sorry. I'll try to do better next time. :mad:

Whilst i'd love to be paid £20k+ a year so would everyone else working at Sky. If you'd all like to pay £10 extra on your subs then I could be. I'm currently on £15.1k a year which is pretty good for 'poorly trained unintelligent staff'.

Could you please tell me what you do so I can insult you and all of your colleagues 4 or 5 times in one paragraph?

Yours, an untelligent, poorly trained, form filling Droid who is very angry.
 
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Oooppps, ok Skytech sorry wasn't trying to start a slagging match, maybe I am a bit subconciously bitter about a few customer service calls to Sky myself.

Actually I wasn't trying to imply Sky call centre staff are either dim or uneducated (I've dealt with some Indian call centres where half the staff had PhDs, they worked there simply because it paid better than the job they were qualified for and that was quite an eye opener) just the system is sometimes inherently limiting to how helpful they can be and actually 99.9% of the time any problem is not their fault at all but rather a result of a system designed to be cost effective rather than perfect. I've staffed a call centre myself in the past and encountered both those who know what they are doing and a minority of total berks. I suspect you want to put me in the second category right now but like I said sorry wasn't what I meant to imply.
 
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Ok, perhaps I went a little overboard, my apologies. Perhaps you might choose your words a little more carefully in future?
 
I deal with quite a few call centres in my job (computer field engineer). Indian call centres are staffed by highly educated people who speak better English that most of us who were born here. The problem is, they struggle to understand our colloquialisms. When I stick to "BBC" English, no problem. Use a bit of slang or local dialect, they can't understand me.

Level one call centre staff seem to hampered by the software at their disposal. If your problem isn't covered by their script, they are stuck. They probably know what you want to do, but the computer won't let them do it.
 
Where I work free thinking and the ability to help solve problems are welcomed and encouraged. Sounds great doesn't it . The problem being that the company does not want to use these ideas as it would deviated from the master plan. So all we do is bash our heads against a wall. And the company never see's that they might be a better way to do something or that sometimes if it ain't broke don't fix it.
 
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I deal with quite a few call centres in my job (computer field engineer). Indian call centres are staffed by highly educated people who speak better English that most of us who were born here. The problem is, they struggle to understand our colloquialisms. When I stick to "BBC" English, no problem. Use a bit of slang or local dialect, they can't understand me.

You've been lucky then, or I've been unlucky. Some of the Indian call centre workers I've spoken to can't even seem to grasp the difference between 'will' and 'would'.

My limited experience of Sky's customer services has been ok. For the money they pay you're hardly going to get grade A individuals and anyway, they'd be overqualified. As a rule, as long as people try to be helpful and solve issues I'm happy enough.
 
Thanks very much, you've just offended myself and every other person that works at Sky. :mad::thumbsdow:(

While I do agree that some of the staff Sky employ wouldn't know their arse from their elbow the overwhelming majority of staff do 'have a clue' and would be very upset and annoyed by your sweeping generalisation.

It would be nice if Sky actually put these people on the phones tho so we can talk to them. unless you want to cancel or speak with technical (who again seem to have no idea other than turning the box off) it just seems like you get some random inidan employed simply as he/she is cheap.

Sky need to remeber the "right first time motto" instead of the "sorry ive no idea and my talk time is high and need to get my stats down so im going to release you."
 
personally I couldbn't give a Gnat's chuff about my talk time, much to my team leaders annoyance. he hasn;t got a bad word to say about my call quality though.

I do work in Technical and it's still the case that the majority of issues are resolved by a 'connection check', which involves powering the box off at some point. This doesn't, of course, correct all issues.
 
You may not be so bothered yourself about talk time, but as I work in a call centre myself I know that talk time and After call work are very important towards score cards and id imagine most people would rather have a good score card than sort out the customers problem.
 

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