I got a call from an nPower Business salesman recently, offering to switch to their electricity supply, as I work from home!

I hesitated because they were quoting a price with a standing charge, which I haven’t been paying for a couple of years. However, the salesman told me he would credit my account with £100, which would cover most of the charge for the year. As a result I signed up!

The next call I got was another salesman, saying the direct debit details had been rejected; this might be because the original salesman had written them down wrong! I corrected the details but then got a bill for the first months supply, addressed to the wrong town & postcode /

Despite twice going to their online account management system & asking them to correct the details, it took a direct e-mail to actually get the address corrected & confirmation that a direct debit had been set up at last.

The reason for this blog post & warning, is that I am now told that I was supposed to receive a £100 holiday voucher, rather than money credited to my account! It seems that the nPower Business salesmen will say anything to get a sale, even things that aren’t necessarily true, in traditional dodgy salesman style!

NOTE! I am now told that this is a “payment holiday voucher” for £100, which I can cash in during my years contract. It’s better, but what a strange way of going about it ????

Here is a warning to anyone considering joining Tiscali, hoping to take advantage of their low priced Broadband/Phone/TV packages!

I was approached a few years ago by a Tiscali Network Business Associate, with a view to becoming an Independent Business Associate myself . This was my first dally into affiliate marketing really & obviously, it was advisable to sign up to Tiscali myself; how do you promote a product if you don’t use it yourself?!

Tiscali seem to offer very good value, they are usually the cheapest deal on the market, but are they really?

I was originally on the Broadband package, but when Tiscali bought Homechoice, they offered me a free trial of the new, on demand, iptv system. This is when the mess started!!!!

The digital tv service itself is ok; the signal is compressed & really needs a 4Mb line to get a decent picture, without the occasional break up & stuttering I was getting on my 2Mb line to start with. The on-demand & catch up TV elements are good – a bit like iPlayer but for more channels & because it was free, it was great having the music & film channels too.

The problems with Tiscali are always when something goes wrong however; it seems very difficult to either get the right department, for the problem, or anyone to admit they know what is going on. Because the digital tv was really Homechoice, the staff that were working for Tiscali were ex Homechoice & I think the two factions weren’t connected properly, using entirely different systems to deal with customers. I was often told, sorry but we’re Homechoice & you need to speak to Tiscali.

Eventually, the free trial ended & I had to pay for the service…..this was when the REAL problems started!!!!

On the TV/Broadband/Talk bundle & received a letter from you in January 2008, which offered me a FREE broadband speed upgrade, or an upgrade to one of the new FREE line rental packages. I chose the free line rental & waited for this to become active on my line. However, I subsequently paid two quarterly bills to BT for line rental & decided to query what had happened to the upgrade.

I was told that I had to sign up to a new package online, which wasn’t what I had been offered, but I tried anyway. However, their system kept saying that the package couldn’t be upgraded, even though I tried repeatedly over a period of a few weeks to change it. When I raised the issue with the Customer Support Team, I was passed from one department to another & was eventually put on the “TV, Broadband & Weekend Calls” package at £19.99 a month. This supposedly includes the line rental & I received a letter from BT saying that my line rental would be transferred in June 2008.

I assumed that would be the end of the problems, but every bill I received after that, had the line rental added to it. I’raised a number of support tickets to get this resolved, but all I was told was that there was something wrong with the system & my package could not be up or down graded in any way. Apparently, I was using their latest technology & the system doesn’t allow any changes on this!!!! At least, this is what I was told a number of times.

So effectively, it seems I was paying for what was offered as a FREE upgrade and couldn’t do anything to change this because there was something wrong in THEIR system. The billing department seemed to agree as they refunded me the line rental for about 4 months & told me that the free line rental would be applied to my account as soon as the system allowed it. However, once again line rental was charged on my account in December & so I queried it again. Again, I was passed from one department to another, all of whom said they couldn’t help me. Eventually, I was told once more that because I’m on the latest technology, the free line rental can’t be put on to my account.

