Sky! No, not Skye – but Sky – the satellite TV service. Now, you would have thought in this day and age that customer service would have been really important to most customers – but then I suppose when you have the monopoly over what you supply, then you don’t really care? Well, that seems to be the point of the Sky Customer Care Department. I telephoned them last Sunday to offer to pay them more money but they refused! How is that bad Customer Care? I hear you ask! Well, because they refused to change my service so that I could pay them more money. Here is the breakdown of the Stupidity of Sky:
We took out a special offer with Sky about 2 months ago in which we had a Sky+ box and installation free of charge and then 2 months of free premium channels before we revert back to the ‘freeview’ option. In the meantime, we were given an HD Sky+ box by a friend, who thought he was doing us a great favour. Anyway, the box works great however, you have to have the Sky Viewing Card paired with the box before the Sky+ takes effect – in other words, before you can pause the live TV and record stuff on it. So, after installing the new box, I call Sky and they take all my details and I tell them why I am calling – to have the card paired for a new HD box. ‘That’s no problem at all’, said the Sky voice, ‘I’ll just get all the information you will need’. Happily I waited on the phone and he came back and asked if we would like to upgrade our subscription so that we could get all the Sky channels in HD – that would be an extra £10 per month. I agreed and even said that, if I really liked the HD I would probably reconsider not taking the movie package as I had heard that the movies in HD are fantastic. ‘They are,’ said he. Then I was asked to hold on again while he just checked something. He came back and said everything was fine and went over the cost for the HD package, etc and I asked him about the costs of the movie package if we wanted it and he told me not to worry about that because we had the movies up until the 23rd August anyway. Then he stopped in his tracks and asked me to hold on yet again! This time he comes back and tells me that, since I had taken out the special offer, there was no way I could upgrade to HD unless I wanted to purchase the Sky+ box that I had in my possession PLUS the HD box from them. This would cost in the region of £100-£150. Seemingly, the contract I have signed FORBIDS me to upgrade any of the system until next year, when the year is up, and then I can do what I want. In the meantime, what is in point happening is this: I am going to be doing away with the movie package and going down to the bare minimum package. Therefore Sky are, through their own stupidity, losing out on a Movie Package deal PLUS a monthly HD subscription. Now – tell me? Where is the logic in that one?
