This is quite sad, Voipfone is sliding down a nasty slippery slope, just like Easyjet if you call them you get charged and the more problems you have with the service the richer voipfone get and the more pissed off your casual customer gets having to call you, maybe having to wait in a call queue as the cost mounts up.

You're a phone company for gods sake, the call actually costs you nothing and features like free phone support set you apart when I signed up ...

IMHO any user is not to be treated as casual and should get free support.

If you get persistent time wasters or whatever allocate each account an amount of "reasonable user help time" before you start charging and then only charge if it's a customer's fault problem.

It wasn't an easy decision to take; we pride ourselves in helping anyone no matter how long it takes - and sometimes it takes a very long time indeed.

However, we are selling low margin, very low cost services which are supposed to be DIY - otherwise the business model doesn't work and everyone pays BT level prices.

Providing expert Technical support to anyone who comes along with their ebay phone and 5 accounts with various operators is not a sustainable economic proposition - nor even a practical one.

Everyone gets free email support regardless and the filters have been set so that anyone using our service in even moderate ways can also get free telephone support.

We think that this is a fair way of operating that enables us to support everyone - if it turns out not to be we'll change it.

When were those changes in terms and conditions even made or added?

I was never notified of them??

We emailed everyone last night - you may need to check your junk filter.

Nope never received it!

Did you get the broadband email?

I agree with you there will be that kind of thing but you are actually penalising all genuine low maintenance customers who (like me) may have been with you more than 2 years, has gone through all of the growing pains etc. and even sometimes phoned in with a problem which was a voipfone problem. There is no way I will do that if I have to pay ...



That does not appear anywhere in the mailshot though I welcome it as
a step back in the right direction, but because voipfone calls are so cheap, to reach your cut-off points you actually have to use the phone rather alot.

I still think you should just have a reasonable helpdesk use quota and not charge, and I also suggest sounding out things like this on the forum
before wielding the accountants charging stick, because your "sustainable economic proposition" depends on the goodwill of your customers like me, like the trusted mods on this forum who evidently haven't been consulted at all and it also depends on the ticking of the "free phone support" box when comparing providers for new signups.

Email is convenient for you but not us - it's quicker and easier to
call and discuss a problem (especially if its complicated):

email helpdesk: phone doesn't work
helpdesk reply: (up to 1 hr later) you didn't put in who your provider is
email reply to helpdesk - BT
helpdesk answer (up to 1 hour) oh try changing parameter X

2 hours to get a fix ...

At the end of the day this is why people still use phones and not
emails for everything and that's the amusing thing here as you are a phone business that doesn't want us to use the phone - or else you
charge us because we can't use it and want to

yes i got that one.

LOL he has a point, made me laugh!

<sigh>

There's no such thing as 'free' support; it's either a cost shared across all services or it is charged for 'pay as you use'. We are trying to establish the correct balance.

The cost of offering technical support is in employing the skilled people to do it and providing the systems for them to use - it has nothing to do with telephone costs. The call charge for casual users is not to provide income, it's to moderate demand - a free service creates infinite demand; talk to the NHS.

To keep this in perspective - everyone gets free email support and we will call back to help if it is appropriate.

Anyone who has broadband or has bought a phone from us, or who uses the services costing more than £10pm or simply spends £20 on calling credit gets' free telephone support.

If you only occasionally use our service you can still call us for 25p pm if you're in trouble.

That all seems fair to me.

An amusing observation I saw about the Heathrow T5 debacle:

"I blame it on the passengers, if they had all stopped at home none of this would ever have happened".

Bloody annoying things customers ...

Voipfone are evidently set on this and in the absence of anyone else chipping in agreeing with me about "reasonable free helpdesk use" I shall spare your further sighs and leave you to listen to your accounting department gleefully devising their next cunning plan.

If a customer is calling for support and it's due to a fault at voipfone's end then it should be free no matter if they spend a £1 with you or £100!