It's been nearly three months since I cancelled my Orange contract and switched to O2. Making phone calls has stopped being such a cause of frustration. Orange weren't going to make it that easy however and have attacked from the direction of the broadband service I had with my old contract. They've sent me a letter requesting that the wireless router they supplied be returned to them otherwise:

"... we will have to charge you £100 to cover the cost of your Livebox (as it's only on loan to you) and that's something neither of us wants to happen."

I'm not sure I fully believe them. That is, I'm not sure I believe they don't want to charge me £100. Although the fact the box is rented to you is mentioned in the terms and conditions it certainly wasn't mentioned when I cancelled the service. It's also taken them a suspiciously long time to request the box be returned to them. What do they do with these returned routers? Are they recycled? Sent out to new customers? They don't seem to care too much about the state it arrives back in as they've only supplied a flimsy pre-addressed plastic bag. And doesn't £100 seem a little bit steep for a wireless router? Fortunately I hadn't thrown it out so can get this back to them. Unfortunately I received a brand new package from Orange today. It contained a 'home broadband starter kit' and a letter welcoming me to their service. It seems incompetence never has a day off at Orange. The fact they've lost thousands of customers since the start of the year comes as no surprise.

Update: The reason I blog about these little frustrations rather than write to Orange customer services is that I don't believe my cause or the cause of any other customer will be helped by a standard letter of apology from them. These kind of interactions allow a company to treat its customers on a one-to-one basis and gives them grounds to pretend that the cause of the complaint is a one-off that never ordinarily happens. Writing about such incidents and posting them on the web, be it on blogs, review sites or forums provides a searchable and, to all intents and purposes, a permanent record of what has occurred. As more people use the web to find out if people recommend a product, service or company then it is a huge help if you can see that there is a lot of positive feedback or a lot of complaints about the thing you're about to spend your money on. If the weight of negative opinion causes the subject of those comments to listen and change the way they do business then it can only be a good thing.

Disclaimer: Part of my job involves looking at what people are saying about brands online as well as more general topics.