Taxi Driver Online

Counting cost of line fault

8:50am Saturday 26th March 2011

A Silsden private hire company says it has lost thousands of pounds because of repeated failures to fix its faulty phone line.

Chris Clavin, who owns Airedale Private Hire, said the firm’s future was now under threat.

He said: “The amount we’ve lost has been astronomical, we’re at our wits end. We’d bought new vehicles and invested a lot of money, and British Telecom has just let us down."

“People can’t get through to us on both landlines and mobiles. I’ve got drivers sitting here not earning any money.”

A spokesman for BT said its engineers had been doing their best to identify the source of the fault.

She said: “We are very sorry to hear that Airedale Private Hire is still experiencing problems and will continue to work with the customer to try and resolve the issue.”

Mr Clavin said the problems surfaced in the middle of November and he first contacted BT at the end of that month.

“From November to maybe three weeks into December I was phoning BT every day,” he said.

“They say they’ve fixed the problem but in fact they still haven’t."

“They offered us £192 off our phone bill and six months of free line rental as a ‘gesture’, but we’ve already lost about £6,000. People who do want to get through to us on the phone later tell us they weren’t able to."

“We’ve been advertising heavily and have sent out 50,000 advertising cards. Things should be flying by now but instead business has dropped right off."

“The phone is staying silent for up to five hours at a time. If this goes on we’ll have to fold the business up.”

The BT spokesman said: “We sent more engineers on March 14 just to be sure that previous engineers had not missed anything. Once again the engineers could find nothing wrong with the line or at the exchange.

“We have suggested the problem may lie at another location. The only way we can investigate this further is for the customer to provide us with either locations or phone numbers of people who cannot get through.”

Source; http://www.keighleynews.co.uk/news/8927 ... ine_fault/

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How exactly are they supposed to do this when the customer can't get through to say that they can't get through.

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Grandad,

Semaphore?

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Pigeon post!!!

It worked during the war!!!

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Brummie Cabbie.

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Could it be no one likes them

call me a cynic but this sounds like a business thats failing looking for a scapegoat there are always problems I get told every day that our phones aren't working its usually either because the lines are engaged or the customer mis dialled if the fault was on their line surely the problem would have surfaced by now ?

Oh and putting 50000 cards through doors doesn't always produce results cause everyone is doing it customers asking for and taking cards gets repeat trade or sypathetic businesses pubs restaurants etc keeping a few cards by the till also works