Eventually, I said that I had had enough of this & couldn’t ring every month to get the line rental refunded & maybe I should cancel my account! I was then telephoned by the provisioning team (a gentleman based in India), who told me that he had looked it up on his website & free line rental was not available in my area. I asked him why he was  telling me this, when I had never been told this before & in fact, had been told it was a problem in THEIR system. I also asked him why I had received a letter offering me free line rental, when it had never been available at my address! I was not rude to him, but did state that I felt Tiscali Customer Service was the worst I had ever experienced & he hung up on me; rather proving my point!

I mentioned this again to the billing department, who said that was ridiculous; being based in London, OF COURSE I should be able to get free line rental. I then received two further responses via e-mail, stating that free line rental was NOT available in my area because Tiscali piggy back on BT’s exchange rather than use their own, but I could get 25% off my line rental by calling the sales team & asking for it!! Why had I been told completely incorrect information for the previous year?!

Tiscali’s customer service teams don’t seem to be able to communicate with each other; each department gives a different explanation & passes you from an 0871 number, then an 0845 number & then an 0800 number. Then you get calls from people who you can hardly understand, who don’t seem able to deal with any query that isn’t covered by the list of 20 questions/answers they have on the sheet in front of them & so they hang up on you instead!!

When I made an official complaint, I received a letter from a Customer Relations officer addressed to Mr Stuart Court at a different address! I’m amazed I even got the letter, bearing in mind I LIVE at Stuart Court, rather than being called this by name!!! It’s interesting to see that when a “valued” customer writes with a complaint about a long term ongoing failure of customer services, they don’t even manage to actually reply to the person with the correct name & completely cock that up too!

In 23 years of being a UK consumer, I have never encountered customer service as poor, inefficient, slipshod & generally unable to resolve a customer’s problem as Tiscali. Nobody seems to know what is going on between the various departments & the training in their own products seems woefully inadequate.

As I was paying nearly £40 a month for a supposed £19.99 per month service, I decided to cancel my account & switch to Sky – I got the Sky+HD service, with 8Mb broadband, line rental & free weekend calls for the same price……..

Tiscali seem to offer great value, but it appears that this comes at a cost (assuming you get the cheap prices)!

It therefore comes as no surprise to hear about the company’s financial problems on Watchdog this week, where they say Tiscali is a company teetering on the edge, crippled with debt and fighting for its life despite having 3 million customers in the UK! The report says their experts were surprised and disappointed by the tales they’d heard of Tiscali’s poor service.

I’m not!!!!

I’ve been blogging recently about the complete disappearance of my site from Google SERPS, for most of my targeted keyphrases. As suspected, there has been a Google algorithm change which seems to be favouring big brand ranking on prime category keywords.

Google has confirmed the “change” to the their algorithm which is giving big brands a helping hand in their SEO efforts. The confirmation and explanation coming via a video from Matt Cutts.

Google aren’t promoting the algorithm tweak as an update, but rather just a change to enhance the value of ‘trust’ factors. As he says in the video:

“Inside of Google, at least inside the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like ‘trust’ ‘authority’ ‘reputation’ ‘PageRank’ ‘high quality.”

And apparently it’s adjustments to these elements in the ranking process that are the basis of the ranking changes we’ve noted over the past few weeks. However Matt’s quick to assert that the changes are only visible on a relatively small number of queries(!!!!). Matt states, “there’s nothing in the algo change to radically impact your current SEO plans and strategies – just more the same fundamentals.”

Not from what I’ve experienced over the last few weeks Matt – the complete decimation of the last years SEO work, content writing & link building! And now I’m told to continue doing these things that seem to have been slapped down as not good enough, whilst the big brands get a helping hand. Google – on the side of the little guy!!!

I’ve just run a ranking report for Cashback Shopper & all my results have completely vanished from Google!

The domain itself is still indexed, so the site hasn’t been dropped completely; I can only assume they are going through another one of their reshuffles /

It’s really annoying as a rankings check a few weeks ago revealed the same thing, only for all the positions to be back when I checked a couple of weeks later.

What is going on with Google? Are these shuffles going to be happening on a more regular basis & if so, how much business do we lose whilst our ranking vanish?

The dominance of Google is not doing us any good when things like this happen – I do wish Yahoo or Microsoft could come up with some other killer application that might swing some searchers back to them instead……a monopoly does no-one any good at all!

