36 Degrees Design

An open letter: To Orange ‘customer services’

written by Stuart on April 13th, 2006

You will have to excuse the long back story, but the facts here date back to the start of my dealings with orange. In September 2004, a few days before I was set to leave my home town to come to university, I decided to arrange a mobile phone contract, until this point, I had been a happy, orange PAYG user, and as such decided to go with them for my contract. I visited my local orange retail store in Nuneaton, and signed up for a 12 month contract with the following terms:

1. 2 handsets and 2 numbers
2. Both with 200 x-network anytime minutes
3. Both with 500 inclusive text messages for the lifetime of the contract.

All this for £30 per handset, per month. A pretty good deal. For 12 months, things mostly went pretty smoothly, other than a couple of cock-ups with the orange billing dept. I was happy with the service I received. Skip forward a year, to September 2005, contract up for renewal, this is where the real problems began. Across the two users, we got through five handsets in 4 weeks before we had functioning phones, and on more than one occasion, went days without any mobile phones at all. Throughout the whole sorry fiasco, we were treated appallingly by oranges customer service centre, who seemed to have no idea of their own procedures, no records of previous conversations, and no sense of what makes a good business-customer relationship. But hey, we got through it, and but for a couple more billing errors, things were back to normal…

So we skip forward again to now, the start of April 2006, when my bill arrived for the previous month. Normally, our combined bill is somewhere between £80-100 including taxes, this one was closer to £150. I knew something was amiss, and upon inspection, it became apparent that instead of having inclusive text messages on my account, I was being charged 8.5 pence for every one sent. Okay I thought, another billing mistake, I’ll call up and sort it, so I did, I called Orange, the reaction was unexpected. Look back up top to the terms of my original contract, one identical to the one I signed when I renewed in September 2005. Inclusive texts, for the lifetime of the contract. That’s what I was told, in an Orange retail store in September 2004. Well now, it seemed, the story had changed, that was now being described as an ‘offer’ which was only valid for 18 months.

Both I and the other user - my sister - have been remonstrating with Oranges (so called) customer services representatives now for a week, to no avail. The quality of services ranges from disinterested to out-and-out rude. One operator agreed an error had been made on oranges part, and credited my account with the overcharge for the period of March 2006. She wouldn’t, however, restore my contract to the terms for which I agreed at the start, and the renewal of my contract. My options, she said, were to add a text bundle to my account, at a combined charge of £56 per month, or continue paying 8.5p per sms.

Now lets work this out. I’ve been an Orange contract user for 18 months, spending on average, £90 a month, so that’s something like £1600, add to that somewhere around five years as an orange PAYG customer, spending god knows how much with them. And for what? to be treated with utter contempt by their hideously under-trained and under-skilled workforce?

Enough is enough, and I decided that the next logical step was to cancel my contract. According to section 4.3 of Oranges own Terms and Conditions:

Orange Terms and ConditionsYou may also terminate your Contract if we vary its terms, resulting in an excessive increase in the Charges or changes that alter your rights under this Contract to your detriment. In such cases you would need to give us at least 14 days written notice prior to your Billing Date (and within one month of us telling you about the changes).

Right, so as Orange had changed the terms of my contract, I was in my rights to terminate it. Wrong. According to another jobsworth in the call centre, this would involve me paying a cancellation fee of £91! So let me get this straight, you change my contract without reason or warning, then rather than following your own terms, you insist I pay for the privilege of relieving myself of the burden of being one of your customers. Utter rubbish.

I’m close to opening up the window and throwing my phone out. Were it not for using my mobile as a business line, I would have done so already, and as soon as I can speak to someone within Orange with one iota or intelligence, I will be ending my contract, not paying any sort of fee, and moving to another operator, who hopefully, will have a better grasp of their responsibilities as a service provider.

Tags: orange, contract, customer services, mobile phones, complaint

Who cares what everyone else thinks? (RSS)

Something to say...

Then add a comment why dont ya!