MortiBlog

I have Internet access right now, obviously. This post was written a while ago (and has been timestamped as such). 

For years I have been trying different cheap ISPs in Canterbury. The first connection I set up here was, I believe, with PlusNet. They were cheap, but slow, unreliable and had poor customer service. When I moved house I switched to Bulldog who, again, were cheap, slow, unreliable and with the worst customer service I have ever dealt with. With both these companies, when something was wrong they always made me go through a selection of debugging processes my end (things I’m quite capable of doing alone) before telling me whether or not there was a fault on my line. Bulldog also impressed me when I lost my BT phone line due to an unpaid bill to BT and they cancelled my contract and tried to charge me basically the rest I’d pay over the contract period without giving me the option of simply resuming the contract.

Oh, a useful tip for anyone else this happens to, if an ISP charges you after BT cut you off, you don’t have to pay it. In order to take you to court over it they have to provide evidence that you chose to cancel the contract, so something in writing or a recording of a call to customer services. Obviously I didn’t cancel it, they did under order of BT, so there’s nothing they can do to make me pay. So I didn’t and they stopped asking.

Currently I’m with Eclipse. As with the others they are cheap, slow and unreliable but they have the best customer service I have ever dealt with. Previously I’ve called them when there’s a problem and it’s taken 30 seconds to speak to an actual person (no dealing with really long answering things where I have to press the correct combination of numbers to get something other than a recorded message that tells me what I already know, all you do with Eclipse is press “2″ then wait a bit). I asked if there were any problems they knew of with my line, the man on the other end said no and asked if I wanted help debugging it my end. I said no, he said fine, I thanked him, end of call. Took under a minute whereas this took at least five with both PlusNet and Bulldog.

Now, I don’t have Internet access right now for the same reason, I missed a payment to BT and they cut me off. I just got off the phone with Eclipse, took me about 4 minutes to get through to someone at customer services this time but that’s a reasonable amount of time to wait and the people I dealt with were friendly, straightforward and didn’t make any stock responses or anything. The first guy I spoke to wasn’t aware of what you’d normally do in my (slightly rare) situation so he asked his supervisor, which is great. Perhaps it’d be nicer if he knew to start with but I know he’s not just looking stuff up from a book.

After this he answered my questions clearly and then put me through to the sales department so I could set up a new line. This is another luxury, Bulldog made me call a different number and stay on hold again for ages whereas this guy transferred me through and passed on my details to the other department so from then on to set up the line the only questions I had to answer about the new line could be answered with “yes”.

It’s my belief that all cheap Internet services in Canterbury will be slow and will drop occasionally, ADSL down this way is a bit cack, the difference is in customer service. Too many companies seem to forget this, they outsource all their customer service operations to other companies/countries and provide them with a book of stock answers and when confused they read as many of them as they can as fast as they can using words that are vaguely relevant to the query. I remember once I was on to Bulldog with some billing query and the person on the other end started telling me about parental controls.

So I continue to recommend Eclipse to people who want cheap Internet access. It works as well as any other of the cheap options down here, sometimes better, and their customer service is second to none. It’s a simple principle, treat your customers nicely and they stick with you. This is the only reason Bulldog are failing or have failed (I forget which). All ISPs should follow Eclipse’s example, pour more resources into decent customer service and less into complex, irritating phone systems. Costs more but at the end of the day it could be what keeps such companies afloat.

I will have regular Internet access this time next week, all being well.