Broadband

BT have caused a bit of a stir this week by mailing a personalised letter to current or former Tiscali group broadband customers (these include Pipex, Freedom2Surf and Nildram). A photograph of one of the letters is available here, having been discussed in various forums earlier this week.

The letter points out the attempts by Tiscali to sell itself off and seeks to exploit the uncertainty by offering the customer a “safe haven” at BT Broadband. The letter is signed by Jillian G Lewis, Customer Services Director.

It isn’t clear where the database for this marketing activity came from, and there is considerable speculation around some BT Wholesale involvement (although this is extremely unlikely). Other speculation suggests that the bt.com web site may be the source (where users may have registered email addresses for paperless billing or their IP addresses can be correlated against the Tiscali IP range).

When contacted for a quote BT spokesman Jon Carter responded with:

The stock response doesn’t really shed any further light on the matter, other than to suggest that the data source was external. One possible source is one of the comparison sites, many of whom are able to track user signups that originate from their websites.

Samknows also contacted Tiscali for a quote and was provided the following response:

Tiscali were accutely aware of the letter already and, if the 30 minute turnaround from the press enquiry is anything to go by, are taking the matter seriously.

Direct marketing of broadband is of course commonplace, with BT and TalkTalk cold calling to sell broadband and who can forget the stack of AOL CDs behind the door. This initiative seems to go a step further in targeting customers of a particular ISP and raises big questions about privacy or the misuse of data.

Further discussion of the matter can be found on this thread over at the ThinkBroadband forums.

Tags: AOL, BT Retail, Freedom2surf, Nildram, Pipex, Thinkbroadband, Tiscali