Sky: a loosing service

It is already several years I am a Sky customer and all things considered I do not get badly with regard their television offering. I am mainly interested to movies and television series — in particular Sci-Fi and Fox’s — as well as I really love documentaries, especially by National Geographic and Discovery Channel. It is really a pity, anyway, that in the last few years History Channel deteriorates so much in quality, drifting to pseudo-historical blunders and sensationalist stories, because I always loved historical documentaries, particularly the reconstructions of battles and other important events, provided that they are reliable and well documented.

The question radically changes if we mention their customer services. Beyond the fact that their troubleshooting support is absolutely poor, as from the fact that I should call a quite expensive toll number up to the disputes that often occur with installers and repairers because of the internal rules Sky imposes on them, one of the most striking things that I have seen in the recent years is the complete lack of decent management of customer relationships.

As I said, I am interested in movies, TV series, and documentaries. I practice sport but I have little interested to see it on television and no interest at all in soccer. In fact, far too much is said about soccer on the Italian tube. Yet regularly, every time there is a promotion on sport or soccer, they call me; every time I ask them to please note on my customer profile that I am not and I will never be interested to that offer; every time, regularly, they do not do it. I even doubt that they have ever got within striking distance of a database to keep track of these things. The best is that I receive those offerings at home by ordinary mail too. If only Sky would take track of what are the actual interests of their customers, not only they could make some precision marketing, but they would also save a good amount of money in postage and phone calls.

They may be good at planning TV programs and, by the way, the new interface is not so bad, although occasionally it automatically schedules programs I did not select — from which I infer that the algorithm used to remember what I recorded in the past is leaking — but as far as customer relationships are concerned, my grade is an F, marked with red pencil.