Whatever about companies looking after their customers when things go wrong at the best of times they should definitely do whatever it takes to support them at the worst of times, which is something Sky failed to do for the mother-in-law of a reader named Donal.

Donal’s father-in-law died earlier this year and weeks later he rang Sky on his mother-in-law’s behalf, and with her authority, to ensure the account was in order and to see how she could reduce the payments. “She could not afford to pay what they had previously been paying,” he writes.

“After a lengthy phone call, I was told that she could continue to receive all of her existing services for a lower monthly fee of €87. One of the reasons that they could reduce the price was that they were going to upgrade her broadband to fibre and as part of a new fibre broadband/talk bundle she would actually pay less for broadband/talk than she previously did.”

He says that he thought this was “strange but that’s what they said and subsequently acknowledged”.

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She was agreeable to the €87 per month so the deal was done.

“Anne received a new router in the post and was given details for an appointment for an engineer to install the new fibre broadband. On the day of the appointment, nobody arrived. I called Sky at about 4.50pm to see where the engineer was and was told that the appointment had been cancelled because their broadband team had discovered that my mother-in-law’s physical line could not support the fibre broadband. Nobody contacted her to tell her this and she waited all day for them.”

Then her first bill after the new contract was agreed arrived and was “much higher than €87 but the Sky agent had told me that this was likely and that everything would be corrected on subsequent bills. So the initial bill did not alarm me — I have had the same experience with my own account”, he writes.

“When the next bill was still too high I chased up and informed them that the agreed contract was for €87 per month. They said that because they could not install fibre, this meant that they had to charge a different (higher) amount. When I checked some of her emails (I am not in the habit of reading her emails) I saw that in March they had sent details of a new contract for €120 per month. That is not what was agreed to by her or myself on her behalf.”

Donal says he tried to explain to the agent that a contract was not valid if both parties had not agreed to it “but they insisted that it was valid. I requested that they listen back to the phone call when a contract for €87 per month was agreed. After some more phone calls I was told that they had, in fact, found that they had agreed a new contract for €87 per month (this was now recorded on my mother-in-law’s account but they insisted that because they couldn’t fulfil that, that they were entitled to put a different contract in place).”

At this point, the family had had enough and the contract was cancelled. “Sky are behaving as if they are doing her a favour by terminating her contract early and that she should be grateful they are not penalising her. In my opinion, they acted illegally by implementing a contract to which she did not agree. Not only that, but they have over-charged her since they put the new contract in place on their system. That they would treat a recently widowed senior citizen like this is despicable.”

We contacted Sky and were subsequently told that the issue had been resolved to our reader and his mother-in-law’s satisfaction. “We have spoken to the customer in question and apologised for this frustrating experience,” said a spokesman. “We always strive to provide the highest standard of customer service and this case fell short of that.”