poor buggers
even if the yare sales staff, the yhave my sympathy. been through similar and it sucks donkey balls.
Dabs.com has notified a significant number of sales staff that their roles have been placed at risk of redundancy. The move at the etailer follows sweeping changes that parent company BT made last year as it merged its three reseller businesses under the leadership of John Thornhill and laid off some workers including senior …
the legal hoops HR have to go through in the process of making people redundant, consultation phases are mandatory, I believe, as are a few other things and all these things have to be seen and documented to be done before you can actually make people redundant otherwise you leave yourself open for unfair dismissal or a bunch of other no-win-no-fee lawyering from the dismissed.
In the old days Dabs had great prices and great service, the RMA system was sweet all done online.
Then BT came along and the prices were no longer great, customer service slowly went downhill and the RMA system was challenging.
Real shame for the team there as there were some really good people I dealt with, but just shows you how quickly BT can take a good business and drive it into the buffers!
Yup, same here. Still look at the Dabs site occasionally, can't remember when I last actually bought something though. They used to be my #1 go-to.
"At risk of redundancy" and "consultation" basically means "we aren't making numbers, management lacks the imagination to fix it, we've decided to take the easy option and get rid of a load of you, the decisions are already made so don't fool yourselves into thinking any differently - this is just a legal requirement so's you can't sue us later". Been there, done that, got the P45 (pink slip, I believe, for our friends across the pond).
Indeed. In their great customer database migration of April 2011-ish my account disappeared. I've emailed and rung (0870, 30 min+ wait) several times, because not only can I not order anything, I can't retrieve old invoices. After my emails in April, and their apologies for not sorting it quicker, we emailed back and forth until August with them ignoring most of the requests, at which point I gave up. Seems they don't even need customers like me. BT have cocked up what was a pretty decent place to buy from.
I used to be a regular customer of Dabs. Then one day a salesman called me and told me (proudly) that BT now owned them.
I pointed out that BT were the bar stewards who chaged me an "admin" charge to pay my own phone bill, so Dabs and anyone else connected with them could go to hell. I am glad they now have.
I was a massive fan of Dabs. I remember in the days before you could buy online, they used to have 3-4 page adverts. I remembered ordering by phone around 6-7PM and was completely surprised when the goods arrived the next morning.
Then when they went online I liked them just as much. Their system of filtering was and is still one of the best in the industry. We take it for granted now but they were the first company I used to have it.
I still use them as long the prices are about right. But they are not as good as they were. Firstly they dont have the best prices anymore. They also dont have the stock.
So over the last 18 month I probably I only placed around £5k worth of buisness with them. I can cope with ok pricing but when you can get the goods , you shop elsewhere.
I still wish them well and hope they bounce back.
Once BT took them over I decided not to use them unless unavoidable.
I remember (as with other comments) the staff being fine and a little surprised that my response to "We are now part of BT" (rising terminal) was met with a long silence as my head dropped.
When will the "Re-branding" "New Logo" "Corporate Identity" pedlars work out that when a name like "BT" is used by every slippery VoIP salesman/woman or incompetent local franchised company then there is a large chance that its not a "Value-add yah".
Nice bonuses at top level no doubt and probably a re-branding to sort it out, new stationary, new logo.