Forum Topic

B.T. what a  palaver

Just had three hours of a right palaver.Lost my internet connection, so phoned the 0800 number, went through press 1, 2, etc, and eventually got connected to the call centre.  After 31mins 24 sec, I found out I was in India.  Just as well it was the 0800 number.  Could you open Mozilla or Explorer,...No I have no internet connection, O.K. we will do a land line check, but, it's not the line, it's the internet.  Eventually I was told we will try and fix the fault from here (India.) After another hour, of stupidity, I was asked for my mobile number, so they could call me back, at 10pm.Isn't funny that things get fixed very quickly when one starts cancelling a provider.

Nicola Howard ● 5074d15 Comments

Don't get me started on this one.

Angela White ● 5074d

Should have asked for a rebate.  Will do so tomorrow, when they phone back, just to check everything is alright.

Nicola Howard ● 5073d

I recently got one of over £400 from BT - and no arguement!

Sara Nathan ● 5073d

How did you do it?To get that amount, I thought: "your only supposed to blow the bloody doors off"

Nicola Howard ● 5073d

Brilliant, Nicola!  Well done, Sara!

Angela White ● 5073d

I'd cancelled a line over a year previously - taking us down to two. When I went down to one, it transpired they had never cancelled the first one and had carried on charging.I found a wonderful customer service woman who was genuinely shocked a bt's hopelessness and just sorte it with no trouble.Previously had to get things made a "flag matter" and still couldn't get it sorted

Sara Nathan ● 5073d

Blimey......it's a wonder you hadn't noticed!!  I penny watch everything now.

Angela White ● 5073d

If you ever have a problem with BT in the future, emailing Warren.Buckley@bt.com will usually work a lot better than goign through their overseas call centres - although with no internet connection it probably doesn't help much in this case!There's no advertised phone number for the BT Customer Escalations team as far as I'm aware, but if you email Mr Buckley you will be contacted by one of them and they will give you a direct line number to call, thus avoiding the frustrations of incompetent script-reading call centre workers :)

James Vertigan ● 5073d

At the time I was getting multiple bits of phone bill every month - more rational now ! A bit

Sara Nathan ● 5073d

Have been inundated with SMS messages from B.T. today, reminding me that they were going to call between 6:30 and 8:30pm.  They called at 6:23pm.  Not even a goodwill gesture for loss of service...cheapskates.

Nicola Howard ● 5073d

Was it fixed, and did they tell you what caused the problem?

Chris Bell ● 5073d

It was fixed last night but, they did not tell what the problem was.  It took ages for the hub to re-boot, so a fast desk top was running at about a quarter of it's speed.  The problem was probably a Bombay mix!

Nicola Howard ● 5073d

Another loss if Broadband today.Phoned the number yet again. to be greeted with:  Q. Tell us what you think.    A  BT are useless, this is the second loss of service within four days, fix it within one hour or get dumped.  Q Is your landline working?  A Of course it is. I'm on it.  Please answer yes or no.Response from BT:You are having problems with your broadband. There was a major problem in your area, which has now been fixed.  Unplug your router from the mains, wait 30sec plug back in and wait for the reboot.At least it wasn't India and the silly script.

Nicola Howard ● 5069d

Hi Nicola,Hope you are doing well...I've been part of the call centres in India and I agree with you regarding the scripted interaction.However that's generally a mandate from the employer and so the customer representative must go through the list of questions.Believe it or not but a number of calls actually get resolved through only re-booting the routers and so the representative has to ensure that the restart is done.Regarding the phone line check, the internet actually comes through the phone line (unless you're using Virgin Fibre Optics Broadband), and the speed of the internet depends upon the location from the telephone exchange, the cabling and also the insulations in the property. Also, the bandwidth gets slower due to cache and hence a restart/reset is required to clear it up.I've had problems with BT too and they have resolved it and like Sara, once I had lodged an official complaint through their website as they rescheduled engineer's appointment twice and to compensate they added £10 credit to the first bill.As someone pointed out, mailing Warren will definitely help but I'd also recommend lodging a complaint.http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10789/~/how-do-i-make-a-complaint%3FBT centres in India do have network access and hence can try to help you out as much as they can - as they are the first line of support. However, you're right that if someone local can take a look and resolve it then it will be much faster. But, corporates like BT won't take that route for obvious reasons.Please accept my apologies in case I've not understood your frustrations. But, I can tell you I've been there :-)Best Regards,Sandeep

Sandeep Mestry ● 5069d

Make a bit of a nonsense of the current hard sell phone calls being made to BT customers not using their broadband! I took a call yesterday from their telephone salesmen and the drive to make me abandon my Virgin bundle of TV/phone/broadband which I have had for several years simply to access a few quids saving per month on BT broadband seemed nonsensical even before all the tales of bad service documented here.

Joe Conneely ● 5067d