Re: Openreach treats everyone equally ........
First rule of complaining:
- The only people you have any business complaining to are the people you're paying money to, or the organisation responsible for legally regulating those people.
I *DO NOT CARE* that OpenReach have a problem. That's your issue, because you chose them as a supplier of goods/services. I'm paying *you* money to provide a stated service, who you choose to subcontract to do that is none of my business. If they don't perform to your standards, it's up to YOU to complain to them, not me. You hold THOUSANDS of customers with them, you hold a lot more weight than me anyway. I do not have a single business relationship with OpenReach, of course they won't talk to me (if you don't have an account number with them directly, you almost certainly don't have a relationship).
I'll happily work WITH your subcontractor to diagnose the issue, arrange repair, etc. but I'm not going to be organising that except via you and your direct referral of THEM to ME.
I had this once with a phone ordered from Three. No phone arrived. Waited the obvious 28 days to see if anything happened. Nothing, not even a slip through the door. They said I had to contact Royal Mail. Er... no... not my problem. I paid you to deliver a phone. You failed to do so. Game over. If you want to chase it up, you have the dispatch numbers and accounts, you can do it your end - because YOU paid money to Royal Mail, I didn't. I'm not going to do your job for you and likely can't. Maybe if you didn't send the phone by unregistered second-class parcel service, then you'd be able to track it? (Or, hey, realise that doing so comes with the risk that occasionally you might have to send out a replacement phone?) Your choice of service provider is your problem. All I care about is that I don't have a phone, that I paid *you* for. That one exploded into their threats of a lawsuit (never happened, never does) before I wrote them a snotty letter and recouped the DD cost from my bank forcibly (they phoned 10 seconds later to tell me off, but strangely never did anything about it!).
Talking of legal, it's the same thinking... if you had a MASSIVE dispute over the account/service, would YOU be taking Openreach to court? No. You'd be taking the people you paid money to to court. If they then choose to take Openreach to court for not fulfilling their contract, then that's up to them but it's of no interest to me.
Your grievance is with the people you paid for the service. Nobody else unless you're pulling in industry regulators. And Openreach aren't the regulator. Ofcom would be.
P.S. If your suppliers are that terrible that you're losing customers... time to find a different subcontractor to provide the expected levels of service to your customers!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
