26.point.1

My Email to Sky

// February 25th, 2010 // FURY!, Random Stuff

Sky have really annoyed me. So much so that I’ve complained.

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I have been a Sky subscriber for a couple of years now, and in May last year I upgraded to Sky HD. At the time I was charged what I considered to be an extortionate amount of money for an engineer to essentially come out and plug a new box into my existing cabling.

Since that happened I have only been able to record things intermittently, the Sky planner has only worked for a few hours after the box has been rebooted, and Sky Anytime has been unavailable since pretty much day one. All of these things I put down to only having one input signal - something that I was never told about when I ordered Sky+ HD that I would need. But being in a flat I couldn’t put a second line in and I just lived with the fact that I was getting a degraded service because of this.

Then about 3 weeks ago I returned home to find the message “Your sky card is not made for this box” - with an error code 7. This occurred on the Monday, and like everything else with the Sky service I receive I just presumed if I left it it would come back on. On the Thursday it hadn’t come back on and I gave your customer services people a call.

They had me read my viewing card numbers, software numbers, and other assorted details from the systems page of my Sky box and “sent a signal” which was supposed to pair up my card and box. But this could take 24 hours. I waited.

And then 24 hours later when it was still not working I called up again. And I read out all the numbers again, and was told that a signal was being sent. And it would take up to 24 hours. I waited.

And then 24 hours later when it was still not working I called up again. And I read out all the numbers again, and was told that a signal was being sent. And it would take upto 24 hours. I waited.

The next time I called I was informed that my case needed to be referred to a higher department, and that they would contact me ASAP and definitely get the service working. I waited some more, and then 4 days later I gave customer services another call.

And read out the same numbers again. And the man on the end of the phone talked me through pressing a number of buttons on my set top box, he was polite, knew what he was talking about, and after a 5 minute call my Sky was up and running and working.

However, in the process of making me press these buttons I also noticed that my Sky box was not set to single LNB mode (which I was informed to set it to by the helpful customer services guy) and this has since corrected the issues I had with the planner, with recording, with Anytime.

So my complaint now that everything is working? It turns out that I paid extortionate money for “installation” of my new Sky+ HD box that was never installed correctly AND it seems that most of the staff in your “something is broken” department only know how to take the details of a persons Sky box and press the “send signal” button on their terminal, and if this doesn’t work then they just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

I appreciate that time and time again I was told that money would be removed from my bill for the time I didn’t get Sky, that’s hardly the point though, I pay for a service which could have been restored when I first called up if you had well trained engineers there to answer calls.

As a very minimum I would like my installation fee refunding as it’s clear now that the service was never fully installed, and I have been paying for a service that I have been unable to take advantage of because of this.

At every level of my Sky experience from sales (where I was mis-sold), through to installation (which wasn’t completed), and now customer services in the service (where I was given the run around for over a week) I have to say that I would score you 1/10.

I look forward to your response and hope that in itself it is better than the previous touch points I’ve had with you.