Horrible service from BT, how to complain?

Odie85

Hi all,

Apologies in advance for the length of this post!

I have recently moved into a new flat that I purchased.

I had an account with BT for the flat I was renting, so called their home move team to book an engineer visit to activate the phone line at the new property.

As this is a brand new flat and has not had the line activated before, I was informed that a charge of £122.50 would be made. This is fine, I was offered the usual no-charge deal if I take an 18 month contract and make 10 chargeable calls per month but I declined and stuck with the 12 month contract I'm currently on which includes the free evenings and weekends plan. I was advised that I would be committing to a new 12 month contract from the date the new line was activated, again this was fine.

I was given yesterday as the date on which the engineer would visit, between 1pm and 6pm. I was advised that even though the engineer would call before he/she arrived, there was no guarantee about when this would happen, i.e it might not be sufficient time for me to get to the flat from work (approx 40 mins) and that if I wasn't at the property when the engineer arrived, I would be charged.

Again, the above is fair enough although not ideal, so I took a day off work to stay in the flat.

The engineer didn't turn up!

I had called at around 3:45pm to see if they could tell me when the engineer might arrive, but was told that they had no further info and I'd just have to wait it out.

At 6:15pm, after no engineer and no contact at all, I called up again. This time after explaining the issue, I was passed to the Indian call centre, where the lady said something about the order still being at a status of Pending and that she "had to cancel it and rebook", she was a little bit rude about this when I queried why this was the case and she forcefully just repeated that there was a problem with the order (she wouldn't say what) and that she had to cancel it and rebook it. I did not agree to her cancelling the order at this point.

By this point she had put me on hold and had in fact transferred me back to the home move department in the UK. They basically told me that she shouldn't have cancelled the order and that they had no information about why the engineer didn't visit. Basically because the order was cancelled, my only option was to go back to square one and place the order again!

Needless to say I wasn't particularly happy, having explained the chain of events to multiple people by this point. Following this I was advised that some other team may be able to assist me and was transferred around for the next half hour, each time repeating the story, each time being told either that the team didn't deal with such matters or that I just had to place a new order and go to the back of the queue (approx 15 days lead time apparently).

In the end I was transferred back to the home move team and they placed a new order manually (there was some system issue), meaning that I have no reference number as the order hasn't actually been officially placed and need to wait up to two further days for them to contact me!

Needless to say, I'm really not happy. I spent over 1 h 10 mins on the phone to BT yesterday, from my mobile (so chargeable even though it's an 0800 number!), being transferred around 5 or 6 times like a fool.

I'm not in a Virgin Media area so I don't really have much option other than to go with BT as it's a brand new line that has never been activated. Sky (who I get my broadband through) said they couldn't touch it if it is a brand new line.

Does anyone have any email addresses of people at BT that I could send my story to in case they can do anything to sort this out?

Cheers,
- Odie

Odie85

I should also say that in case a BT representative reads this and can help me, I have a note of the various reference numbers that I was given by BT in relation to the original order and a note of the time where I called the call centre as well as a list of the various departments I was transferred to and what each one told me.

Heinz

Odie85 wrote: »

Does anyone have any email addresses of people at BT that I could send my story to in case they can do anything to sort this out?

I've had some success with THIS.

BT_company_representative

Hi there, please PM your order details.

Odie85

PM sent with details.

I got a response from an email I sent to Ian Livingstone and it says that someone will be in touch to try to resolve this, but any further info you could please provide in relation to why the original engineer visit did not happen would be greatly appreciated.