Well Tiscali has responded, for those not up to date the other Tiscali pages can be found here and here.

Below is a transcription of the letter I received from the Customer Services department.


Dear Mr Tasker,
Thank you for your letter regarding your Tiscali account.

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the poor level of Customer Services you have received from us. Tiscali endeavour to make customer care our highest priority and take complaints of this nature extremely seriously. The points raised in your letter have been noted and will be addressed immediately.

I can confirm that, we received an indemnity claim from your bank on the 22nd November 2006, For the amount of £35.98. We sent a cheque to your bank for the said amount.

Our Finance Department have declined the request to refund the outstanding balance on your account, as the cheque sent to your bank covers the period of outage from your Tiscali Broadband Service.

There is an outstanding balance on your account for the amount of £35.40, which is a valid charge, and must be paid in full. as there are no notes on our system supporting the Cease and Reprovide request prior to the 12th October 2006.

Again, please let me apologise for any inconvenience suffered as a consequence of this situation and thank you in advance, for your cooperation with this matter.

If you require any further information please do not hesitate nto cotnact our Customer Care Team on 0870 7449 966 option 1 then option 3. Lines are open 8am to midnight 7 days a week. Calls are charged at national rate.

Alternatively you can contact us through our website at www.tiscali.co.uk.

Yours Sincerely

Kate Channon
Tiscali Billing and Customer Care Team

So a fairly apologetic letter, however they say that it is a valid charge, there's a surprise!!!!! They do however admit that there was indeed an outage, why should I have to pay for it? For those of you with eagle eyes, yes they are billing me for 50p more than the outstanding charge on my account. This is because I received an unexpected credit for 50p just before Christmas.

 I sent the following reply;

Dear Kate Channon,

 Firstly thank you for your reply, I realise that in your letter you requested contact either through the website or by phone, however I have a few issue with those methods of communications, aside from wishing to keep our correspondence "on the record", I am not willing to pay National rate to speak to Tiscali, this was an issue I also had when I was a customer of Tiscali. I cannot use the website to contact yourselves as the website crashes the Konqueror web browser.

Please find enclosed two copies of the email I received from Tiscali on September 11th 2006. The first is a copy and paste Human readable version of the email, I have included this so that you may see the information with which I was supplied. The second is the email with full headers included so that you can verify that the email is in fact genuine, and was sent out on the date of Monday September the 11th 2006 from a machine with the IP address 212.74.99.47. At the time this email address resolved to the Dynamic Hostname: mk-www-7.portal.uk.tiscali.com. At the time of writing this letter the IP address supplied currently resolves to the very same Dynamic Address.

This email was an automated response from your system, and explains that the Cease and Reprovide order will be passed onto your broadband provisioning team.

In your letter you explain that there are no notes on the system supporting my request for the Cease and Reprovide before 12th of October 2006, however should you listen to a recording of the conversation (I believe most calls to your Customer Service are recorded) you will find that I was informed that the equipment had in fact already been removed from the line 01473715575 at the exchange. This alone supports the fact that although it may have got lost at some point, the Cease and Reprovide was received and partially actioned.

The customer service representative that I discussed the matter with on that day informed me that whilst the equipment had been removed from the exchange Tiscali had not yet taken up the new line, despite this being more that ten working days after the work was due to begin. I was then informed that whilst I would be marked as a priority it would still take up to ten working days to provide me with the service. This is when I made the decision to cancel my account.

You acknowledged in your previous letter that there was in fact an outage in my service, hardly surprising given that the equipment had been removed from the exchange! I find it incredibly surprising that your Finance department wishes to charge me for a prolonged period of outage. Most service providers have a clause in their contracts or Terms and Conditions stipulating that if an outage should last longer than x days then a refund will be made of an appropriate amount. I believe it sums Tiscali´s customer service up perfectly to say that there is no such condition in Tiscali´s Contracts.

I will state again what I have stated on numerous occasions, Tiscali took money from my account that they are not entitled to, I have reclaimed this amount via the direct debit indemnity clause. I find it hard to believe that Tiscali can attempt to justify charging me not only for the period of an outage but for their engineers only performing half of a simple Cease and Reprovide instruction.

I would also like to take this opportunity to notify Tiscali that this correspondence has now continued for far longer than I consider reasonable. Therefore all correspondence sent to yourselves by myself will incur my standard charge of £20, in order to cover both my time and the expenses incurred in writing and sending letters. Tiscali will be invoiced for these charges when I consider our Correspondence to have reached an end.

Once again thank you for replying, and I hope now that you have a copy of the email I received perhaps Tiscali can launch a more thorough investigation into why I received such poor service.

In my previous letter I authorised two further letters from yourselves, given that I have now supplied you with extra information that apparantly was not available to you previously, I am willing to lift that restriction.

Your Sincerely

Ben Tasker

Updates when I get them!!

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