I’m sorry, but I guess Pipex support staff cannot count. It is the only explanation I can see for their repeated insistence that I provide information that is already present in the support thread.

Over the weekend I pointed out that the threads do indeed contain a full name, date of birth and an email address – three of the things on the list they keep sending me. But still all they can do is ask for the information again, and again, and again. Even more ironic is that none of this is needed for a simple report of a broken link on their web site. Here’s the latest, from yet another support person:

Dear Mr. Gordon,

Thank you for your email, the contents of which have been noted.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience which may have been caused as a result of the issue which you are experiencing.

I must reiterate as my colleagues have previously informed you that in order to address your
query you must send three of the pieces of information for data protection. We need to receive this information in each email thread to ensure the validity of the customer, and adhere to Data Protection Laws. Once we receive this information we will be happy to assist you. The information we require is as follows:

Your Customer account number

Your full name

Your date of birth

Your address including postal code

Your contact telephone number or email address

Finally if you wish to contact our customer care number when abroad the number is 020 3302 8404.

I realise this may not be a satisfactory response at this time, but I am confident that this matter will be resolved soon. Pipex does take these issues seriously, and it is always our intention to bring the concerns of our customers to a satisfactory conclusion.

We thank you for your patience and assistance in this matter.

Kind regards,
Emer O Grady

Pipex Customer Relations

Our Customer Care Department is available on 0871 663 3300. Calls are charged at 5p/min from a Pipex line or at 10p/min from a BT line. Calls from mobiles and other providers may vary. Lines are open 8am-9pm Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm on Saturdays and 9am-6pm on Sundays.

I haven’t even published the thread about the broken customer survey, but that too is getting the same questions, time and time again, no matter how often I point out that they have the three items they’re asking for already.

While researching how to contact Pipex by telephone from here in the US, I came across a very familiar tale in two parts: Dean Marshall, over at Dean Marshall Consultancy in the UK, describes the problems he had dealing with Pipex at the end of last year:

• Part 1: Are Pipex Fraudulent Criminals?
• Part 2: I Believe Pipex Internet Limited Are Guilty of Fraud

Wow! Same experience of finding that you’re suddenly on a contract term. Same problem of not being able to get any management response, nor for that matter even getting a response from the same person who last responded, in email or otherwise. And worse, repeated overbilling and failure to keep promises to refund money taken in error.

I concur with Dean that these procedures were not set up to ensure smooth operations. They were set up to make it as difficult as possible for a customer to get any form of resolution, and especially to cancel the service. Additionally, I believe that they purposely extend phone calls to collect additional fees from their premium numbers and that they collect unnecessary personal information for every request, presumably with the intent of selling it (as their so-called “privacy policy” allows).

Pipex customers who are stuck with them might be interested to know about a site called Say No to 0870 where you can search for alternative numbers to the premium rate ones Pipex publishes. Here’s the numbers I found (untried as yet, but I will update if I ever need to use them):

Customer services (0871 222 5550): 020 3302 8401 / 020 33028402 / 0161 4515100
Customer services (0871 663 3300): 020 3302 8403 / 020 33028404 / 020 33028454

Check out the rest by simply searching for Pipex at the Say No to 0870 site.

Last week, while reviewing all the ridiculous responses that Pipex has sent me in response to me trying to help them by reporting a broken link / page not found / 404 error on their web site, I noticed that the thread where they kept asking for three items of personal information, actually had three of the items already on it:

• Full name – completed when I submitted the information through their web form;
• Date of birth – also added via the web form since it cannot be submitted without it;
• Email address – they keep sending me email responses, and accepting my replies via email.

So, I sent them a note on the thread asking why three of the items they asked for were not enough. Here’s the reply:

Dear Mr. Gordon,

Thank you for your email dated the 4th September 2009, the contents of which have been noted.

Please be advised that the information requested for security purposes must be contained in the thread of this email. We cannot accept information contained in a totally separate email. Please forward the information requested, so that we can address this matter.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require any further assistance.

Kind regards,

Suzanne Kelly
Pipex Customer Relations

Our Customer Care Department is available on 0871 663 3300. Calls are charged at 5p/min from a Pipex line or at 10p/min from a BT line. Calls from mobiles and other providers may vary. Lines are open 8am-9pm Monday to Friday, 8am-5pm on Saturdays and 9am-6pm on Sundays.

So, in addition to still being ridiculous enough to keep asking for information that is irrelevant to the topic of the post (my identity still does not change the fact that the link in their FAQ is broken), it appears that they cannot count?

Perhaps my biggest problem with Pipex customer service has been this insistence that they have my personal information attached to every question I ask, or every problem I report, even when the communication has nothing to do with my account.

Here’s the latest email I have received from them about this:

Dear Mr. Gordon,

Thank you for your email, the contents of which have been noted. Firstly, I apologise for any inconvenience caused to you by the issues you have being experiencing.

I attempted to contact you by telephone earlier today but, unfortunately, there was no response.

I am glad to note that your connectivity issues are now resolved.

I apologise if you are unhappy with the level of customer service you have received; it is never our intention to cause frustration. Please note that, as per Data Protection procedures, each email thread must be Data Protection compliant.

