Mr Didier Bellens
Chief Executive Officer and President
Belgacom
Boulevard du Roi Albert II, 27
B-1030 Brussels

(Faxed from a neighbouring office)

30 November 2009

Dear Mr Bellens,

I am writing once again (ref my previous letter to you of 26 March) because I am very dissatisfied with Belgacom’s customer service. Your staff have made three serious mistakes in dealing with my problems in the last week, and I still have no office telephone or fax connection.

I called your customer service to report that my line was not working on Wednesday 25 November. In fact, I thought I might have been disconnected due to the late payment of a bill which I paid on 23 November. Your colleague, however, assured me that my payments were in order and that there was a technical fault, which she said would be fixed within the day.

I called again on Friday 27 November to find out what was happening, as the line had still not been fixed two days later. It turned out that in fact your colleague had not even reported the fault on 25 November so Belgacom had taken no action to resolve my problem.

The person I spoke to on 27 November told me that he had arranged for 1) calls to my fixed line to be forwarded to my mobile phone, and 2) that a technician would come to fix the problem on Monday 30 November between 0800 and 1200. In fact, neither of these promises was kept. No action was taken by your staff to fulfil their commitment to forward calls to my mobile number; I cannot do it via your website (or at least I cannot see how I can do it myself).

This morning, expecting your technician at any time between 0800 and 1200, at very considerable inconvenience, my colleague and I waited for him in my office. I had to leave to attend an important meeting at 1130; apparently your technician arrived at 1207, in other words outside the time that had been arranged. The security guard in my office building authorised your technician to go to my office on the first floor, where apparently he was unable to find my colleague, who was sitting in the office waiting for him with the door open, as she had been for some hours.

I have been given another appointment with one of your technicians for Wednesday morning, 2 December. I am very worried, though, because the confirmation message I got for the appointment references a completely different telephone number. I hope that the technician will come to the right address, at the time that has been agreed.

To recapitulate, I was given three important promises by your staff in the last five days, all three of which were broken. I would also add that I have experienced the following additional problems in dealing with Belgacom over this issue:

• It is completely unclear from your website what number should be called in case of problems.
• I have never had less than a 20-minute wait (sometimes more than an hour) to speak to your staff
• Belgacom staff often do not have access to the information needed to sort out my problems.

I expect, Mr Bellens, that you will refund a substantial part of my monthly bill from Belgacom this month, since I have received no service from you for over a week. And I do not know who is going to pay for my lost time and energy in sorting out the mess.

Sincerely,

Once again, they are bloody lucky that their only competitor in the Brussels region, Tele2, is even worse (difficult thought that may be to imagine).