Hallelujah!

After six weeks – forty two painful days – one thousand and eight excruciating hours – we finally once again have telephone and broadband connections at home. Hoo-bloomin’-ray!

British Telecom (BT) naturally made things difficult to the last. Having informed us – after their previous no-show – that the fault lay without our apartment they subsequently changed their minds and required us to make another appointment. When – following the obligatory week’s delay – an Openreach engineer finally visited us in the flesh he informed us that a test that he had performed outside in his van before ringing the doorbell had demonstrated that the fault was – after all – out in the street. He surmised that the previous engineer assigned to the case had not correctly measured the distance from the cabinet to the break in the cable – hence his mistake and this latest delay.

This engineer was – inevitably – not equipped to fix faults outside the premises, and we had to wait for a further twenty four hours for the situation to be finally resolved.

OK. I will shortly shut up about BT (at least until they try to bill us for the service that we have not had!) but one thing I would say is that I have modified somewhat my views concerning BT’s incompetence. I certainly believe that the maintenance division – Openreach – is deeply flawed in this regard. The first meaningful information we were given was that which the visiting engineer imparted to us – nearly six weeks after the fault was reported. The inescapable subtext of his observations was that Openreach had made no serious attempt to diagnose the problem up to that point! Had they done so the fault would have been fixed in a couple of days. This is just unacceptable.

The Customer Service side of the operation – on the other hand – is clearly broken by design… which is quite simply an insult.

The BT website is explicitly designed to prevent customers from communicating in any meaningful way with real live human beings. Should one contrive – through one’s own extensive efforts – to actually discover a contact phone number, this simply (should one be (un)lucky enough to get through) connects one to BT’s call centre on the Indian subcontinent. The role of the perpetually (and unnervingly) cheerful souls who man this godforsaken outpost of the BT empire is to act as cannon fodder to the angry customer. They can do no more – since they are not equipped so to do. They have no useful information to pass on, and nothing said to them finds it’s way back to the engineers.

Once I had finally made an appointment with the Outreach engineer I was called by no less than four different call centre operatives, each wishing to inform me that an engineer was to visit. Oh really?!

After the engineer had been and gone they called again:

“An engineer will be with you this afternoon.”

“He’s already been.”

“I’ll call back later to update you.”

“No – let me update you!”

…and I filled them in on the nature of the fault. It was clearly the first time that they had heard any of this information.

BT would doubtless try to explain away this sorry excuse for a ‘service’ by pleading the sheer weight of calls with which they have to deal. Well – I have some advice… equip the operatives with useful information to disburse and the customer will not feel the need to keep calling back. I would estimate – from my own experience – that call traffic could be cut by 70-80%! This would also reduce dramatically the amount of time currently given over to listening to the angry diatribes of disillusioned customers.

Right! That’s enough…

Flame off!