We would have no reason not to deal with your issue. Your personal details are requested for no other reason that to verify that you are the account holder.
You can find our complaints procedure at the following link: http://www.pipexuk.com/terms/terms.html.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Ronan Moyles
Pipex Customer Relations

Our Customer Care Department is available on 0871 663 3300. Calls are charged at 5p/min from a Pipex line or at 10p/min from a BT line. Calls from mobiles and other providers may vary. Lines are open 8am-9pm Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm on Saturdays and 9am-6pm on Sundays.

The most interesting line in there is the statement that “as per Data Protection procedures, each email thread must be Data Protection compliant.” What does that mean exactly?

There are basically two types of reports that could arrive at an ISP’s help desk:

• Those that pertain to the reporting user’s account;
• Those that are general reports about the service, not related to a specific account.

When handling the former, I totally agree that being able to verify that the user reporting the issue or requesting a change is in fact the owner of the account is essential. For the second type of report though, it is irrelevant since there is no change to the user’s account information, or even a need to look at it. There is no need to require personal information from a user who is asking a general question (e.g. “Are there any service outages at the moment?”) or reporting a problem, such as a broken link on the company’s website.

Verifying Users

Going to back to a case where my account might need to be accessed, or modified, let’s look at how Pipex chooses to validate that I am indeed the owner of the account: they ask for three of the following:

• My name
• My address
• My date of birth
• My phone number or email address
• My customer account number

And they believe this is secure? All but the last of those are basically public data these days.

Ironically, Pipex has a more secure option available to them since they issue user names and passwords for accessing their service. In fact, when submitting these support questions through their web portal, I was already signed in to that account. But still I am asked for more information. Even though the tickets I file are automatically associated with my account.

Privacy Policy

As is often the case, the company’s privacy policy shows a more likely reason why they are so keen to collect this data: they sell it, and not just in aggregated form either: “This information may be disclosed to other Pipex group companies and carefully selected third parties.”

But wait, if Pipex is happy to share my name, address, telephone number, email address and date of birth with carefully selected companies (i.e. those that pay enough), surely that means that they’re already well aware that this information has little, if any, value as a way to validate that I am who I say I am. Given their current privacy policy, they’re essentially sharing the keys to my account with these other companies. Great! Wonder if they share the user names and passwords too?

Security or Value

Of course, asking me for that extra personal data makes the information they sell much more valuable. So, is the real motivation for asking just to improve the value of the data that they sell? Perhaps.

Oddly enough, they’ve been quite happy to answer my questions and update my account even when I use a fake d.o.b., so it seem unlikely that they’re checking these values against my account.

So, after yesterday’s ridiculous request for personal information before they could even acknowledge a broken link on their own web site, I sent them the detailed information about the broken link and asked them to forward it to their web team.

This morning I get another response asking for personal information. Only now it is asking for more information than the previous request:

Dear Mr. Gordon,

Thank you for your correspondence, the contents of which have been noted.

In accordance with Data Protection laws we require three of the following pieces of information to allow us to access your account and advise you on your query:

– Your Customer account number

– Your full name

– Your date of birth

– Your address including postal code

– Your contact telephone number or email address

Unfortunately, your original correspondence does not contain three of the above pieces of information. Therefore we need you to send them through to us along with a copy of your original correspondence. Please note that we will be unable to act upon your enquiry until we are in receipt of this required information.

Once we have these details a member of our Customer Relations Team will endeavour to respond to you within 48 hours. Should we fail to respond to you within this timeframe we would appreciate your continued patience. Rest assured that we will be in contact with you as soon as we can. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind regards,
Michele Hatter
Pipex Customer Relations

Our Customer Care Department is available on 0871 663 3300. Calls are charged at 5p/min from a Pipex line or at 10p/min from a BT line. Calls from mobiles and other providers may vary. Lines are open 8am-9pm Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm on Saturdays and 9am-6pm on Sundays.

I am going to try to escalate this to Pipex and/or Tiscali management now. It has reached the point of the ridiculous that when somebody reports a simple broken link on their website they feel the need to collect unnecessary personal information about the person making the report.

Since I know how annoying it is to have broken links on a site and nobody tell you about them, I also filed a support ticket with Pipex yesterday for the page not found error when trying to access their network status page from their number 1 most common question: “Are there any service issues?”

The response I received today was this:

Dear Mr. Gordon,

Thank you for your email dated the 1st of September 2009, the contents of which have been noted.

Due to data protection I am unable to act upon your account with the details provided. We would require that you provide us with three of the following details.

– Your Customer account number

– Your full name

– Your address and your postal code

– Your contact telephone number or email address

As they appear on the account

Unfortunately, your original correspondence does not contain three of the above pieces of information. Please note that we will be unable to act upon your enquiry until we are in receipt of this required information.

Once we have these details a member of our Customer Relations Team will endeavour to respond. Rest assured that we will be in contact with you as soon as we can. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

If you are unable to confirm the above information, or you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Care Team on the number below.

