To be livid with Talk Talk on behalf of my very elderly parents! (advice welcome)

[4c4good]

Dad 96, very frail, very poor health. Mum 80. Exhausted carer. I live an hour away and work fulltime.

They rely on their landline for essential things like making hospital appointments, social services issues and to contact people to fix things, as well of course to keep in touch with family and friends.

Three weeks ago, Mum reported interference on the line, and what seemed to be a crossed line. They were promised an engineer would call on the phone at a certain time. No-one called - no surprise.

Problems worsen. Line is intermittently unavailable, or incoming calls go straight to voicemail. Mum says she can't access voicemail though I am not 100% clear this is the case.

They now have no dial tone at all, and nothing has happened with Talk Talk. I have reported the problem and was told they wouldn't speak to me as I am not the account holder ( after keeping me waiting 20 minutes)

Meanwhile a series of mini disasters happens. Their loo breaks. There is a minor insurance issue with the car. This happens when they had intermittent service and incoming calls were somehow lost - the upshot being they had been flushing the loo with pails of water for several days until I intervened and got it sorted. Mum can just about receive and make calls but not retrieve messages - on her ancient pay as you go mobile after some tuition so they are now back in touch with the world -but in a haphazard way.

They have one of those emergency bleeper phone line alarm things and this equipment was checked by the provider on Monday and the engineer was sure this wasn't causing the problem.

Now I need to get this sorted with Talk Talk. I recall a thread on here where a Talk Talk community champion or some other interesting title came on and offered help and a link to some kind of complaints forum. I've been on the website and see there is a 'memembers area' (sic) - which I assume will need account info to register with, which I haven't got tonight. Well they are certainly tools, and can't even spell, let alone run a decent service.

Can anyone link me to that and/or provide any assistance?

How dare they treat my parents like this!

Talk Talk are unbelievably shit.

I can offer nothing except my sympathy and a warning to everyone else NEVER to use them.

SorryICouldn'tBeMoreHelpTiggaxx

another EX talk talk customer
who would advise to stear clear

the way the OPs parents have been dealt with is appauling
and I hope not only is it resolved,
but highlighted how awful TTs care of the elderly is

as for Marks post? speechless

but adds more fuel to the OPs fire

I used to be with TalkTalk and my internet was constantly going down, as was my landline. Utterly rubbish. Now my parents are with them and I want to weep. After ten years of uninterrupted phone service at their house, suddenly their landline is going down 3 or 4 days at a time.

Landlines are vital to older people and it's appalling that they don't prioritise them.

Is that post really from someone from TalkTalk? It's . I'd forward it to Dildo Harding if I were you OP. Hope you get it sorted asap x

Are talk talk tiscali?

We had a nightmare with them if so.

We run a business from home and had a letter about an upgrade to the exchange which would mean no internet for 48 hours.

In actual fact we were without internet for 3 weeks. So we decided to cancel our contract but they kept sending bills and threatening court.

They backed down in the end when we refused to pay.

Appalling service.

My parents are also having horrendous problems with talk talk, it has taken 6 weeks to switch there internet over and the service has been undeniably crap. Mum now has no internet or email, a lifeline as all her children live abroad, she is frustrated to tears with it.

I did warn her about going with them due to our horrendous experience, bt she got 'talked' into it. I really can't say to her"I told you so" but I am am so sad for her, but feel helpless, as I don't have the time to spend endlessly arguing with the rubbish customer services, who keep telling her it must be her computer!

It worked perfectly fine before talk talk got involved.

Hate hate hate them!

Data protection is also a load of bollocks. Everyone hides behind data protection too, Nationwide wouldn't let me pay my son's credit card over the phone because of data protection, I didn't want any information, I had the card number and just wanted to pay it off!

I had a broaband with tiscali for ages.
I had months of problems, and them refusing to answer the questions I asked through the forum. (They would answer, but not what I had asked)
I changed to SKY eventually, but then had them continue to bill me, and had the collections department harrass me for months.
I reported them to OFCOM.
The story is here:
my post is no 480
It did eventually get sorted, and I have updated the thread with the story. Posting name there is dini.
That thread is full of nightmare non-existent customer service from Tiscali/TalkTalk
I emailed the MD Charles Dunstone. [email protected]
One of his (Very helpul) assistants took on the case.
I will pm you his direct number. Cant hurt.

