Two months ago, I received an email from TalkTalk stating that my contract was to be terminated at my request. This was news to me. TalkTalk said a third party had requested it, but it agreed not to terminate. A month later I received another email, again stating my account was to be terminated the following day. TalkTalk did not seem to have a record of my previous call but once more agreed not to terminate. Days later, I had no internet connection.
I was told it had cancelled my account and had charged a fee for terminating it early. It agreed to refund this, but it was a month before it could reconnect me, and the new contract costs more than the old one. I complained but no one has got back to me.
GO, York
TalkTalk appears to have been contacted by another provider claiming it was taking over your account and it says it’s powerless to prevent an account migrating unless it hears from the customer to the contrary. Which it did, of course, but only the day before the planned disconnection.
Mysteriously, it takes 24 hours for a request to be processed then seven days to halt a termination, so you were too late to stop it.
You’d think that it would have been forewarned by your experience the previous month, but, as you say, it seems to have no record of this.
Once disconnected, you had to start a new contract from scratch, which is why it took a month.
Surprisingly, you were willing to entrust yourself anew to its customer service and, after intervention from the Observer, your complaint was finally acknowledged.
TalkTalk says: “We are sorry for the inconvenience the customer experienced after his line was taken over by another provider. He has accepted £50 as a goodwill gesture and the complaint is now closed.”
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