28 day grace for new customers.

[#1]

A friend of mine (and a referral) took my advice and got PN for broadband. Now her problem was that her BT line was put in shortly after Alexander Graham Bell invented the damn thing, so the broadband was completely unreliable. When she did get sync (once in 96 hours) her connection speed was about 55kbps, and phoning the CSC told her that the line was old and probably would never work. Not being technical, she thought she'd wait until next time I'm there to get this sorted, and cancelled.
Apparently the line tests etc are not free, and she's now being billed for them. This makes me look bad, PN look terrible, and all in all not good. Does this mean the free for 28 days is not the case? Is it a case of "no such thing as a free lunch?"

[#2]

I'm really not sure what's gone on here.  Did she sign up for the free trial and cancelled within a month and still got charged for cancellation or am I missing something?

[#3]

Yip. Totally with James here. This doesnt smell right and we need to get to the bottom of it and understand what has happened.
Can you PM a ticket ID or a username and we'll take a look.

[#4]

I'm suspicious about the charging for line tests.  It might be a reference to the BT SFI charge, but there's definitely been some confusion somewhere along the lines.
As mentioned, more than happy to look into it.

[#5]

Chinese whispers maybe ?
My client was having e-mail problems and claims he was told to buy a new PC to clear the problem.
The support ticket claimed to have asked if he were able to try to reproduce the problem on a different PC.

[#6]

Now that wouldn't necessarily be bad advise.  If the problems were DNS related to a specific machine then that could be used as a suitable diagnosis method.
This could be technically feasible on an email issue, but I would have been inclined to have gone with trying a different email client first before suggesting something quite so elaborate.

[#7]

My sentiments. It's actually my step-mother to be, and it's chinese whispers via my father, who still thinks AOL via DSL is the best thing since sliced bread (he's old, and lives in Florida). I would give the customer ticket ID, but it seems the account has disintegrated, so the username was pdocker. maybe you can enlighten me as to what was really said.

[#8]

I'll certainly take a look at that account for you in the morning and let you know what I find out.

[#9]

Hi there,
I've had a look into this account.  There have been no references towards a broadband fault at all, until cancellation was requested.  Unfortunately, we need to know that broadband is not working in order for us to investigate it after having suggested sensible troubleshooting exercises.
The reason that a cancellation fee was charges, was because this was a new activation (ie: not a migration) and hence the free trial is not applicable as we had to pay BT £40 for activation.
Now, I'm unable to see any references towards being charged for tests to be run, but I do wonder if this is confusion currounding the charge for the activation of the broadband service. Obviously, I'm making guesses here.  However, there would have been no charges for us to investigate the fault, but it did need to be raised in the first place.
Needless to say, I am very sorry that she had a poor experience and I'm sorry that it came down to cancellation and if there is anything else that I can clear up, I would be more than happy to do so.

[#10]

I'd just like to add a little on to my earlier post.  I do fully appreciate and appologise for the fact that the cancellation tickets were dealt with poorly.  There was too much emphasis on the grounds of the cancellation fees and not enough emphasis given to the reason for cancellation.
The fault should definitely have been looked into further and more information should have been supplied as to why the poor speeds were being experienced, which unfortunately was overlooked when dealing with the cancellation request. Please do pass on my apologies to your Step-Mother to be and please rest assured that we will ensure that the analysts responsible will be spoken to to ensure that they do consider the whole picture when looking into tickets of this nature.

[#11]

Thanks James for your help. It's been enlightening. Perhaps for future reference you could make it clearer that the customer should be an existing broadband user, and not require activation. This is where I fell over, and I know understand what the charge is for. If the customer comes back at Easter next year, would she get any sort of help with regards to reactivation, or will she have to pay that again?

[#12]

I imagine that we could come to an arrangement as a goodwill gesture on account of the problems that she experienced last time around.