TalkTalk email marketing in silos
So once upon a time I went with a small business ISP that seemed to give good service. It was originally recommended to me by the IT guys that used to look after an old agency that I worked at. They used the ISP to provide home connectivity to remote workers for a hedge fund. I signed on and have been with the business since 2003/4. When I moved house in November 2004, I rearranged my connection with them.
The ISP was first bought out by Tiscali, which was then bought out by Carphone Warehouse and put into it’s Opal Telecom business. This was then re-branded as TalkTalk Business. I have unlimited download and a theoretical maximum download speed of 8Mbits/s.
Since I’ve gone to TalkTalk, they keep emailing me on a regular basis trying to put me on a new tariff. I’m not particularly willing to do:
- I’m out of contract, I only need to give a month’s notice, I’m not thinking about moving but I like the flexibility
- I never get anywhere near 8Mbits/s anyway
- Any new tariff is likely to include download limits, this would be an issue. A couple of films from iTunes, Skype calls, email, blogging, some geekery, RSS feed reading, watching movies on BBC iPlayer and a couple of Apple software updates would probably be enough to blow the ceiling
- If I wanted to bundle my voice and broadband providers I would have done already
So this is an email they sent me last week:
In the middle of it, is a box to allow me to Check your speed and see how fast you can go… I clicked the link and got web page upon putting in my telephone number and postcode
So the LLU service the number is transferred to is theirs, which they should have known given that this site was linked to in an email entitled Important: you are on an outdated package. I flagged this up with TalkTalk on Twitter and they said that they had their IT people looking into it.
Eventually they came back to me and explained that it was down to the fact that they hadn’t integrated my ISP’s infrastructure completely into the TalkTalk Business infrastructure despite the branding. What really surprised me however was getting the same mailer again, a week later. So there seems to be a silo between marketing and their technical people.
1 Comment