Connecting, or Trying to

Nov 18, 2003

Way back in July I wrote about getting my Telecom Italia ADSL connection up and running, only to discover that I wasn't getting the level of service I had requested. What's happened since then has been so ludicrous that I don't even want to recount the whole, painful story. Maybe (said she hopefully) the final piece will get done this Thursday when, after much screaming down the telephone, a technician is finally coming to install the network router, and we should finally have everything we asked for back in May. Yeah, right.

I must have talked to about 30 different people by now at Telecom's 187 customer service line, and, in sheer desperation, screamed at a number of them. Mostly, I feel almost as sorry for them as I do for myself. They're supposed to be servicing customers, but they don't seem to have much power to do so. They can't talk to the technicians. One regional office can't forward a call to another (if you call from a cellphone, you end up speaking to any region at random, but certain services can only be done from the local region). Half the time their computer systems are down when you call, or they can't do what you're asking from the systems they have access to. Hell, about 20% of the calls I've made have had to be re-dialed because the connection was broken either during hold time or in the middle of conversation - hello, are we a telecommunications firm?

Telecom Italia, like America's AT&T two decades ago, is having to adjust to no longer being a monopoly, which they still were when we arrived in Italy in 1991. In those days, abuse of customers was legendary, and easy to get away with. There was no such thing as an itemized phone bill, unless you specifically asked and were willing to pay extra for it. So Telecom Italia employees had a well-known practice they called il ponte (the bridge): if you had a foreign last name and made overseas calls, they would make personal long-distance calls and bill them to you, because, with an average larger phone bill, you were less likely to notice or complain.

Nowadays Telecom Italia has competition in both cellphones and landlines, and this creaking behemoth is struggling to figure out the concept of customer service. Telecom Italia reps have been known to practically weep on their customers, longing for the good old days. So why am I using them for my ADSL connection? Because I used one of their competitors, Tiscali, for two years in Milan, and they were possibly even worse. My ADSL contract with Tiscali was year-to-year, and had to be cancelled at least 60 days before its end, by registered letter - otherwise they would automatically renew it and continue charging for another year. I mailed the letter sometime around February, to ensure that there would be no question about my timing when my year expired at the end of June. In late July, they billed me €570 for a re-installation which I had not requested and they had not performed. Fortunately, I caught this the day before automatic payment was due to go out from my bank. As I charged down the street to the bank, I called Tiscali's customer service from my cellphone. After a bit of checking, the rep came back on the line: "Yes, there has been an error," she admitted.

read it and weep: the whole Telecom saga