Brampton Factor: What's so great about one telecoms provider?

Telecoms companies may like the idea of providing customers with multiple services - fixed-line, mobile, broadband and data. But, asks Martin Brampton, is this really what customers want?

The season of goodwill seems to have passed by call centres. Maybe that is not surprising, with so many of them located in a distant continent. Or perhaps the whole philosophy of call centres is alien to the idea of goodwill to all men (and presumably women). Ho hum. It all contributes to my policy of digital divergence.

It was probably a mistake from the outset but I called BT. The idea seemed a logical solution to another modern frustration. My wife was having difficulty opening a savings account because the bank asked her to produce a utility bill. Why exactly you have to be a consumer of utilities in order to have a savings account is a mystery, and I have never seen any plausible account of the benefits supposedly accruing from all these pernickety rules.

As it happens, my wife has been paying all the telephone bills for some years but her name is not on the bill. So, after the usual tedious combination of being told about the recording of the conversation, a whole series of largely unhelpful menu options and a lengthy period of waiting, I asked if we could have a different name on the bills. This apparently simple request could not be so easily granted.

First of all, I had to authenticate myself. Apparently it is not enough to be sitting in your home and calling BT using the telephone line that is the subject of the query. Indeed, the BT system had lost the source of my call in the transition across continents - useful information you might have thought. To authenticate myself, I had to produce my BT account number or tell the call centre operator what telephone numbers were most frequently called.

Well, I failed abysmally on both tests. Since my wife pays all the telephone bills, she keeps them somewhere in her filing system and I never see them or the relevant account number. And of all the family, I am probably the least heavy user of the telephone. How would I know what numbers are most frequently called? And as if it somehow settled the matter, the operator informed me that BT could only change the bills to my wife's name if it first carried out a credit check on her.

It cut no ice to point out that if my wife's credit was not up to scratch, the telephone bills would not have been paid, since I had not paid one for years. So the only result of my effort was 15 minutes of wasted time and frustration. I suppose it was naïve to expect anything else.

This all happened around the time our broadband connection was under review. For a long time it has been with PlusNet. Earlier this year, perhaps unwisely, I was seduced by the idea of combining telephone service with broadband service and paying a single amount to one provider to cover both. Unfortunately the discussion with PlusNet to put this into effect was so protracted and confused that I eventually abandoned it.

Then came the news that PlusNet was to be purchased by BT. So if I had signed up for the telephone service with PlusNet, I would simply have finished up buying everything from BT. Trying to get the name on our BT bills changed was a sharp reminder of why I would prefer not to buy everything from BT.

Oddly I was still attracted by the thought of combining broadband and telephone services. So the next job was to scout around the internet looking to see who was the best provider, with particular reference to customer service. It quickly became obvious that the combined providers were actually worse than BT. That was the end of my flirtation with integration.

(It is ironic that the UK chief executive of Orange should be pressing the idea that customers want "the convenience of billing and customer service" from a single provider. This at a time when Orange and TalkTalk are rivals in plumbing the depths of customer service for their combined phone and broadband packages).

The move of our broadband provider is now complete, the choice based more on service quality than price. That leaves me looking around for an alternative to BT for telephone service. Sadly most of the contenders seem unable to reach even the low level of service offered by BT. Although I would like to spur competition, there is a limit to the sacrifices I am willing to make in that cause. And I am forced to recognise that BT is still the wholesale provider for the services I am buying. For most people, there is no alternative at that level.

In other digital areas, divergence seems plainly the best policy. For example, I run a number of internet domains, either for myself or other people. The policy that I am happiest with is to handle domain registration using a single company but never to use that company for any other service, especially hosting. Some of the lowest cost registration services are highly automated and give complete control to the user. Changing hosting providers is easy.

And I use more than one hosting provider because none has the best combination of price, technology and service. Unfortunately they are currently US providers, as UK suppliers seem unable to compete effectively in this area, at least for the technology that I need. Flexibility in choosing from a range of services is the best weapon at our disposal in many cases.

This kind of approach seems the only practical response to a situation where the biggest problem faced by consumers is abysmal customer service. The nearest thing to a solution is to be geared up to deal with a variety of providers and to be prepared to switch when things go wrong - albeit making careful enquiries about whether there is any hope of improvement from the new supplier. Presumably, one of these days, someone will realise there is competitive advantage in providing good service.

It may be the case that technical changes are causing certain kinds of convergence. But that is no reason for us to be the dumb recipients of poor quality services. We can, instead, look for ways to segment markets so as to maintain a balance between trends for convergence and moves that encourage divergence. Long live diversity!