As I have written before, the local bowling club is still having problems with Tiscali. They signed up for a combined telephone/broadband package. I was asked to provide an anti-virus package, and the first time I went there (4 months! ago) the internet wasn’t installed so I started installing it.

The disc went in fine and ran through its checks but the modem did not have the ADSL light lit. The program stalled there saying there was something wrong. And ever since then, four months of technical support hell, it has not worked. I said it was the provisioning, something on Tiscali’s side, but they have done everything under the sun to try to avoid doing anything about it.

They blamed BT, they blamed us, they blamed the very equipment they sent us. Not once have they checked the account to check provisioning was correct, they have never done anything except point the finger elsewhere. They really do have an abysmal technical support division. You name it, it’s happened. They’ve scheduled callbacks and never called. They’ve scheduled callbacks then when we call them they say the callback was at a different time (ask yourself: why would you come in with a hired computer professional at the wrong time?). They’ve put us on hold when contacting a supervisor, never to find one. They’ve said a supervisor will call back immediately, and didn’t. They’ve taken another phone number down (to call me at home) and never called it, calling us liars by saying we never gave them the other phone number.

The BT technical people checked the line, found a minor fault, fixed it, and told Tiscali they’d fixed it, and the next time we called Tiscali they blamed BT again saying they were fixing a fault. Again. When we insisted it had been fixed they suddenly noticed it was fixed. Clearly they can’t read what’s on the screens in front of them.

Worse still, a letter was written to Tiscali who wrote back (a month later) that our complaint was being forwarded to a special division. When we called technical support we were supposed to go straight to that division because we were a special case, yet have never been contacted by this special division, or talked to anyone from it.

Not being racist or anything, but I think that this farming of support services to other countries (read: India) is a bad idea. It’s difficult to talk to them, and to understand what they’re saying, and they don’t understand english colloquialisms. Furthermore they seem to think that we sit at home or at our businesses waiting for phone calls from them. When we say that we can’t be there at 3pm because of work, they repeat it, as if repeating 3pm is going to make us relent or remember that we suddenly can be around waiting for them to call us.

From my own personal view, Tiscali has been good, but for the bowling club, for my next door neighbour (whose own problems with them took 3 months+ to fix), they have been atrocious. Taking 4 months so far, the bowling club’s problem has always been the same and we keep on saying it, the modem does not had the ADSL light lit - that seems to indicate one or two things to me - that there isn’t an ADSL signal on the line (provisioning problem with Tiscali, or a line fault with BT) or that the modem is malfunctioning (which Tiscali should replace anyway).