It can't be love! (BT)

Member Name: nicola21

Product:	BT
Date:	08/04/01 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Regular-priced calls and rental, available nation-wide.

Disadvantages: Disorganisation and bad customer service.

Although BT is the biggest player in the telecommunications circle of this country, it still has not found a way to manage all of its customers to a satisfactory standard. "But they have millions of customers!" I hear you cry. Yes, and their annual gross turnover is probably another million times the amount of customers in both residential and business sectors. They are a large enough company with a profitable enough revenue to have adequate staffing on all levels of service, from plentiful, capable telephone staff to the skilled electricians, however they still haven't managed to strike a balance and certainly don't perform to a high enough standard that anyone would expect.

This is simply my experience of BT's service, and my consequential opinion of them. No doubt there are happy customers out there, but my my dealings with them have proved otherwise. It has not just been a one-off, as all companies make mistakes and the staff are only human, but on a series of occasions, all at different times over a period of a few years.

Let me just set the scene. As a student using this service, I moved house three times within two years to various local properties, and have set up a BT account at each different address (BT being the only available service in the area). A simple transferral of one account to three different numbers you would have thought, but for BT, it isn't as simple as that!

First of all, BT doesn't seem to understand that when an individual moves house and requests that their account be transferred to the new number at the new property, they will no longer be at the old address to receive mail. One would expect that after this transferral of addresses and telephone numbers, BT would send all further correspondence to the new address, but no, they still send it to the old address. Very useful!

This is the first, but main occurring problem with these people. I have no idea why they
do this. Worst of all, the following service is poor and incompetent. I will explain what happened.

When I set up my first personal account, they assured me that I would be connected within twelve hours. Thrity-six hours later and I was connected. Slow, and not what I was told, but okay, I wasn't going to niggle over that. When it came to moving house, I asked them to transfer the account and they did, but all correspndence went to my old address. The old house was empty and locked up, so I could not retrieve my mail. I informed BT of this error, after waiting a painstaking hour waiting in the queue on the helpline, and received an apology.

So far, two houses, two telephone numbers and one account. Some problems, but not enough to get distressed about. Then, I moved house for the third time. (I was only moving so much as students do each year, and we moved twice in one year as the rogue landlady was spending the rent, not paying the mortgage and the house was repossessed.)

This thrid move was the worst. I asked to transfer the old account, but was told that it was easier for them to create a new account and close the old one. That was fine. I asked them to transfer my outstanding credit from the old account to the new, but they didn't. They just sent a cheque out for the amount to my old address that I no longer occupied! I complained, but they said I had to write to the manager for a new cheque to be sent out.

On top of this ridiculous mistake, when I asked what my new number would be, they calmly told me the number was ... such and such... and I realised that this was the number I had at my first house I had lived in.I advised them that this was wrong and they spent a further half-hour sorting it out as I patiently waited on the phone. At the end of the conversation, the BT advisor said "Oh, if you have any problems, call this number and quote this reference."

Okay, I thought the last comment was a bit
strange but took little notice. I waited for two days, and still the new line was active. I had to call the freephone number from my mobile, as I had no landline, and on Vodafone, as many know, freephone calls are charged at a standard rate. I spent one hour and forty minutes that evening waiting in a queue on the helpline, all the while being told that my call was held in a queue and would be answered shortly. Since I was paying, I didn't want to hang-up, miss speaking to someone and have to call again wasting my money. I gave up after nearly two hours of waiting. The next morning when I called again, I spoke to someone, advised them of my waiting the previous night and they informed me that they had closed ten minutes after I had made the call. I was disgusted that they kept people waiting in the queuing system for hours after their lines had closed. They apologised.

So then back to the main problem of not being connected, I discovered that my BT line had a major fault that they were already aware of. Because the chap I spoke to initially could not be bothered to sort it out at the time, he had passed me onto someone else without any explanation which made it worse. I waited for ten days for my line to be repaired, spent hours on the phone to helplines, and was treated badly by most staff I had spoken to.

I was given about thirty pounds off of my next bill in compensation, and they agreed to paying my excessivley-long call charges to them on my mobile to their helplines that close without informing queuing customers. So that was something good, but surely if all this is happening to me in a short period of time, how many other customers is this happening to nation-wide on a daily basis?

For the vast amount of revenue BT collect each year, and the amount of people that can only use the BT service in their area, the quality of their performance, the competence of their staff and the way that they manage their customer service, has ver
y little to be desired. I dread to think how many other unsuspecting customers end up being messed around by them each year. They really have to pull their socks up.

Unfortunately, I am moving to a new, permanent address at the end of this month, and the BT line will have to changed again. Maybe BT will have another chance to redeem themselves on this forthcoming ocassion but I do not expect too much from them. I will let you know what happens if there is any chance of them proving that they are not 100% useless.

BT need to sort themselves out before people start to leave their service for good, as more and more telecommunication companies are entering in on this super-profitable bandwagon. I know that BT advertise for returning customers by quoting "It must be love!", but maybe it is necessity rather than love, and maybe, just maybe, BT are the best of a very bad bunch.

Summary: