Buying electricity, fraud | Anders had canceled his participation in the English Premier League. Then a letter arrived in the mail

– When I had to cancel the basic package, it was difficult, says Anders Våge to Nettavisen.

Våge, a lawyer, bought a TV in Elkjøp in the summer of 2022. He was then offered a discount of NOK 1,500 with an Allente subscription. Allente is a television distribution company owned by Telenor and Viaplay that offers linear TV channels as well as streaming services.

Premium League subscription includes free for two months. After these two months had passed, he canceled the Premier League package.

Våge filled out a form and was scheduled to be contacted by Allente customer service to terminate the subscription. After a conversation with customer service, where he declined several offers, he received confirmation that the subscription had expired.

But then the bill arrived in the mail.

– There were two months when I tried to quit smoking for various reasons and it was not possible. There were a lot of emails, phone calls and long phone lines, Vaag tells Netafsen.

Do you have experiences with Allente that you would like to share? Contact Nettavisen editors here.

I started a Facebook group to warn others

Våge is not the only one who has had such problems with Allente, and Nettavisen has received advice about several others facing similar challenges. On the comparison service bytt.no, Allente also gets bad reviews Feedbacks By far the worst result for TV distributors.

One of those who interacted with Alente is Iqbal Tahir, who created a Facebook group “We who were scammed by Alente/Elkjob”.

He himself took a long time to unsubscribe, and ended up taking to social media. Only much later, after he wrote nasty comments to them on social media, was he able to terminate the agreement.

He says it took two days to reach the department that handles dismissals. After receiving confirmation that the subscription has ended, you will still receive an invoice.

– It is easy to pay the amount to avoid debt collection, and there I believe that consumers are being deceived, and Alente is aware of this, writes Taher to Netafsen.

I went to the newspaper

For his part, Våge was eventually able to terminate his subscription, but only after he chose to write an entry for discussion in it Bergens Tidendi About the fall incident.

– It’s unfortunate that it was so difficult, but then it worked. He adds that it seems deliberately difficult to quit.

After posting the discussion entry, he also received an email from Alente apologizing and explaining the situation.

– Here we just have to apologize – in this matter there were shortcomings in our dealings, and we apologize for that, says the response to Våge.

Furthermore, they explained that Våge’s dismissal ended up between two chairs with them, meaning that the agreement was never properly terminated.

Allente has many satisfied customers

Maja Wikman Ulrich, CEO of PR and Communications at Allente, told Nettavisen that they are aware that some customers have had a bad experience entering into an Allente agreement in store.

We think this is unfortunate, and we apologize for that. We are now working to resolve the situation, and are trying to have a direct dialogue with the individual affected customer, Ulrich told Nettavisen.

When asked what Alente thought about customers feeling like they had to turn to social media to be heard, Alente responded:

“Customer satisfaction means everything to us. We have received many awards for good customer service in the past year, but we are not satisfied when some of our customers are not. We have more than 50,000 contacts with Norwegian customers every month, and we want them all to be satisfied. That’s why we’re constantly working to improve our services even further.”

When asked for her opinion on the fact that both Iqbal and Faag believe that Alente is intentionally making it difficult to terminate the agreements, Ulrich responded:

-We would really like to apologize if agreements are difficult to cancel. We typically encourage phone contact because customers almost always have questions about termination, but it’s also possible to terminate subscriptions via a form and chat on our website, and a large percentage of our customers use these digital channels, she wrote in an email.

She says that when it came to the Anders Vaag case, it ended up between two chairs, meaning the agreement was never properly terminated.

– The matter has now been corrected, and we would once again like to apologize to Anders. Allente’s goal is to have the best customer service in the industry — that didn’t happen here, and we used this case to improve our internal processes and procedures, Ulrich wrote.

– Regarding Iqbal Tahir: We cannot find this name in our database, so Iqbal’s case is very difficult to comment on. “You are very welcome to contact us again if there are still questions, and we will do our best to find good solutions,” she added.