How not to manage a customer relationship, and why #Opal #fail

I signed up more years ago than I care to remember to Nildram for my ADSL service.  Over those years I kept paying slightly over the odds in order to have the benefit of a few things:

• An 0800 fall back telephone access in the event of broadband failing
• A 20:1 contention ratio
• Decent customer service.

Over time Nildram changed hands and now sits inside Opal.

This morning I received an email from Opal offering me and upgrade that would save me some money.  Having enquired about it I discovered that the features above were no longer part of my current deal.  As part of the transfer from Nildram (or possibly before) the contention ratios were dropped to domestic levels, even though business grade contracts were in place.  So that would explain the drop off in performance...
Frankly I think downgrading a service and continuing to take the money is fraud. I will have words with trading standards.


The FRIACO call back was decommissioned some time ago (and it's availability was one of the reasons I did not downgrade my service some time ago).

I’ll let the following speak for the customer service.


Having made my representations to the sales person, I was advised that they had no means to record and pass on my comments to get a more formal response.  In fact the only real response was to re-sell me the upgrade to a new service.  They would or could not address the concerns that effectively broke the trust relationship between customer and supplier.  I would rather pay a bit more to a company I trust than stay. 

I was also concerned that the pitch was that this happened before Opal were involved.  This attempt at absolution is not acceptable.  When you buy a company and promise nothing changes, you are renewing a client relationship based on trust and a contract.  To argue as they did that as the contract was a rolling 1 month contract, and therefore I was “out of contract” is ignorant and wrong.  If a contract renews automatically until it is cancelled, the renewal inherits the same terms and conditions.

The net result is that an attempt to get me to upgrade my service and get me fully into the parent company fold, has instead irritated and annoyed me, wasted my time, and led me to leave.  I am not willing to invest more time and energy into sorting out a problem with a company that I now don’t trust when I can put that effort into finding a new supplier.

Would you do the same?