After my Dad died, I found it incredibly difficult to cancel TT for my Mum and they continued to bill her. Got it sorted eventually, but what a palaver!
Mum then went to Sky who have been dreadful too and when we tried to change her over to Virgin, Sky wouldn't let her keep her phone number despite the fact that it was her original BT number that she'd had with BT for 26 years and only had Sky for 12 months. Mum wants to keep her number, so feels she's stuck with them. I think all these companies are incompetent. It all feels so much worse when your vulnerable and elderly family is struggling with them.

I too have had problems sorting out my parents' phone service - this was Virgin. They too refused to speak to me as I was not the account holder, but said if I had their password they would speak....password!!! As if they could remember their password :(

Eventually I got to speak to a manager, who agreed that if my dad said he allowed me to deal with it, they would permit me...and happily my dad managed to understand that and it worked.

We also found that they had signed up to an expensive full TV channels service with Sky - they hardly watch anything more than BBC1 and BBC2 so this must have been someone cold calling my father and getting him to change the package. The same happened with their gas and electricity - someone cold calling and selling a more expensive deal. My dad sounds sensible on the phone but he is totally incapable of making any financial or consumer decisions. I worry about cold callers a lot - my mum is ok and knows to put the phone down, but if he is on his own, or picks up the phone first, he would say 'yes' to anything.

I don't know of any way this can be stopped. Their no. is registered with the telephone preference thing, but so is ours, and that doesn't stop the calls.

Have to add a comment about Mark from TalkTalk.

Mark - you need to go on a customer relations training day. What a way to communicate with people :(

If KatieMiddleton/ KatieMortician is hovering around MN today then it might be worth giving her a shout. She's often lurking on the employment boards but is a bit of a hotshot on how to deal with complaints handling/ management so she might be able to give you some advice on how to take this forward with TT.

Totally at TT's attitude in dealing with your parents but even more at Mark's response on this thread. They need to improve their PR skills as well as their customer service. I certainly won't be using them in the future.

Wow what a shocking thread. OP so sorry to hear about your dad and hope he is on the mend soon. And what an inadequate non answer from Mark from TalkTalk. Seriously, how could you think that was in any way and appropriate thing to post? Another one who will be avoiding talktalk in the future.

As to ancient pay as you go mobiles, may I suggest the Big Button Mobile? It's sold in TESCO amoungst other places and costs around £30. You can use it with any sim card (it's sim free) and is very simple and easy to use with, as it says, big buttons for hands that don't behave as well as they should. It does texts and calls only and has a special red button on the back that you can programme with an emergency number (such as a son or daughter) that only needs to be pressed once to get through. V good and simple to use.

Any response Mark??

"I would rather have no internet access than ever use their services again" tryharder, I'm a current talktalk customer and there is not much discernable difference between not hving internet and having talk talk broadband the connection is unreliable. Just waiting out my contract period before I change.

After my fil died I contacted Talk Talk to change the account holder to mils name. They cut her off, then denied it. It was such an awful time which their incompetence made much worse. Truly awful.

Overwhelmed with all your kind responses and sensible suggestions. Bar one person

I like the sound of that Tesco big button phone. I will investigate at the weekend.

Dad is on the mend. He even offered to try to touch his toes for the doctor apparently. At 96!

It's too late tonight to call them -will try again tomorrow and report back. If it isn't fully resolved by then, I will start to email the people suggested, and call that Chief Exec number too. And try the forum.

It's bad enough when these frustartions happen to us, but with the frail and elderly the landline is quite genuinely, a lifeline. I am so furious that they are treated with such contempt - and they are far from alone it seems.

Is 'Mark' real I wonder?

I think it should be illegal to sell anyone anything over the phone. It's dreadful. My parents' phone is working again at the moment but there is a horrible high pitched whining a lot of the time. Again, they've lived in the house for over 20 years, never had any problems before until they switched to TT.

4c4good - there was a piece on You and Yours today (12-1pm, bbc radio 4) on Talk Talk. It was about halfway through the programme but I couldn't listen because I had to go into the supermarket. The trail suggested they have had their knuckles rapped by Ofcom so it might be worth a listen.

Last year we had a similar issue with my grandmother. She was 84 and lives alone in Newcastle, we live in Birmingham. The hassle i had trying to get Talk Talk to deal with me! I'm also a customer and only got a decent response when i emailed their head honcho to complain. She was without a phone line/internet for almost a month.

Talk Talk kept insisting the problem was inside the house. It turned out that they had cut off her line 'accidentally'.

