A major upgrade of the Foxtel pay TV customer database has seen thousands of customer profiles and information totally wiped resulting in consumers who call with a technical problem being told that they don’t exist.
Consumers calling the Foxtel service hotline are met with a recorded message that tells them that due to a computer upgrade their call is unable to be processed other than for a technical problem.
When I called Foxtels customer service centre to report a faulty Foxtel console I was put on hold for over 30 minutes. When I finally got through I told the customer service operator the street address as well as the telephone number of the property where two Foxtel services were installed.
I was then told that I did not exist and that Foxtel had no record of the installation. After insisting that I did have two Foxtel installations and that I had been a customer of Foxtel for many years the operator who had problems understanding how to spell Mosman hung up after saying “Sir I am trying to help you but you are not a customer of Foxtel” She then hung up.
After calling back and waiting another 40 minutes another customer service operator asked for the number of the Foxtel SIM cards in the problem set top box as well as the Foxtel account number. They also said that I did not exist on the Foxtel database.
He then said “We have just installed new customer service software and we are having major problems. We seem to have lost several thousand records. I will have to totally re create your profile. 30 minutes later and after several interruptions to talk to a supervisor the call centre operator said that he was unable to process my technical problem with the power supply to my set top box and that he would call back”.
I am still waiting.
Calls back to follow up on the call resulted in me being put through to a recorded message that said that due to the installation of a new computer system Foxtel customers have been unable to reach the Foxtel call centre. The message went on to say that Foxtel now had a backlog of calls and that it would take days to get back to consumers”
Calls to Foxtel executives were not returned.