I wrote the other day about my attempts to upgrade my XP installation to Vista. After trying 4 times & having the upgrade fail for an “unknown reason” each time, I decided that using my clean dual boot installation & re-installing the packages I need to use, was the best way forward. Any older software that won’t run under Vista, will still be in my XP installation.

So, I got all my e-mails transferred over to Outlook under Vista & installed Dreamweaver etc. Things seemed ok, apart from a couple of troublesome e-mail accounts that won’t connect to their server, so I thought I’d give Bit Defender Total Security 2009 a go, as I have a 6 month free offer from PC Advisor. What a nightmare that turned out to be!!!!!

After installing this package, Outlook came to a full stop & I kept having to close it down. I’m not sure whether it was the anti-spam that was crashing Outlook, or just the combination of 2 bloated Microsoft products running together, but I removed Bit Defender & installed the FREE Comodo Internet Security package instead.

However, Outlook is still not running properly now and after 3 days of this, I’ve really had enough! If Microsoft thinks I’ll be going through all this again for Windows 7, they’ve got another think coming!!!!

Spent 4 hours the other day, trying to upgrade my PC from XP to Vista! I already have a dual boot system & run XP 99% of the time, but as I have a dual core system, with 4Gb RAM (XP can only use 3 of it) and XP is reaching the end of its support cycle, I thought I’d jump into using Vista full time & keep my XP system as the backup instead. So, being good, I backed up my system and set the Vista upgrade going.

All seemed to be going well…..the upgrade path is supposed to leave all my programs & files intact, which is why it takes so long. In fact, I had to leave it going when I went out that evening! Unfortunately, when I came back there was a “read memory” error at 75% and I had to roll back the whole installation – AAAAGGGHHH!

So, I’m once again back on XP & debating whether to bother again. I ran a memory diagnostic which revealed no memory errors, but as I often get this error message when I shut down Internet Explorer, I’m wondering if it’s an error in XP rather than the Vista upgrade.

I really cannot cope with going through a clean installation followed by rew-installing all my software, so I’m back to the inbetween club for now…..if I feel brave, I may go for the Vista upgrade again – who knows, I may get it done just as Windows 7 comes out!!!!!

So, I woke up this morning to see REAL snow, not the usual dusting of icing sugar that we get in London….fantastic, takes me back to my old days of sledging as a small boy.

Thinking how cool it would be to have a little go again, I called a friend & we set of for a nearby park, which happens to have an excellent hill. Unfortunately, when we arrived, we found the place locked up & families wandering up & down the road with their sledges…….as I had heard on the radio earlier, that the London Borough of Camden had closed all its parks for health & safety reasons, I could only assume that the same has happened here (London Borough Waltham Forest).

Everyone is talking about the epidemic of obesity in this country, yet the opportunity comes along for kids to have some fun & get some much needed exercise & the councils close the parks because of health & safety. This is what the culture of compensation has done – no one is willing to risk some money grabbing idiot that doesn’t look where they’re going, or seeks to blame everyone else for “accidents”, falling over or banging their knee. This means that the “authorities” are running scared of being sued & the vast majority of people then have to suffer because anything deemed “unsafe” is then banned!

Accidents happen, people fall over, kids get bruised….that’s normal! Perhaps it would be better if all the kids stayed at home & played on their Playstations 24/7. Then they wouldn’t risk getting hurt in the snow!!!! They’ll probably all have heart attacks later, but of course,they can’t sue anyone for that!!

It amazes me! The government can find billions to pay the greedy bankers & even consider bailing out the car industry, but when other industries have difficulties or issues, they can go to the wall! The current strikes at oil refineries are a case in point……employers have been using the EU rules on allowing workers to move freely through member states, to employ cheap labour & undercut British workers.

The Olympics site is another case – British jobs for British workers!!!! Rubbish! I have a friend who is a highly skilled welder, but can he get a job on the Olympic Park? No, because all the jobs have been contracted to Irish & French companies, who then employ their own workers…..the promise of jobs for local people was just another lie from this government…..

I realise this has nothing to do with web design/affiliate marketing, but what the hell!!!! There’s only so much hypocrisy a man can stand before he explodes lololol!