Watchdog team investigates Bulldog

[Scoobs]

Bulldog Broadband

6th September 2005

Bulldog was bought by Cable and Wireless last year and set out to make itself top dog in the communications industry. Offering super-fast internet connection and cheap phone lines, it pumped millions into its ad campaign. People signed up in their thousands but the service didn’t turn out to be quite what was promised. Watchdog has received 500 complaints about Bulldog in the last year alone.

So what's happened? A problem occurs at the point at which the line is disconnected from BT and Bulldog takes control of it. Bulldog admit that as many as 20,000 people have signed on but are still awaiting connection and blame BT for not doing their job correctly. In the meantime, customers are left with no phone line or internet connection at all.

Bulldog customer Thea Newcomb told us, "When I can't get online, it's like having an office you're locked out of. You can't do your day to day tasks, you can't help people, you can’t correspond, you can’t respond to emails, you can’t do your banking, you can’t do anything."

But the biggest complaint people have is with the poor level of customer service on offer, and how difficult it is to get through to anyone if you need to get a problem fixed.

An insider who'd worked at Bulldog for months told Watchdog Bulldog's management knew exactly what they were putting their customers through. "If you were passionate about Customer Service then you wouldn't sign up a single customer until you were confident you could provide them with an adequate level of service. But we are still signing people up today, we are still advertising. We can't set people up quickly enough. We have got problems with the people that have been set up but we are carrying on regardless."

Bulldog's chief commercial officer Andrew Morley admits Bulldog has had significant issues over the summer. He says the company was trying to open up the market against BT and offer a real alternative. He reveals Bulldog only had 50 call centre advisers in the summer but has now increased that number to 250. The company has also suspended its marketing activity and pledges it will get better.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/watchdog/report...050906_1.shtml

[seaviewuk]

The company has also suspended its marketing activity

People over on ADSLGUIDE are saying that they have seen people today handing out Bulldog leaflets in shopping centres throughout the UK.

[silver]

is poor to keep pushing the service while still having problems with their call centers

Sil