TalkTalk: we're not just cheap and cheerful

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 2 Jun 2009 at 12:14

TalkTalk is attempting to shake-off its image as a "cheap and cheerful" broadband provider, claiming it's perfectly capable of handling high-end and business broadband users.

The Carphone Warehouse ISP was the pioneer of the "free broadband" market, and quickly became synonymous with customer service issues when it struggled to cope with the flood of new customers during its launch period.

Last month, Carphone Warehouse bought the Tiscali group, making the company the country's biggest domestic broadband provider overnight. The Tiscali group includes business-oriented ISPs such as Pipex, but Carphone Warehouse insists it will be able to cope with the demands of business customers when all the ISPs are rolled into the TalkTalk brand over the next couple of years.

"We have hundreds of thousands of customers who are heavy or business users," Richard Walker, director of customer experience at TalkTalk, told PC Pro. "We still have young, very technical, very savvy customers who are still very happy with TalkTalk."

Walker claims the company has vastly improved its customers services since those troubled first few months, and is continuing to retrain customer support staff in its call centres in India, South Africa and the UK.

"There's been a lot of focus on training and getting agents authorised to help customers on their first call, rather than giving them four, five, six hoops to jump through," he said.

The company is also planning to consolidate its 14 worldwide call centres into just a handful of larger sites to make staff training easier.

Swallowing Tiscali?

The integration of Tiscali's 1.8 million customers will inevitably raise fears that TalkTalk will once again struggle to cope with a rapid expansion. TalkTalk plans to bring the various different ISPs under the one umbrella and migrate them all to a single billing platform within the next two years.

Walker claims the ISP is much better prepared for the expansion now than it was when the company first entered the broadband market. "We've just gone through a trial migration of 85,000 customers in one weekend. It was as seamless a migration as you could have," he claimed.

However, he admits the company hasn't even started planning in detail how it will migrate the Tiscali ISPs - and their nine different customer support centres - into TalkTalk.

"In terms of direct contact with [Tiscali] personnel, you can't do any of that yet," Walker said, explaining that the companies were still waiting for the legal formalities of the takeover to be completed. Walker says the company already has experience of merging different ISPs following its acquisition of AOL. "Tiscali is a more fragmented scenario," he added.