I've been having problems with my internet, and these problems are not the simplest ones; first up we had to change from the cable connection in our house to a BT landline, and so we needed an engineer to come round to ours and fix it manually. Our first date was missed because my housemate was working full time and didn't reschedule, the second date a week later had the guy not even turning up, the third time another week after that saw him arrive but after waiting the few days for our line to activate saw nothing happen. After getting another engineer around, we finally had a phone line!
Next task was to get our broadband provider (ISP) to use our phone line to set up an internet connection. We had to wait for our modem to arrive. A week later, we had a router, but lo and behold, the internet wouldn't work. They sent us a new router a couple of days later, very quickly, but that didn't solve the problem. The problem [i]was with our line.[/i] This was getting ridiculous.
They had to send somebody to the exchange in my city to fix something there. After a few days of waiting and contacting my ISP, they eventually got there and it seemed to fix the problem. After so many weeks we finally had internet! ... Except it was slow as hell, problematically slow to be precise. We were told to wait a few days to see the connection improve, which it did marginally. The thing was, our ISP was due to unbundle their connection [Boiling it down, we were currently 'borrowing' BT's lines to connect and unbundling was the process of replacing BT's stuff with the ISP's own which would mean a faster connection] towards the end of september but it happened actually towards the end of November. The fact that we hadn't unbundled meant we had a much slower connection than we should.
Eventually the unbundling happened and we had faster internet. However, that was not the end of our problem, as we have not only had to suffer through various lagged connections but also the connection dropping completely, sometimes once every five minutes or so. I've frequently been on to the ISP's customer service line about this and it seems to be easing itself into a usable line now and so I finally think the light at the end of our internet problems tunnel is within sight.
Now why did I bore you with such a long tale of woes about something I'm sure you couldn't care less about? Well, the reason is that I want to stick up for why, even though I couldn't have predicted most of these problems when I signed up with the internet company, I decided to go for them and have no qualms about it. Customer service.
Do you know how much we are at the mercy of big companies? A recent example is Guitar Hero. Apparently the guitars that you play it with are only under guarantee for 90 days, which means that should you experience a break after a mere 100 days of using the controller, you would be expected to fork out another £60+ for another one, and that's just one. What about if you played often with two players? If like me, you look after your stuff and never thrash it around, and you find both quite regularly break quite soon after the warranty the maximum you can expect to pay for your Guitar Hero experience is around £400 a year. Now I disagree with this completely. These things should come with the warranty of about a year because it shouldn't be fair to fork out so much because the company didn't make something that could withstand that much play. £60 could buy you a digital camera and I'd certainly expect that to last me a year. The normal controllers cost around £30 each and I'd really wish mine to last more than a year. So more expensive controllers? They should last a LOT longer than three months.
So why did I choose my ISP over other ones? Because of it's great customer service. Price is obviously a key point amongst students like us, but this shouldn't be the first nor only thing you consider when choosing a company to give your money to. The foremost should be whether they care about their customers. The worst possible thing you could want is to be stuck in a contract with a company who only want your money and don't make the effort to help you at all. This is why I'm so glad we went with who we did, because throughout this whole ordeal they have been nothing but helpful and done their best to sort us out even when the majority of it hasn't been their fault at all.
So please do keep this in mind when choosing your next internet/utility/phone provider, as I wouldn't want anybody in my position with a rubbish company.
