Quarter Life Crisis

Deutsche Telekom Hooray¶

2008 words

Last week I reported about poor customer service by Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Telekom. I didn’t need to speak to the bank again yet, but the Telekom story evolved. And not for good. The current state of affairs is:

• Early in May we went to a Deutsche Telekom branch, filled out a form and showed IDs so we could change the names in our contract. One of the two names in there was to be changed to a different one.
• Nothing happened for two weeks, so I called their service hotline. After a jingle about some stupid new TV service they want to sell you, a little battle with their voice driven menu and a wait, I reached a person who found out that he can’t give me any additional information on the problem because the computer system doesn’t provide those details after six o’clock.
• I called again the next morning, listened to the jingle again, fought the menu again, and then reached a person who told me that I should go and ask at the local branch about the progress of that request. After asking I also learned that the local branch does not process the forms themselves and that they have no way of finding out how far the processing has progressed (actually I knew that already, I just wanted their call centre person to acknoweledge that her ‘help’ wasn’t helpful at all). The person at the phone didn’t even see how it seemed absurd that going to the branch should help. All I could do was shrug, get out of there and hope that time would solve the problem. (Should I have shouted?)
• As I passed the Deutsche Telekom branch in town anyway a few days later I thought I’d go in there and ask anyway. The person I spoke to was at least friendly and trying to be helpful. Obviously she couldn’t say what had happened to our form but she sent an e-mail with an inquiry right away.
• Nothing had happened a few days later but I saw that when logging into our account at the Deutsche Telekom site, only a single name (of the old names) was left. I found that confusing. That happened in the evening, so I waited before calling their hotline again.
• The next morning I called the hotline and asked what’s happening on their side. They told me there was some request but it appeared that two old names were still registered. I logged into their website again and sure enough the two old names were back. I then explained the whole situation again and the call centre person at least made an effort to understand how this is fucked up, but eventually she said the switchover had been scheduled for a few days later and for some ‘technical reasons’ it shows up as our line being cancelled and re-registered with the new names. She understood that this was ridiculous (and, I might add, that this never happened when we changed names on the contract previously), but we just shrugged it away.
• A few days later two letters from Deutsche Telekom arrived. One stating in a wonderful monospaced font that they are sorry to lose us as customers and that our line will be cancelled on the fifth. The other letter said in Arial that they welcome us as new customers. Seeing that we never cancelled our phone line these things would have been surprising but after my chat with their staff the previous day I just marked it as the sort of nuisance a mix of stupid consultants, lazy programmers and clueless management make you suffer through.

• This morning our internet connection was gone. That wasn’t one of the usual Airport or Ethernet failures my MacBook has but the router said it couldn’t connect to the DSL. So they at least cancelled something. The phone line still worked though. Strangely it was picked up immediately without any jingle and of course I ended up in the sales department for some reason. But the person on the phone tried to be helpful anyway. She looked up the record, agreed that things looked wrong and that nothing should have been cancelled but said that we needed to re-register everything with our DSL provider.

  Just in case that isn’t clear: When you get your phone line from Deutsche Telekom, they will also run your DSL line. But (thanks to regulation perhaps?) you don’t have to buy your DSL from them you can buy it through cheaper or more efficient resellers. Which we did. So you need a contract for the phone line and a separate contract for the internet connection with a different company which relies on the contract with the phone line.

  Now the whole point about this exercise was that our DSL provider, 1&1, sucks and we wanted a different one whose prices reflect the current ones and which lets you cancel the service on a monthly basis. If there’s one thing I don’t want to do is sorting out anything with the DSL provider. Their service is hopelessly bad, their phone lines are €1 a minute or so and I’m sure they’ll be even less interested in helping us when our contract has been cancelled and will run out in a few weeks. I explained that to the hotline person and she at least seemed to understand and said she’ll try to sort this out for me.

I have a bad feeling that this story isn’t quite over yet. I also wonder whether anybody over at Deutsche Telekom has a good idea about what they are doing. Many of their staff actually appear to be friendly and helpful (for real? or just part of their training?) which, especially for Germany, may actually be above average (I don’t think I ever spoke to a person who wasn’t at least one of clueless, unhelpful or a liar at German AppleCare, say), but it’s just not good enough. We wanted to change a trivial formal detail, something that should be nothing but changing a few fields in a database. Now we have had many phone calls, apparently a new customer number, only a single name (the new one at least) in our contract and no working internet connection.

