After writing a blog about Northern Rail and their appalling customer service, I thought that I should write about the opposite: Telcom, my internet service provider (ISP), is probably the best example of fantastic customer service, so this post will be about them.
When I moved to Manchester, I realised that I couldn’t take my Virgin Media fibre contract with me, as Virgin doesn’t cover this area. As such, I decided to switch to Sky Broadband (not much of a choice, as there was no alternative). Sky offered “super-fast” ADSL that would take a day to download the latest update for ARK – in theory. In reality, it took three days, since the connection would drop every time someone else in the building used the lift. No, really; this is a genuine problem.
It took me over a month of constant calls with Sky, and going through this stupid “turn it off and turn it back on again” procedure with their customer service (who also kept referring to Megabits as Megabytes), before they actually sent around an engineer who confirmed that poor wiring in the lift shaft was the problem.
One day, I noticed a Telcom Velocity poster in the hallway of our apartment block. I wrote their website address down, did some research, and eventually signed up for a contract with them. Needless to say, I terminated my Sky contract.
Telcom turned out to be even better than Virgin Media. I won’t even compare it to Sky’s broadband. We get a stable 150 Mbps for download and upload; while Virgin caps your upload speed to about 7Mbps. Telcom’s routers are also super fancy, it’s a Tp-Link Archer C5 with USB ports and excellent coverage that is all included in your monthly bill (with Virgin, I had to pay extra for Superhub 3.0).
The router manages to handle two hard drives, and a Smart bulb hub on top of many other devices that connect via WiFi. I even run an ARK server on this router, with no issues for me or for other players!
Another great thing about Telcom? Their customer service.
When I joined Telcom, they ran a competition on Twitter, asking people to tweet them a photo of black cabs with Telcom promotional vinyl on them. I participated and got this, delivered personally by a member of their own staff to my door:
In November last year, Manchester was hit by some serious storms and floods. On the 17th of November, we had lights flickering and the Internet went down for approximately 30 minutes. I didn’t even consider complaining; the power outage was quite understandable, and their service had always been exceptional anyway. But, as it turns out, I didn’t even need to complain, as I received this email the next day:
Telcom is a prime example of how a company that cares about its customers should be run. I’m looking to buy a house next year, and I dread the thought that I might need to switch to another provider as Telcom currently covers only a few areas around Manchester.
PS. I wasn’t paid to write this review 😛