Came across some advice on the Ofcom website today. Entitled “Keeping customers connected” this new note  tells you what to do in case your Communications Provider goes out of business.  I’ve pasted some of the salient points in here:

“If your supplier does go out of business, one of two things should happen.

For phone customers:
(1) You may get a phone call from another telephone company saying that your current provider is going out of business and you need to place an order with another company. They will often give you a deadline by which you need to have switched.”

Later the document advises:

“If any of these things happen, it is better to take action than to wait and hope”

The note covers your phone line and broadband connection though I’ve only reproduced the phone line advice here. The point is that this is verging on encouraging slamming where phone lines are taken over without someone’s consent.  In this case Ofcom is suggesting that people succumb to a pressure sell which is of course the exact opposite to what might be considered normal advice and is indeed why there is usually a cooling off period in many contracts.

I was the victim of slamming myself years ago when Mercury was trying to grow market share.  I was rung by some oik in the sales department who sounded like he had been brought in from their used car sales division and who did not come close to convincing me that I should switch suppliers.  A couple of weeks later I got an invoice thanking me for the business.  The oik clearly had aggressive targets.  Nothing has changed but I would say that in this case Ofcom is not helping matters.

PS Clearly ofcom does not go about advocating slamming but I wonder whether this note has been properly thought through?