Peter Reynolds

In this competitive internet world, what happens when your ISP (and your long-established email address) gets taken over or merged into another organisation?

In a market where there are no prizes for customer service at all, what can you expect from a provider who already has a reputation as the blackest of the black sheep?

When Tiscali took over Homechoice about a year ago, the Homechoice website continued up until early this month. Last year there was a downtime of far too many days on the Homechoice POP servers and all sorts of problems with trying to administer email accounts. There was no explanation at all, let alone any apology.

Early this month everything went down again for several days. When the POP server came back up the website had disappeared leaving just a re-direct to the Tiscali homepage.

Then last week everything stopped again. Emails to Homechoice support were returned as undeliverable and those to Tiscali went unanswered. I went to Tiscali’s PR agency and then direct to the Tiscali’s Chief of PR and my own email address started working again.

I discovered today that Tiscali has dumped Homechoice. Apparently “legacy” Homechoice email addresses have been ported over to Tiscali’s own servers but it’s quite clear that there will be noi more support for creating or deleting email accounts or changing passwords.

The Tiscali insider I spoke to said himself “You’d think they could have sent out a letter or an email or something”.

Unfortunately, of course, this is just par for the course for this industry and Tiscali’s reputation is such that it seems to set the standards for abysmal and irresponsible customer service.

No explanation. No communication. No apology.