TalkTalk foots the bill: Talk Talk gets fined £3 million

“Why did Ofcom fine Talk Talk?”

Actually, Ofcom fined the Talk Talk Group over billing issues in 2010.

Talk Talk Group’s  (TalkTalk Telecom Limited and Tiscali UK Limited) problems started in November 2010 with integrating the billing system from Tiscali.  By merging the accounts from two different companies, the Talk Talk Group meant all the customers were under one roof or, in this case, one billing system.

Sounds good from a business sense – one billing system would mean one area to look for customer details.

So what went wrong?

Well, the guess would be that in merging the accounts from Tiscali,  the Talk Talk group must have got their customer details lost in translation. Especially since they were billing customers that had cancelled or left in some cases.

With 62,055 customers being billed wrong, the Talk Talk Group racked up a number of complaints with Ofcom between the 1st of January and 1st November 2010. With Ofcom’s intervention, the Talk Talk Group had up to December 2010 to resolve this issue.

However, while the Talk Talk Group UK “did take some important steps to comply with the rules” , almost 3,000 more of their customers were still incorrectly billed between 2 December 2010 and 4 March 2011.

“Why would this affect eZe-talk?”

In eZe-talk’s case, every customer is important to us.

As a small independent telecoms provider, we have found it hard to convince some of our existing customers that they are actually with us for their home telephone and broadband.

Especially when Talk Talk have stated otherwise and have made demands for payment.

True,  we cannot say we are not without fault.  Mistakes do happen with all providers in the telecoms industry but, when it comes to blame, it seems too often that it was the small telecoms provider and not the big telecoms provider that caused the issue.

If you are an eZe-talk customer affected by this issue in regards to Talk Talk, please call us on 0800 083 9432 or email us at customerservices@eze-talk.com.

You can also talk to us on Facebook as well – there is a link on this very page.