Appalling lack of customer technical support

About 6 weeks ago my VOIP handset broke and so I got a new one. I went to my account online to find the access settings for ***4 (number ***) and I set it up and it showed as “Registered”. But it did not work at all. It could not make or receive any calls.

Thus began the total nightmare of trying to get tech support from Mweb over the next 6 weeks. I tried to phone *** and held on listening to the same music and messages for over an hour until the line just dropped. This turned out to absolutely typical.

I then tried the chat system and it was just as bad. I made my selections and explained the problem and then waited at least 5 hours for someone to respond. When someone finally did come onto the chat, I did not see because I was busy with something else at that moment, not sitting staring at the actual chat screen for 5 hours. I only noticed about 5 minutes later that someone had finally responded and by that stage the agent had just closed the chat without even bothering to read what I had written above! I had exactly the same experience several times more but finally got hold of someone and was given a reference number 302517.

After a couple of weeks of waiting, I received an SMS to say that their reference number had been closed! It was closed without anyone ever getting back to me or fixing anything! Knowing that it was impossible to get a hold of anyone on the phone I went through the same process on the chat of waiting 4 or 5 hours at a time to try and have the luck of catching somebody on the chat at the exact time that they finally responded. Every time I did write the full problem into the chat in advance and every time the agent completely ignored it and just closed the chat if I wasn't sitting there at the exact moment. Eventually I finally got hold of a Support agent on the chat and all he did was tell me that he did not know how to fix a VOIP and I needed to call ***!! It then took me at least 10 further messages to convince him that this number never gets answered for me and I kept saying why can't he send them an email and get them to call me. He honestly could not be bothered to do this until I continually harassed him over the chat. (You can check the transcript to see just how little support this agent offered). At last he agreed to do it and gave me reference MWB***6.

I then waited a few more weeks until yesterday with absolutely no response from MWeb yet again. Yesterday I wasted 90 minutes hours waiting on *** after selecting 3 for VOIP support (being told constantly that I was number 1 in the queue!!!) until I had to give up and hang up because I was running out of the VOIP minutes allocated to my other phone ***0 (***). So I tried calling sales, hoping that I might get to speak to a human being. The sales lady then tried to help me by calling me back on my cell phone and then said she would put me through VOIP support, but of course all that happened is I went back into the same queue where I was "first in line" and that went on for another 30 minutes until the line dropped.

Today I tried again to contact Support via Sales (for existing customers) but after about 10 mins of being “first in line” the line just dropped. So I called again and waited almost 30 mins and then finally got through to a human being. So then I began to explain the problem yet again and to ask the lady to help me to actually get in contact with tech support by phoning them herself like the other lady had done the previous day. While I was still explaining this to her, the line went completely dead! Why? Because my VOIP line ***0 (*** added insult to injury - it had finally run out of its entire 150 minutes allocated for the month - all of it WASTED in trying to contact Mweb technical support!!! Of course this lady didn't think to call me back on my cell phone which she knew very well because that is how she had accessed to my account - appalling and uncaring service yet again from her.

I then had a brainwave: clearly, Mweb does not care at all about its existing customers enough to staff the existing customer sales upgrades line any more than they do the technical support lines, but maybe they do have staff allocated to hooking brand-new customers who will be completely unsuspecting about the terrible service they will get once they pay. This idea turned out to be correct! By pretending to be a new customer, I got through to a human being almost immediately (using my cellphone since all 150 VOIP minutes already wasted). Luckily, this lady turned out to be the best staff member you've actually got and she phoned me back on my cell phone and then put me in a queue to speak to technical support. After about another 15 minutes, a technical person answered the phone, but they were not a VOIP specialist so instead they logged a call back for me and I was surprised to discover that about 4 hours later somebody did actually phone me and sort out the problem with the non-working VOIP line.

So all in all, I have wasted nearly an entire day of my time plus HUGE frustration trying to get a simple Support with a VOIP set up. I have been charged for the entire month of VOIP service that did not work at all, plus I have paid for an entire month of VOIP service on the other phone only to be unable to use it at all because it has all been wasted on trying in vain to contact Mweb Support. By my reckoning, you owe me at least two months worth of VOIP service fees, as well as an apology for wasting so much of my time.

Here is what you need to do to improve your service:

1) Hire more people to work on the Tech Support phone lines and on the Chat system to reduce waiting times from 5 hours to something more acceptable like 5 minutes. (Do you even measure the wait times? Do you even care?)

2) Use a proper call queuing system that does not lie to people about being 1st in a queue but rather tells them the estimated waiting time so they can decide if they can afford to wait.

3) Setup the chat system so that its makes a sound when an agent finally answers - this would alert the customer that there is finally someone on the line. You cannot expect anyone to sit actually staring at the chat screen for 4 or 5 hours hoping to see an answer!!

4) Train your chat system staff to actually read what is in the chat above, especially in cases where the customer is no longer “live" at that very moment. Right now, they just abandon the chat without trying to do anything to help!! Because of this issue and the lack of a sound (3 above) it took me an average of 4 attempts to ever get any response from the chat and in each case the average wait time was about 4 hours!

5) Don't tell lies on the recorded messages on the phone. The VOIP support queue keeps saying that there are troubleshooting instructions etc on the website. This is totally untrue. All that is offered are the basic instructions for setting up a Yealink Phone. No instructions are given for any other models of VOIP phones. So you can try to work out how to do it using the Access Details section of your account, but if you get it wrong, there is no help at all. And the Access Details section is very misleading because it shows "Product Username: ***4 as Username to access VoIP platform”. But actually, this number is not used at all in the phone settings to get VOIP to work. Instead, you are supposed to put the phone number into every field except for the password field. If it were not for this misleading instruction, I would not have had a problem in the first place and would never have been through the torture of trying to get technical support from Mweb.

The agent who finally helped me said I could write all of the above info to *** which I did only to find that it comes back as un-deliverable!!

If there is anyone at Mweb who actually cares about customer service, then I would appreciate a detailed response to all of the points above and some real attempt at improving your awful service. If look here HelloPeter.com you will see that your service rating from 2,130 customers over the last 12 months averages 1 out of 5. For any normal corporate, this would be considered an absolute crisis!