Carphone Warehouse vows to cut TalkTalk queues

Carphone Warehouse is 'fairly confident' that it is catching up with demand

Carphone Warehouse has pledged to cut the waiting times for its 'free' TalkTalk broadband service to just three weeks by the end of September.

Between its April launch and yesterday, 476,000 customers had signed up for the deal, which bundles landline calls and up to 8Mbps broadband access for £21 a month.

More than 400,000 of registered customers can now make phone calls using the service, but just 247,000 are connected to the internet. The waiting time for installation remains around two months.

"There is no doubt that, on the customer service side, we initially underestimated demand," Carphone chief executive Charles Dunstone told the Evening Standard.

"We have expanded that considerably since June, and now have 1,600 people answering calls and emails. That will grow to 2,100 by early September as people complete their training."

Dunstone added that he is "fairly confident" that the company is catching up with demand.

"By the end of August, there should be few or no queues at our call centres, and in the autumn we will be telling new customers that we can sign them and connect them within three weeks," he said.

"We still have some way to go, however, to reach the leading service levels we target and I take personal responsibility for ensuring we achieve this."

According to Dunstone, TalkTalk has been a victim of its own unprecedented popularity.

"If anyone had gone to one of our board meetings ahead of the broadband launch and said that we would sign up new customers at the kind of rates we have, he would have been described as insane," he said.

The level of demand has steadied to between 15,000 and 20,000 applications a week over the past seven weeks.

TalkTalk's UK revenues soared by 230 per cent in the 13 weeks to 1 July. Dunstone has said that the group wants to buy some of the Link stores that have been put up for sale by O2.