BT's short lesson in customer services craziness

I am not sure if the world is going increasingly bonkers, or whether it is just the frustrations of the call centre age making me think so.

Whatever the answer, I find the displays of stupidity currently perfected by most large companies or organisations rarely surprise me. However, on Easter Sunday I was treated to some ineptitude that trumped most.

Visiting my family over the weekend, I arrived home on Sunday morning to find a BT engineer up a ladder fiddling with our neighbours’ telegraph pole. I couldn’t quite understand why he was working on a routine job on Easter Sunday - apart from a colossal overtime payment I imagine - but admired his dedication. He spent about an hour outside, moving from the neighbours’ telegraph pole to my family’s and with the job seemingly done he left. A short while later I picked up our home phone – it was dead. The Easter Phone Bunny had nobbled it.

I called BT, from another line, and the nice man in the call centre told me they’d send an engineer out, but because of the Bank Holidays it wouldn’t be until Wednesday. I replied that perhaps as the BT engineer had come round and broken a phone that was working perfectly fine before he arrived, could they send him straight back to fix it.

What was I thinking? Of course that couldn’t happen. No, despite the engineer having left less than half-an-hour ago there was no way he could be a) traced or b) sent back. This was a new job and had to be booked as so. Ironically, I bet if the call centre had bothered to trace the engineer he would have come straight back out of professional pride.

What could I do? I put my case for a while, but the BT call centre man displayed no interest in doing anything but repeating the party line. Eventually I gave up. It was Easter Sunday, it was sunny - I had better things to do. Well done BT - another customer services masterpiece.

- Simon Lambert, This is Money

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Comments

[claire mcgurk]

Dear Prospective Customers,
If you have a chance not to be BT customer, then please take it. This is why:
1. Customer services never answer the phone within one hour.
2. If they say they are going to call round at a particular time they do not - even when you have called to confirm a date and time in advance.
3. Customer services, if you do get through, may promise to ring you back. However, this never happens.
4. If you tell them that they have to ring a certain number to contact you, they will ignore this.
5. More often than not, you will speak to someone who claims to be "untrained".
6. If you write to them by email, they may reply, but never within a week.
7. If you ask to speak to a supervisor, at first they will say that there is nobody there who is in charge.
8. If you insist, and do get through to a supervisor, they will also claim to "untrained".
9. A recorded message will say "we are busy at this time, call back later". If you call back, at any other hour or on any other day, the same message is played.
10. At other times, you will be put on hold and a recorded message will tell you that "your call will answered as soon as possible". This is a lie. You may well be on hold until your battery on your phone runs out - this has happened to me several times.
11. Frequently, you will get through to a call centre in India. Other times, the line sounds bad and the connection is awful but that is when you are speaking to somebody in Stoke-on-Trent!!!!!!
12. Oh, and if you want to complain and your complaint is about sales, a bill or general matters, please phone 0800 800 150 between 8am and 8pm, Monday to Saturday. Good luck!
Claire

[richard lewis]

A while ago I had a very similar experience with BT. An engineer was working nearby, then my phone went dead, but he was still there so I mentioned my loss of line. "Nothing to do with me" he insisted, even though I had been perfectly friendly and just asked him to check. "You'll just have to report it as a fault" he advised. My service was reconnected days later.

Just now, I have been trying to help my daughter get a line for her flat in London SE24. She applied by calling sales and was told, as there had already been an installation in her flat before she moved in, she would be connected and be given a new number in two days time. Nothing happened. Over the next 16 days we have been ringing BT, waiting up to 40 minutes listening to meaningless recorded apologies and finally being cut off. Their sales team always answers of course, but try to follow up a problem? Forget it. I fail to see how BT can any longer stand for British Telecom. They can't even communicate with their customers, or it seems, with each other.