I find it impossible to contain the level of frustration which I gain from every dealing I have had with BT lately. When my house mate moved out a couple of weeks ago I needed to change the name on the line from his to mine. I never realised quite how painful and difficult a process this was to be.
Over the course of a week I rang BT 7 times, each time I wandered through their spaghetti of menus trying to find someone to help but who was I to speak to? Sales? Customer service? Provisions? From the multitude of options provided the answer was no clearer. After a 45 minutes wait for each call, I eventually got spoke to someone – I’m not including several abandoned attempts.
The first of them just couldn’t help; one of them could only tell me who could and hung up although they later turned out to be wrong; one answered the phone and hung up without even saying anything; another, an Irish lady from sales, said I needed to speak to Customer Services and put me through to another department, 20 minutes waiting later the confused person on the other end told me they were the faults department and couldn’t help me because it wasn’t a fault -duh! But they did give me a phone number.
I tentatively rang the number they gave me, my 7th call took 35 minutes to be answered by a very rude and ignorant person who spoke broken English. She eventually identified herself as being from the billing department and another minute later we worked out she could help me, yippee!! Holding it all in, reminding myself it wasn’t her fault, I told her what had happened and what I wanted; just a name change on the line and when it needed to happen. She said yes she can do this and it’ll happen on the 5th of September. The 5th??? I knew that the contract for James ended on the 1st, the date I’d specified for the transfer, so I asked what what would happen for those 4 days – I’d be cut off, no apology, no compromise, no phone, deal with it.
Sorry but this pushed me over the edge, perhaps it was the confusing menu systems, the 4+ hours of my life wasted waiting to get through to 5 people who were ignorant to my needs just to perform a simple action but she copt an earful of rage for which I am guilty but so not ashamed and never remorseful!! We eventually settled on the 3rd with being cut off for 2 days, fazed and resigned I gave up.
A few days later I got a phone call from provisions confirming everything, they were a lot more helpful saying the phone would be off for only a minute which was fine, although it would cut off my broadband but I knew that I was able to get this fixed by BT Wholesale, thanks only to my professional understanding of BTW’s processes. As foretold the line did switch over, the cease on my broadband did appear but was cancelled and things were fine. So I thought.
Yesterday I looked at the bill which was sent through, £11 per month which is steep for me considering I don’t use the phone, or even have it plugged in, unfortunately OFCOM haven’t yet insisted on a wires-only product for broadband users yet but I hope it’s in the pipeline.
I was more shocked though to see though that for me to pay my bill I was to be charged £4.50 in processing??? How does a company justify charging just to pay them for their services?! I was under the impression that I’d set up Direct Debit with the rude billing lady from call 7 but I was not in the slightest bit surprised to find that this was never actually done so now I’m going through the fun all over again to set one up, by phone because the online payment site isn’t working! Oh and one thing on the bill I happened to notice which struck me by surprise…They changed my phone number! On not one conversation I had with BT did anyone tell me the number would be changed, a fact I only noticed by chance.
The only hope is that one day OFCOM will break BT’s monopoly and the competition will eat them alive, the current state of their service is beyond belief, their organisation is overcomplicated, their staff are rude, poorly trained and limited to narrow sets of responsibilities, their queue times are beyond too long and their processes are unrelenting and bad for the customer. On the bright side my experiences with other smaller parts of BT group have been less extreme but this is the one everyone has to deal with at some point in their lives if you live in the UK which makes it so shocking they don’t seem to be stopping it’s decline into chaos, perhaps Ben Verveeyen will hear the cries of his customers and no doubt his employees who march out the door on mass and will get something done about it, I just hope until that day comes I won’t have to contact them again. That is, once I get through to billing, 2 calls so far 40 minutes per call and still no answer :’(
WWWHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
… and all of this is what I’m trying to avoid in the future for our customers by adopting a systems approach.
Bet all the stats, reports and meetings abouut them in the BT call centres look great to the managers there, though…
That’s what makes it so frustrating, the ignorance that can only generate such a poor service perpetuates the problem, where is the end?
Having moved to a new property I arranged for a new connection to BT.
No problems until 10 days later no one could contact me. It seemed that BT had switched me to a new number. Having sent out moving cards and printed new stationery it was important to have the original number back.
On calling BT (65 minutes wait) I am told that they could see no reason for it to have happened and it would take 48 hours to switch back (Including the weekend 4 days). Tried phoning after the 2 working days but after 50 minutes gave up! After 3 working days I phone them back (Another 70 minutes wait!). The original report had been closed. I resurect it – wait another 48 hours. I suggest this is not good enough and raise an official complaint. Next day I get a call from the Complaints Department “It will take another 2 days” but she will phone back tomorrow. She did phone back next day “It’s still progressing” Over the next 2 days, no more progress calls from the Complaints Department. Two more days after that it still hasn’t been fixed. I phoned again today (Only 62 minutes wait!). Another pointless conversation. “Nothing I can personally do, sorry, in hand, wait”
It is now 10 elapsed days and 6 working days and from my last call I am told now that it can take 10 days to resolve.