4c4good, sorry to hear about all your difficulties. I just wanted to add I'm another ex customer of Talk Talk who will never use them again. They left me without broadband for 3 months, billed me and harrassed me for payment for a cancelled account and it took 18 months to sort it out. I wrote letters that got "lost", phoned constantly and was so frustrated when i finally sorted it all out, I swore I would never use them again.

I tell everyone to avoid them at all costs. They are a shocking company.

TalkTalk passed on our phone number to their people overseas whos computer used to dial our number with nobody at the other end, of course. When we dialled 1471 to find out the number, then dialled that number you got through to nobody, but it was a premium rate phone number

dh wrote a threatening email to TalkTalk and the phone 'calls' stopped. Go figure

Another ex-customer. I don't like their pushy doorstep salespeople. We didn't receive any bills from them whilst we were with them - but got letters demanding payment for the bills they hadn't sent, threatening to cut us off. I'm not sure how they thought we would know how much to pay without actually telling us.

hiddenhome - go to whocallsme.com to check the numbers of any calls like that before you call them back.

You just enter the phone number that called yours into the website and if it's a scam or some such you will find lots of posts by people complaining about it, some of them offering great advice about how to put a stop to it.

And yes, I'm another ex-customer of talk talk.

Picnicbasketcase - "I'm not sure how they thought we would know how much to pay without actually telling us."

They have this great game, where they cut you off with no warning, so when you try to use your phone it automatically puts you through to a talk talk operative.

Then, if you are not the account holder (imagine that the account holder has been deployed for three months maybe, and is out of the country and unavailable to spend hours of their life waiting on hold in an increasing fury) they will allow you to guess how much money you owe them and take it off your card. They can't tell you if your guess is wrong or right but when you finally get it right they will agree to take the payment for that amount. It's a lot of fun, that guessing game but they prefer it if you just give them your card details and no idea of how much they plan to take (you don't have to be the account holder to pay the bill it seems).

They will then tell you it's your fault they processed your account with the wrong bank details, which their operative had written down incorrectly in the first place, and that they will now charge you £30 for that mistake on top of the magical mystery bill amount because the no connection fee special offer doesn't apply to you now.

And they will say that they had no option but to cut you off because even though they have your telephone number, provide your internet access with Talk Talk email addresses and have your actual home address and sent your router to it, they still don't have a valid way to contact you to tell you of a problem and prefer to just cut you off with no warning.

Hi I am here! I had no idea I had such a reputation but thanks thegruffalossecretlovechild! I am a moany old bag 'tis true! I do actually have form for whipping Talk Talk's arse before thanks to some lovely chaps at Guardian Money because Talk Talk are possibly the worst people I've ever dealt with. Utterly unreasonable.

Right, firstly the data protection stuff. You are not asking them to breach the Data Protection Act. You're asking them to check an outstanding case has been resolved and if not to deal with it. Because your mother has already reported the incident they should have a log of that. It is not breaching the Data Protection Act to read the note on your parents' file and see the information is there about the fault. Nor is it breaking the Act for you to say there is still an issue, can you contact my parents to resolve please. They were due a call at X time and it's not happened. They should be able to check this and action it, all without breaching the Act. Except they won't because they would need to think and make decisions and there is no one who has customer contact who is allowed to do such a thing, but you could try the broken record technique and ask to speak to a manager.

I recommend you email the CEO using the email address up the thread. Also complete the online form on the website using the link below. Keep it factual, explain the problem, date reported, promised action and that it did not happen, explain your parents are elderly and cannot be expect to use the computer and that their main communiation is by phone. Is their alarm system definitely working? Because if the phone line's down it might not.

Outline clearly in your complaint what needs to happen. ie

1. Call parents on xxxxxxxx number by 5pm today.
2. Confirm the next steps and give a timescale of how long this will take to resolve.
3. Your parents need to be refunded for the period they have been without a phone.

Stay calm. Even when they are infuriating. IME they don't respond to threats to go to the papers because they don't understand.

Their complaints process is here help.talktalk.co.uk/app/answers/detail/a_id/2022/related/1/session/L2F2LzEvc2lkL1dXU3FPM0hr/sno/0

Mark is surely an automated robot. No one with half a brain posts like that on Mumsnet or recommends elderly people use the internet to make their complaint or that that some how gets round the data protection act (whether online or by phone it's the same information and same response required). Mark, if you are real can I suggest you read anything by Age Uk on how to deal with the elderly? It would help. As would PMing the OP to ask for her parents' landline number and taking up the case.