Congratulations.

1 day later: still no DSL - although they hinted in the phone call a day earlier that DSL will be back ‘at midnight’. Another call to their customer service (no stupid ad this time!) gave yet a different story. Now they seem to have gotten the name change all right in their own system (not in the website I can access, though) but the person didn’t really try to be helpful. In particular she didn’t get the we only told you to change the name, so W[hy]TF did the DSL stop working? aspect of the problem. Rather she tried to do ‘service’ the your internet provider is a different company, this is not our problem… way. I made her promise to have a technician look into this who may or may not call me back.

2 days later: still no DSL, another call to their hotline. And this one confirmed that we now have two customer numbers. It’s still not really clear to me which of those numbers is the proper one (because no matter which one you tell them on the phone, they seem to be happy) but today the change in customer number was the culprit for things going wrong. So Deutsche Telekom changed our customer number without really telling us and this caused the DSL to stop working. Now, by their logic it’s my problem to tell this to our DSL provider. Somehow my logic they should just do whatever it takes to make our DSL work again because they fucked things up. And they should do it NOW. The unhelpful person on the phone today completely didn’t get that point. She again announced that somebody will look into it (like on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and I told her great I’ll call back tomorrow and ask how they’re doing. Of course it’s Sunday tomorrow, so they won’t move anything by then, but they should know I’m not giving up. She told me that it’ll take them two weeks to do anything. Which I find rather ridiculous. They managed to break my DSL connection within a day in the middle of the night, so they should do the same to fix it again. I also start feeling like I deserve some compensation… (as the hotline people never seem to know anything anyway and the process by which they are working seems different everyday we started wondering whether it may help to tell a few lies like yesterday your colleague said this would just need a few clicks on the computer, so just do them please. As they don’t know what they are doing anyway that might just get some of them to do the right steps. I also told the hotline person that by inquiring on the state of things every day I would make this failure more expensive for them, thus possible encouraging them to solve it quickly. Unfortunately she was a bit dumb as well and told me that this doesn’t cost them anything. So perhaps the next time I should ask for their name, whether they know what they are doing and, if not, for a connection to someone who does before proceeding. Let’s hope they have an ‘annoying customer’ flag on their screen…

3 days later I gave them a break and sent a message to our DSL provider instead, asking whether they can readjust things more quickly from their side. I have a slightly bad feeling about this because we might end up with both sides ‘fixing’ things and nothing working in the end.

4 days later: I found a reply by the DSL people in my inbox. Apparently they really know about some change made by Deutsche Telekom (thanks to both party for not letting us know!) and provided a number we can call to sort things out. At a mere 14 cents per minute that may be worth trying.

5 days later: Our DSL provider were surprisingly helpful and friendly in their reply. They informed us that Deutsche Telekom cancelled our line with them and offered to re-apply for that. But that will take one to two weeks. Not exactly the solution we had in mind - we were thinking about NOW - particularly as we want a new DSL provider in around three weeks. Argh! I think Deutsche Telekom should refund the lost DSL days for it and we’ll just use that money to switch to the new provider a month early. But I wonder what kind of fight it would be to make that happen. In particular I really don’t think I should be paying for their incompetence.

End of story: Our web server also broke down soon after this, so live updates didn’t happen. After two weeks we decided to just let go the remaining paid-for time of our old DSL contract and sign up for the new one to streamline progress. It took another week for that to go live and initially it didn’t work. But after another call to the new DSL provider it seemed that they knew how to kick Telekom in the right places and we had DSL again after another day or two. I applied - in a paper letter! - for a refund of the DSL for the period where the line couldn’t be used. And we received €20 for that after a few weeks. However, we technically have a ‘new’ phone line now. With all the possible inconveniences you can imagine. We had to re-apply for itemised billing, we had to turn off some crappy answering machine ‘service’ and so on. Nothing we ever had, asked for or wanted.

Further entries on this fuck-up: when coming online again, on having to re-apply for itemised billing.

June 5, 2008, 9:54

Tagged as arial, customer service, deutsche telekom, dsl.