Is anyone at BT monitoring their customer feedback?

Anyone who has been reading this blog over the last month or so will be aware of all the problems we have had with our good friends at British Telecom.

Suffice to say that when we recently moved offices BT did absolutely everything in their power to mess up the process and we ended up without any internet for over a week.

Last week I wrote on this blog that there are three key stages to customer service – the before, the during and the after.  BT contrived to mess up all three parts of the process in some way or another.

After the absolute mess that was our move I was sent an automated email by BT asking about my experience.  I was absolutely scathing about the process and let them have it with both barrels.  This was over a fortnight ago and I have heard nothing, not a dickie bird.  Now I don’t expect my account to be BT’s number one priority but if you are going to bother asking for feedback about a process then at least have the decency to a) read it and b) acknowledge it.

If we had received an email containing the type of feedback that I sent to BT then I would personally have picked up the phone right away and even made a visit to the client to try and repair the damage.

I wonder whether BT are even actually reading the feedback that is being submitted to them.  If they are not reading it then it begs the question why bother sending out requests for feedback at all, thus wasting their time and their customer’s time too.

If BT are reading the feedback and no one within the organisation deems the type of feedback I gave them to be important, by the way it was scathing but also very constructive too, then they have serious problems.  As a provider of customer service courses I tried to give them feedback that they could act upon to improve their processes and ensure that this does not happen to someone else again.

We all know the hackneyed old phrase that a complaint is an opportunity to improve things but this is obviously not the approach taken by BT and their management.  It actually angers me that they are allowed to go on with their business totally immune to customer feedback yet in some respects they have a monopoly in their business.  BT are after all the only company who can make a line live for using the internet so you are forced to use them at some point throughout the process.

As we know customer service starts at the top but I would be surprised if anyone at the top of BT is even interested in the feedback that their customers take the time to give them.

The major lesson here is do not ask your customers for feedback and then do nothing about it, not even acknowledge it.  If you are worried about the feedback you may get then do one of two things.  The easy thing to do in the short term is do not ask for feedback if you don’t want to hear it.  Of course the harder thing to do is face up to the problems and get on with doing something about it.  I suspect that BT will just continue to request feedback and then selectively screen out that which makes uncomfortable reading.