EE reports flat Q3 sales, keeps mum on Power Bar recall debacle EE reported flat third-quarter revenues to the City this morning and tried to ease investors by promising – once again – that it would do a better job on customer service. During the three-month period ended 30 September, the mobile carrier was battling a major product recall. But it made no mention of the Power Bar blunder …
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"EE also has a long way to go to achieve its "ambition to be number one for service" as it stated on Wednesday morning."
Long way doesn't even begin to describe the distance. 6-7 years ago, T-mobile had a quite decent customer service, actually. Then it went down hill, and hit rock bottom when it became (part of) EE.
Are they really that bad compared to others? I've been with Vodafone for years but am planning to jump ship after my contract is up. I was eyeing up EE as they keep scoring highly in coverage tests (e.g. rootmetrics) and network is my main issue with Vodafone. However, I keep seeing horror stories about their service!
Unfortunately, their customer service is a pain in the backside. But unfortunately, that goes for pretty much all carriers in the UK that I have used over the years...
O2 - terrible
T-Mobile/EE - abysmal
Three - outrageously incompetent and annoying (especially once you move on and want to keep your number); spotty network coverage in the City; hidden limits for calls to other countries, which can cut you off in the middle of the conversation and will then block all calls unless you log into their site and make a payment outside of your normal bill cycle...
I ended up with Giffgaff now... It's using the O2 network, so you get decent coverage. They don't provide customer service themselves, and you don't pay for it. Sounded like a reasonable option to me, because you don't get customer service elsewhere either, apparently.
Their community based approach works rather well. Number transfer took less than 48 hours (apart from calls coming from Three, because Three kept routing my number internally for a week longer - straight to a voicemail I could no longer access; but that was Three's fault, not Giffgaff's)
>Are they really that bad compared to others?
From my experience and assessing the raw Ofcom data I would say no.
Also like Three, once you've worked out how to handle it's Indian call centre, getting good service becomes possible, plus they must be doing something right to maintain a relatively high average ARPU compared to the competition...
However, it would be useful if El Reg could do a Netmarketshare/statcounter style of assessment going back several years ie. including the mid 90's when Orange were riding high in customer service and satisfaction.
Agree on it more likely being a kerfuffle, none of my household's four power bars were from the faulty batch - although all were from different batches.
What would be interesting to know is whether the recall has had an impact on in-store swapping of power bars; mine have been nowhere near a store, but then living out of town and only infrequently visiting places with EE stores that's to be expected.
They can't really get worse at customer service, so I guess the only ambition they can have is to get better.
Unfortunately, they're still a total mess, one of the worst web sites around (although Nominet is happily getting into that sphere now), the inability to setup and top-up a new SIM unless you're really lucky remains, and my experience as a contract customer lasted 6 weeks of a 24 month contract, 3 of those weeks were me waiting for them to give up trying to bulls*** me about the cause of the problems.
They've fallen a long long way from the Orange of yesteryear.
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