So report your Telco to OFCOM for having an incomprehensible price list. Now that *is* something they might be interested in. Because they regulate telsos, of course, not the services that telcos are providing access to.
Which might make sense for people who work there, but as a consumer it's difficult to see how having different points of contact does anything other than deter complaints. Wasn't the whole point of rebranding ICSTIS as PhonePayPlus so that it could get away from it's history of not actually doing anything?
In message , at 13:57:09 on Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Duncan Wood remarked:
The pattern of complaining to the delivery point, followed by a watchdog/ombudsman, under oversight of the process [not individual complaints] from a regulator and with overarching responsibility from a government department is repeated for a very wide range of issues.
Are you asking for one point of contact for everything from late trains to bent solicitors?
It was partly because they wanted to get away from a poorly understood acronym, but also because the scope of premium rate had evolved considerably. Not just paying per minute to talk to someone, but things like paying for a ringtone or paying to vote in a TV programme.
In message , at 14:49:07 on Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Duncan Wood remarked:
Is that for retail telecoms providers to complain about wholesale telecoms providers, or for consumers to complain about everything they don't like which happens over the phone?
You don't guess, you do searches, ask people, and so on.
I disagree. As a branding exercise perhaps something slightly better could be devised, but the old acronym mean nothing to almost everyone.
I write in reference to your complaint relating to the Parcel delivery service e-mail using 070 numbers and the outcome of our investigation.
PhonepayPlus has carried out a full evaluation of your complaint including the information requested and supplied by the provider operating the service.
The Executive contacted the network operator Atlantic Communications Corporation Limited responsible for allocating the 070 numbers. The network has confirmed all the 070 numbers used relating to the Parcel delivery service have now been deactivated.
070 ?follow me? numbers are often used for call forwarding services ? for example, plumbers or locksmiths might use them as a single point of contact and have calls diverted to different mobiles or landlines at different times. Calls to 070 numbers may cost up to 50p per minute from a BT landline, more from a mobile. The price will not necessarily be explained during the call itself. There are other legitimate uses for
070 numbers, such as to advertise items for sale or to call a special number to contact people in hospital ? for example, the ?Hospedia? service.
Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention
That's one of the things that annoys me, too. Commercial organisations can call themselves what they want (heck, I don't even care if Royal Mail have another go at branding themselves "Consignia" once they've been privatised), but regulatory bodies, government departments and quangos should have names which clearly reflect their function.
That's because the old name for which ICSTIS was an acronym was itself a really badly chosen name which didn't give any clues as to the organisation's purpose. The solution to that would have been find a name which did convey its purpose, not replace a cumbersome and unwieldy non-descriptive name with a marketing buzzword non-descriptive name.
In message , at 22:19:00 on Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Duncan Wood remarked:
There's many more than that. For example if someone rings you up selling a dodgy financial product you have to work out if that's whatever the FSA is called this week, or another of the regulators from that sector; and so on. It's a bit ambitious to have a one-stop-shop because it'd cover so many different industries.
One thing that works better in the Netherlands is to have the same regulator also dealing with data protection issues that are linked to phone calls, although of course these days there's legal convergence between phones and Internet so they have to handle email spam as well.
If you phone OFCOM up I'm sure they'll tell you where to complain about premium rate issues,
21:02:28 on Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Mark Goodge remarked:
The "TIS" stood for Telephone Information Services" which is what had become out of date by shifts in the market. You can't really call voting on X-factor an "information service". But it is a Pay-By-Phone thing.
The Premium Rate Telephone Services Regulator. It doesn't really need an abbreviation. Its domain name would be the easily memorable premiumrate.gov.uk.
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