Dealing with BT is frankly depressing – their customer service is so poor

Followers of this blog will have noticed that we have had very few posts over the last week or so.  For this you can blame our good friends at British Telecom.

I have honestly never had such a frankly depressing, awkward and infuriating customer experience.

I am very pleased to announce that GA Training has just moved to a lovely new and modern office and problems with BT aside we are all very happy.

On the day of the move I was told that an engineer would meet our IT engineer and install both the phone line and subsequently broadband at the new office.  We gave our staff a day off and told them to be in bright eyed and bushy tailed first thing the next day to start working.

BT were as specific as most companies are and gave us a time on the day of anywhere between 8 – 6.  Broadband, I was assured would be active by 6pm latest.

The phone engineer arrived and spent the next hour or so moaning about doing his job which was mildly annoying.

Once the phone engineer had gone it was onto the wait for broadband to come online.  We were canceling our service on the old office and I was assured there may be a bit of down time but nothing excessive.

At 4pm that day the problems started.  I received an automated email from BT thanking me for the cancellation of our order.  Panicked, I called BT but was assured by the lady on the phone that in fact this was an error and that the cancellation should have stated our old number on the email and not the new one.  I was assured that Broadband would be on by 8pm latest.

I believed the lady – why wouldn’t I after all?  I was already confused however though because I had been told we would be online by 6pm, then 8pm.

Eight o’clock came and went with no sign of broadband.  I let the IT guy get home to his wife and kids and got back on the phone to BT.  This time a different person told me that yes my order was still going through but that it can take up until midnight to come on.

I was not going to wait until midnight but was reliably told that it would be on by the morning.  I had to then make a decision re the team and so I called them each individually and advised them to work from home for the day unless I rang them in the morning and they could come in for the afternoon.  Everybody on the GA team was actually disappointed because they were looking forward to getting into the new office.

I came in bright and early to find that no internet was available.  I had to wait until 8.30 for the relevant BT call centre to open up.  I then spoke to someone who told me my order had in fact been canceled and after spending 20 minutes or so trying to argue that I or one of my staff had requested the cancellation he finally worked out that it was in fact BT who had canceled the order on my behalf – thanks for that BT.

I was, as you may imagine, livid by this stage especially when told that the earliest they could put an order through for me would be 5 working days – a week in layman’s terms.  I asked if as this was BT’s error they could push it through quicker.  I was told that although he would try he couldn’t promise anything and even if it was fast tracked it would still take 2 working days.

I was then promised a phone call back from the escalation team in 2 hours.  Unsurprisingly no one called within two hours and after four hours I called back.  Turns out my friend from the earlier call had done nothing, not even made any notes on the system for the next operative to follow.

The new gentleman I had on the phone reassured me that he would escalate for me but that it can take up to 24 hours to come back to me.  He told me that the earlier advisor should never have promised two hours as it was not possible to be exact other than any time within 24 hours.  This guy then admitted in an unguarded moment that they had lots of problems like this which begs the question what they are doing to sort it out?

This call was going better than previous ones however it finished very badly as he ended the call by telling me that the escalation of my call was going to cost BT £150.  I told him in no uncertain terms that I didn’t care if it cost BT thousands of pounds.

Looking at the narrative above it is clear that we have a number of customer service problems that are not being addressed.

First and foremost BT clearly has a problem with this type of thing but are to my knowledge not doing anything to sort it out for their customers.

Secondly we were given different information by everybody about when we would come online.

Thirdly no notes were taken during my first call and therefore I had to keep explaining myself every time and a false promise was made of a call back within 2 hours.

Fourthly I was told I was actually costing BT money by calling them and finally the telephone engineer who fitted the line spent his entire time moaning which didn’t exactly help.

Tune in tomorrow to see how it can and in fact does get worse but don’t worry there is a light at the end of the tunnel which will be revealed in good time.