Sinclairs wrote on Apr 23
rd, 2008 at 12:26pm:
Feel like throwing the whole bloody box out of the window`and having nothing more to do with them.
That is indeed surely the danger Sky run in terms of continuing to grow their customer numbers if they continue to abuse them in this way and prevent them doing things easily and painlessly online.
After not being subscribed to Sky for 15 months I rang them the other day to subscribe for one month to see a motor racing event this week I am interested in. I could log in to the online account I set up with them when I was last with them which showed I had a Sky Digibox. But could I upgrade to one or more Sky Mixes from not subscribing online, even though they had still had my Direct Debit set up. No. They wanted me to call them.
I called on the normal 01506 number on this website and it took about 15 minutes speaking to an adviser after a 6 layer deep touch menu to get resubscribed. Then when I said I also wanted to give 30 days notice to cancel I was transferred to customer services who then said they couldn't do it and transferred me to cancellations. Eventually after further hassle I managed to also put through the cancellation in 30 days time. Net result a call of about 45 minutes to do a very simple thing. Call cost me nothing as I have an unlimited 01/02/03 calls package fortunately but what about the value of my time and their staff time. the £1.50 or so that they might earn on revenue share on a 45 minute call will not cover their employee wages and NI and training at around at least £7 or so for this amount of time as they were UK based.
Why on earth don't the cretins at Sky allow online account management to be used to resubscribe and also to change Mixes and to even downgrade from Sky Movies or Sky Sports to just Mixes. About the only thing they may have some vague point in forcing you to call them on is Cancellation as they always offer longstanding customers a deal to try and talk them out of that. But not allowing reactivations or changes between packages online is just ludicrous. No wonder they have to charge so much when they are so inefficient by making every change of customer package a 30 minute or so call!