It goes way past being angry but what is unforgivable is:
1. The time it takes to get through
2. Being passed from one department to another ( I suspect their system puts customers through to the wrong place)
3. Being given false information
4. Rock bottom BT morale because of their new systems.
I’ve had the (mis?)fortune of seeing some of the systems parts of BT use for tracking staff performance, coming from a very pleasant company to work for it stinks of totalitarianism, what they fail to realise though is that if the system is broken you can drive your staff as hard as you are able and they will still fail to perform to expectations, all you achieve is lower moral already crushed by failing to meet the customer’s expectations and thereby the satisfaction from having done a job well and made someone happy. It’s all to common in big business and they don’t even realise they are their own worst enemy.
Hey, Does BT put you into a new 12 month contract when you transfer from one housemate to another ??? Can anyone help.
There is no minimum contract for the phone service that im aware of, BT internet does but I couldn’t tell you about that I use Zen
Found this by googling ‘bt incompetent bastards’ and got some comfort in hearing that I am not alone and feeling like I need to explode due to BT’s utter incompetence.
You’d think they’d be happy to deal with a customer who just wanted to stay with them after moving house, but they left us without a phone for two weeks and, worse for us, broadband for over a month (which they still haven’t connected). We told them to stuff their broadband and have gone to Sky (and switched our telephone calls to Sky, too).
Having moved to a new I was astounded to find out I was going to be charged £165 for the transfer of my name and details to the new address, furthermore they didn’t even let me keep my old number. I reluctantly paid the sum but the following month the same amount was taken from my account (£165). I called BT or should I say India, they were not helpful at all, they diddn’t even have my details in their system, they couldn’t explain why the money was taken from my account. I now use those payment cards things to pay my bill. DON’T EVER GIVE BT ACCESS TO YOUR ACCOUNT.
First the B in BT should be changed to IT, as it is a disgrace to have B meaning British.
We have holiday Lodges, one of which we have been living in with phone and Broadband connected for our business, we had a new Lodge built on site just a few yards from the others so when it was completed we phoned BT to get the phone and broadband transferred, simple enough you would think!!!
It was arranged that BT would come on Monday 9th June to connect to the new Lodge then Open Reach on the Tuesday to put in the phone and broadband.
No one turned up on the Monday but they still disconnected the phone and broadband. Nor did any one bother to let us know that they couldn’t make it.
On the Tuesday Open Reach arrived to connect inside the house, but of course he couldn’t as no one had been to connect it to the outside of the house.
He said it would be a few days before anything could be done.
When we asked if he could reconnect the phone again he said that our number had been cancelled and given to someone else and broadband had also been cancelled.
So we were left trying to run a business with no phone and no Internet.
My husband and I had to use our mobiles at great expense to try and get some one in India to try to explain to us what was going on, we both got very frustrated and so did they hanging up on us twice which is unacceptable and disgraceful.
Eventually the phone was connected in the new lodge but still no broadband.
After a few days we managed to get to speak to some one in India that we could actually understand and could understand us, he sorted out a dial up connection for us.
He also said that we needed a new contract for Broadband even though our contract hadn’t run out. It took three weeks to get everything sorted out and not once did BT apologise.
We lost customer bookings, had expensive calls on our mobiles and all because of BT’s incompetence.
It is absolutely disgusting the way they treat you, even a simple phone call gets you passed from one office to another forever listening to music, and then getting cut off when you have been hanging on for 20 minutes.
I only hope that I never have to deal with BT again.
Im about to jump ship from BT and move to Be for my internet use,the phone line is still in my old flatmates name and judging from my predecessors comments im in for a crap ride with BT to transfer the details over!!!!! if an article appears in the local newspaper of an irrate wegie storming the BT callcentre that’ll be me.
After speaking to an ex-BT employee, it’s become v.clear that they do not provide their staff with simple authorisational tools. For example, the reason they can’t reconnect lines is because whilst your line is down, they then allocate it to SOMEONE ELSE! Which I fully agree is frustrating, even more so as a business. This is a major concern. Another, none of their general call center staff have access to simple billing, therefore a simple name change cannot be done, without the system demanding they cut off the customer, thus losing your number in the process!
I cannot believe that BT, one of the world’s biggest businesses can’t grasp the concept of addressing these most pressing issues and kill a bird with two stones, because they’d then be providing SOME sort of GOOD customer service.