A few days ago I found myself locked in a vigorous debate on the telephone with an employee of my ISP, Virgin Media. I'd discovered that they had suddenly started charging me £37 a month rather than the £25 I had previously been paying; when I rang to complain, the employee advised me that my "discount period had elapsed" and that "there was nothing they could do about it".
Now, I know that Virgin (formerly NTL) tend to rank fairly lowly in customer satisfaction surveys – Which? recently put them 8th from bottom, nudging ahead of such maligned services as Talk Talk and AOL – but this was my first real confrontation with them since they took over the UK cable network last year. Was I about to become part of the ranting masses over at Cablehell who viciously lay into Virgin on a daily basis?
I spent most of the morning investigating alternative broadband options; all of them would have worked out way cheaper than my existing £37 deal. New Virgin customers are currently lured in with a £10/month opening offer for a 20Mbps connection, which then rises to £20 after 3 months, seemingly for perpetuity. No mention of this mythical £37 standard charge that I ended up on. I was effectively being punished for my loyalty – and that's surely the point at which a customer should up sticks and vow never to give another penny to that company ever again.
My own technology blacklist isn't very long. I steer clear of Epson printers, after a miserable experience a few years back. I find Motorola mobile phones completely unusable. But while we all encounter terrible products from time to time, we always give the companies a chance to redeem themselves with a refund or a replacement – and some do so admirably. Samsung, for example, replaced my 2-year old broken LCD monitor within 24 hours without even needing to see a receipt.
But some brands just become vilified across the internet. Virgin Media are certainly one; Apple and Microsoft, as two giants of the computing world, obviously come in for torrents of abuse – although that's often from people who've never bought their products and just don't like the idea of them.
But who are the most hated technology brands of 2008? Which ones grudgingly agree to replace your knackered wireless router after four weeks of haranguing, only to send you another broken one? Which ones have taken inexplicable design decisions, turning a once-admired product line into a bizarre collection of barely-operable gadgets?
Feel free to sound off below – and we may follow up some of your examples next week.
(As a footnote, when I rang to cancel my Virgin Media account, they immediately restored the monthly charge to £25. Amazing how customer service improves when you threaten not to give them any more money, isn't it.)
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Wordpress. Looks great, smashing system in many ways, but their updates drive me mad. At the risk of sounding like a Google employee, I've seriously thought about returning to Blogger.
Posted by: Cliff | Thursday, 24 April 2008 at 01:20 PM
BT: Went for their broadband package which mysteriously stopped working one day. Despite many many hours on the phone to BT support, were told, variously, that:
1) Everything was working fine
2) We were using the wrong cable (which was the same one we had always been using)
3) We didn't have broadband coverage (despite the fact we were living right around the corner from BT Headquarters in London and we had been using, and paying for broadband coverage for months)
4) There was a problem but that it couldn't be escalated beyond the first-line call centre
We ended up switching broadband providers and, wonder of wonders, our internet connection miraculously worked.
Posted by: MH | Friday, 25 April 2008 at 10:14 AM
Epson. Not only are their ink cartridges expensive in relation to the quantity of ink you get but you can't even recycle the blasted things.
Posted by: Tim | Friday, 25 April 2008 at 06:04 PM
Belkin Skype phones....they don't work.
Posted by: Jerry Goldstein | Sunday, 27 April 2008 at 05:21 PM