JazzHell
March 7, 2006Update: a reader points me to this post which cites an article claiming that 40% of Jazztel’s claimed customer base have not had their service activated. I consider it unethical (and surely unprofitable) for this company to continue to advertise for new customers when it can’t even activate 40% of the ones it already has.
Jeff Jarvis in the US had his DellHell; in Spain there is JazzHell.
Julio Alonso is tired of Jazztel’s crap service, and so am I.
I signed up for the fancy 20 meg service *4 months ago* and never got to use it once. Repeated calls to customer service were pure torture: long wait times and endless transfers between departments only to be told that frankly they themselves had no idea what the status of the account was or when it might be activated.
Jazztel loves to blame Telefonica for obstructing their ability to activate lines; this may be totally true, partially true, or just a scapegoat for incompetence. I don’t know, but it’s hard to have any sympathy for Jazztel when I see their advertising plastered *everywhere* in major newspapers here trying to sign up new accounts, when I’m impatiently still waiting for mine to be activated.
So today (funny enough, before even reading Julio’s post), decided to just give up and quit. Even this was pure torture, as some call center person endlessly reads from a script designed to ’save’ your account….don’t quit, we’ll give you dialup for free…we’ll give you a discount…we’ll file a special priority ticket for your account….and so on. The final indignity: they put you on hold for 10 minutes, then come back and ask, “are you sure you still want to quit?”, as if counting on me to give up and hang up before finishing.
March 8, 2006 at 12:29 am
i took jazztel on ‘blind’ when i moved here 7 months ago. apart from initial delays getting the USB box replaced with a router i cant recall a second’s trouble. there have been two small outages both of which have been solved by customer service in a friendly and efficient manner despite by crap spanish. i get 6mb (or is it 20? not sure i care that much) and free landline calls for E30 a month. not bad…
one swallow doesnt make a summer, as we like to say here in the zona alta, but its worth hearing another side of the story.
March 8, 2006 at 4:28 am
Sounds like verizon here in the states. I can’t stand that company. I had to install a phone line for work purposes and I had a very similar situation with Verizon postponing the installation 4 times then coming out, doing nothing and leaving. 2 times that happened before I finally called and screamed at 3 different people only to find out that indeed the line was miraculously installed despite the technician telling me he wouldn’t be able to. ugh.
Anyway, I feel your pain.
March 8, 2006 at 11:52 am
Richard, it true there must be many happy customers like yourself; and of course, the happy ones aren’t making as much noise as the unhappy ones….but it doesn’t excuse the fact that this company is making some serious mistakes. For a startup attacker hoping to steal market share, I think these may prove to be fatal ones.
March 8, 2006 at 4:22 pm
This sounds very much like the typical “killed by early success” trap many start-up and challengers face:
A. an agressive marketing strategy (very attractive offer, mass communication,…
B. not backed-up by scalable back-end operational capabilities to handle the ramp-up in sales
A+B leads to bad (and in the best case irregular) service level to new customers (in such crucial things as activating your ew customers), creating a brand “badwill” of being a lousy company.
Sometimes a wonderful strategy to flood the market with your product goes down the drain because of poor implementation…
March 16, 2006 at 10:05 am
We have Jazztel Empresas in the office and I have had more outages on our internet line than California during Gray Davis. We usually have an outage on the internet line once a month and as usual it is blamed on telefonica or better yet an “incidencia general”. In december we had out internet service down for 5 days in the office and their excuse was telefonica’s caudal had gone out due to a storm!!!
Our line is a 2MB line and we are supposedly guaranteed 100% - we have never had more than 10%…and we pay business rates. I feel bad for residential users it must be even worse!
The company is a disaster and even the customer service who we know well now - seem to sigh at how terrible the service is when you speak to them. Instead of spending on advertsiing they should improve service levels.
Since our last outage we made a decision to move to Alpi and are in the process of doing so…it still took them 3 months to start the process, saying they lost the ocntract…help us god!
Anyway just thought I’d rant.
December 24, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Jazz Hell just about sums it up. I told Jazztel that I wanted to end my contract in June 2006. The staffer checked my data on her computer and confirmed that the contract had been terminated. Even so, I waited a couple of months before instructing the bank to stop further payments. Since then, Jazztel has blithely ignored my protests and certified correspondence. Now it is resorting to the threat of credit blacklisting. A company that employs such vile practices should simply not be allowed to do business in Spain or anywhere else.