A Confusion of Relevance

Yesterday evening we submitted the following Customer Service enquiry to ntl via e-mail on their ‘interactive form’:

“We are currently paying £10.50 per month line rental and £17.99 per month for 1Mb Broadband.

Whilst visiting your website we noted a VALUE PACK for Phone & Broadband including:

Unlimited local off-peak calls
1Mb Broadband

for an inclusive price of £24.99 per month.

Could you please switch us onto this tariff, as we don’t like to miss out on getting more services for less money, or would this change deprive us of the unlimited broadband usage promised from this month?”

The automated response assured us that the enquiry would be submitted to “the relevant ntl department”. A quite straightforward Customer Services enquiry I would have thought.

This morning’s reply, (for which I’m not criticizing their promptness), to our customer service enquiry, came from the ‘ntl Technical Support Bureau’ … I suspect this was not the “relevant department” … so, not at all unexpectedly, their message states:

“Unfortunately we are unable to process your request as we only handle internet technical support queries.”

Oh the wondrous joys of automated systems.