Kind regards,

Paul Branley
Pipex Customer Relations

Pipex Communications UK Limited, a Tiscali UK company, 20 Broadwick Street, London W1F 8HT. For Customer Service queries, please call 0871 663 3300. Calls are charged at 5p per minute from a Pipex line or 10p per minute from a BT line. Calls from mobiles and other providers may vary. Lines are open 8am-9pm 7 days a week.

So, apparently they need my address in order to fix a broken link on their site. No wonder the portal is so broken if it is this hard to try to help them out with information about minor problems in their site. Everybody has broken links (especially in FAQ text which tends to be overlooked when site updates happen). Smart companies thank people for the reports and get them fixed. Pipex chooses to make it difficult for customers to talk to them, even when the benefit is all theirs.

Oh, and I should point out that my “email” was in fact not an email at all, but the result of me filling in the web form on their support portal where I had to sign in not once, but twice (single sign on is also beyond Pipex’s web team it seems). Since I was signed in to my account, why do I need to provide all those extra details anyway – the ticket is attached to my account. And I know that for sure since I can log in again and pull up a list of all my tickets.

History
Although I live in the US, I still maintain DSL service at an address in the UK. That service is provided by Pipex, and has been for a very long time. Initially, while I was still living in the UK in the mid-90s, I signed up for dial up internet from the BBC. That service was short-lived, but all the BBC Internet users were migrated to Pipex dial-up accounts. And for a long time, even after I left the UK, that was the service that I had. A few years back, we migrated again to DSL. That was the first indication that Pipex was not managed by people who knew much about running an ISP, perhaps not anything at all.

Contract
Then, about a year ago, we were changed onto a new plan that was meant to be faster. Only the house is too far from the CO, so it isn’t faster. Then it failed every day for weeks, and all they would do is point at BT and all BT would do is point back at Pipex. So, I called and tried to cancel the service. Sorry, can’t do that because now I’m on a contract. Huh? I’ve had the service for 15+ years, what’s this about a contract?

Seems that new plan was basically a scam to get people to agree to new contracts with one year terms. So, despite being a customer for 15+ years, they think they need to get a contract in place to keep me there. What does this say about the quality of service? Yes, that it is likely to be so bad I’d want to leave. And sure enough they’re matching up to that expectation. Lock people into contracts, and then fail to provide service. I have three words for that: Breach of Contract.

Support
In addition to contracts to lock people in to their service, they also decided that they could turn support into a profit centre as well by using a premium number. With the poor quality of their internet service, and the amount of time they keep you on hold, this might make more than the subscriptions! But here’s the rub for me: I live in the US, so I can’t call that number (it doesn’t work for international callers since they can’t get the money from me). Every time I send something in by email, I get told to call. When I ask for an international number to call, I’m told they don’t have one.

This became comical when I had to update the expiration date on the credit card I use to pay them. In the end I pointed out that unless they found a way to handle the update vie email, gave me a number I could call from outside the UK or called me, then I was going to let the card bounce and stop paying them. The card info was updated the next day.

Support Portal
And then we get to the latest incident. The service is off once again. So I check their service status online in the fancy looking new portal they created. Last problem showing there was in late 2008 – almost a year ago. So, the status application doesn’t work then because I don’t know any ISP that manages to have no issues to report for an entire year; I’d be surprised if Pipex managed a week. Perhaps there were too many issues and it overwhelmed the app!

Next step: file a support request using their online form. I fill in the form (well, most of it – more on that below), and I get back one of those annoying auto-generated responses pages that never actually help solve the problem. In this case though, as a further demonstration of just how poor Pipex has become, there were no suggestions. Just the text telling me to check them, and the button to submit the question if the totally absent suggestions didn’t help me. FAIL!

We’ll see if they respond to the question with anything other than ‘call our premium support number.’ Perhaps when I submit the second one asking them for the exact date when the contract term is up they’ll get the message.

Just for fun, I did some digging around on their site and found that the top question in the support area is “Are there any service issues?” Guess that tells us about their reliability record. The answer is even better:

“To see if there are any problems with the Pipex Service, please click on this link.”

I clicked it, and the response was:

Not Found

The requested URL /service-status/ was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.8 (FreeBSD) PHP/5.2.5 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.7e-p1 Server at www.mypipex.net Port 443

So, yes, clearly there are problems – even the status page is broken.

Data Protection
This one really bugs me. In all their correspondence now, email, phone and forms, they’ve started insisting on collecting my date of birth. I’m sorry, but that’s really irrelevant for providing me with internet service. They claim that they need this personal information from me in order to comply with the data protection laws in the UK. Bollocks. Those laws were meant to do the opposite of that and prevent companies keeping personal data that they didn’t need. My date of birth is not needed to provide internet service, and it is not needed to collect payment via my credit card. I know this because I’ve never given it to them. Now I give them a fake d.o.b. (one that I use for any other sites that ask for it, but don’t need it – call it my unofficial d.o.b.).

Either Pipex is totally clueless, or they’re trying to collect additional personal data from their customers and using the DPA as an excuse. Not sure which is most likely, but for now I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they’re just clueless. They sure as heck don’t know how to run an ISP.