Business Telephones And How To Pay Less

It was probably with those complaint line profits that NTL were one day able to afford Ross Noble to do all the menu voices. It was quite a surprise I can tell you, to hear those chirpy Teeside tones greet you for the first time. I thought I'd accidentally dialled Just A Minute and Nicholas Parsons was about to ask me why I'd interrupted. Later, I realised the logic, though: when your service is one long joke it might as well be delivered by a stand-up comedian. Perhaps it might even become a funny one.

Still, even once you got used to it, it was a weird experience being guided through the menu options by an automated Ross Noble. You kept expecting the call to suddenly descend into some kind of surreal improvised flight of fancy: "I'm sorry, our services are currently down for extensive phone system maintenance at the moment... But don't you worry there's a team of highly trained telephone maintenance voles scrabbling away down here right now. Oh yes, we'll be up and running in no time! So long as no barn owls turn up..." The only 'improvised flights of fancy' I ever heard, though, were the appointment times given out for phone engineers. You'd wait in all morning, but they wouldn't turn up. It was like being in Waiting for Godot.

"Nothing happens. Twice," someone said about that play. Twice I would have been happy with.

In 2006, when Virgin Media decided to take over NTL, they said they wouldn't be putting their name to NTL's services until customer service had reached acceptable levels. Like I so often did, Virgin must have given up waiting. Nowadays, their brand's taken over, but you still hear bad reports. Unexplained service outages. Long delayed repairs. The usual kinds of thing. In fact, nearly all of the telephone/internet services seem to have their problems.

As for me, I'm with BT now. So far, it's not been too bad. But there are still plenty of other companies I have to ring up, all with their own costly lo-call rate, or 0870 numbers. But it's a while since I've had to pay to make a complaint to any of them; or for any other reason I might have phoned them, for that matter. And neither should you be paying. Just enter a number at Say No To 0870, click search, and call the cheaper geographic alternative with your inclusive mobile or landline minutes.

Or maybe companies don't profit from complaint lines? I don't know, but at least now we can make sure.

About the Author

I may look at business telephones from Maintel for more information, or check out their phone system maintenance if I run into trouble. Get in contact if you want more information or want me to postulate on your business.

Regards, David John Martin