I’ve tried reviewing their ‘services’ on various real review sites, but they have an army of agents who scour sites daily and complain to the review sites whenever they find bad reviews. But one thing they can’t do is tell me to take down a review on my own site! And if they do, I guarantee they will be offended at the forthright nature of my response! Admittedly, it will likely have a lot less impact here, but if I can warn off one potential customer, then it’s all worth it, right?

So who are the Utility Warehouse Discount Club? They masquerade as a service supplier, offering consolidated management of your various utility services; phone, broadband, gas, electric etc. The more services you have with them, the more you supposely save. That’s what they’ll tell you. You can save even more money by introducing friends to them. All sounds very convenient and great, doesnt it?

What they don’t tell you is that every other monthly bill you’ll receive they will have ‘revised their pricing’ until you’re paying way over the price of their competitors. Mine rose so much over the short time I’ve been with them that I could now get the same services from almost any other provider far cheaper.

They also basically operate as a pyramid scheme where they charge inflated prices for services to offset the discounts they’re able to offer for ‘introducing friends’. As you convince more suckers to switch to their utterly shit company, you get a discount proportional to the amount that THEY spend with the company. And so it goes on down the chain of victims. You can even become a Utility Warehouse Discount Club ‘authorised distributor’ and earn cash from referrals. All you need is a complete lack of morals and scruples, and a desire to fuck people over for money.

This is what provides them with their loyal army of snitches who make sure that nothing bad appears about them online – it is of course in their interest that they protect the reputation of the company. They also manage to completely unbalance and obscure the search results for Utility Warehouse Discount Club by running their own ‘authorised distributor’ web sites singing their praises. They even have a neat ‘dirty tricks’ tactic – their OWN websites are called things like ‘Utility Warehouse Scam’, which then go to great lengths to convince you that no, it’s not a scam! Thus obscuring results for any real sites exposing them as a scam. Clever.

In fact, Utility Warehouse Discount Club are simply an ‘umbrella’ for a bunch of 3rd party offerings brought together under one name. Their phone lines and broadband, for example, are really from a company called Telecoms Plus. Who ultimately lease their services directly from BT. The trouble with this kind of arrangement is that all you’re really doing is introducing yet-another-middleman (or in this case, two) into the mix, so that if you have a problem with your broadband (which for me is an almost weekly occurence) you need to phone their own dire support – because you’re ‘their’ customer – who basically will brush you off by explaining that, really, your broadband is fuck all to do with them.

Indeed, on the numerous occasions my broadband has been down for days, weeks and even months at a time (it took me over two months of daily, dogged persistence and dozens and dozens of calls to their support to resolve an issue with my broadband running less than 1/10th it’s proper speed), ultimately, it’s a BT Openreach engineer they send out when you can finally convince them that the problem is not going to go away on its own. So conveniently for them, yes, you’re their customer, but the blame ALWAYS lies elsewhere, and as such it’s ALWAYS completely out of their hands.

If you report a broadband fault – and you will… often – after running you through the scripted  set of ‘tests’ (ask them a question that’s not on the script, and they’re utterly stumped), they’ll conclude that your router (supplied by them) is faulty, and send you a new one. Pretty sure this is more to get you off their backs for 3 or 4 days while you’re waiting for the delivery of your replacement router than because they ever believe it will solve the problem.

To give you some idea of the frequency and extent of the issues I’ve had, they have supplied me with 8 replacement routers in 2 years… and not one single time has the replacement router solved the issue. Also, unlike most other companies, they don’t arrange for collection or return of the old equipment, and you’re expected to return them at your own expense, the postage cost of which they may (if you argue long and hard enough) credit back to your monthly bill sometime in the future.

Oh, also, on two of those occasions, the model of router they supplied me was confirmed to be incompatible with the Xbox360 and PS3. On complaining to UWDC about this, they said that they made absolutely no promises about what equipment their service would work with. When I asked was it not reasonable to assume that I could use two of the world’s most popular online gaming services on their broadband, they said ‘no’… and then proceeded to advise me that if I used my OWN compatible router, they would be under no obligation to provide me with further support.

All of which adds up to why I’m in the process of switching my service back to BT following discovering that just for a change I have yet another broadband problem (which is a carbon copy of the previous fault that dragged on for 2 months).

Ironically, I left BT for UWDC because of their dire service, but frankly it just makes far more sense to go right to the source whenever I have any issues, rather than putting 2 other middleman companies between me and my real supplier, each of which can compound and create their own issues (e.g. some of my problems have been due to admin problems that UWDC or Telecoms Plus have caused where they’ve incorrectly matched my line to my broadband and blocked or severely restricted my service). Especially when UWDC support have no real ability to help you, even if they ever actually showed any interest in helping you, which they dont.

I wouldn’t recommend Utility Warehouse Discount Club to my worst enemy, let alone a friend. If you value your sanity, don’t listen to a bunch of bullshit about how great they are and how much you can save. It’s all lies. Go to ANY other service provider safe in the knowledge that you can’t possibly have a worse experience!

Btw, ‘representatives’ of UWDC need not apply to my moderated comments for this post. You won’t get to have your say here. Your lies are spread far enough as it is.

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