BT complaints

BT_company_representative

Hi folks,

In response to keith969, have you now placed the order? If you want to drop me a PM with the details I can check the order for you or arrange a new order if you have not already placed one.

Hi Culpepper, also sorry to hear about the problems with your billing. If you can send me a PM with your details I will be happy to look into this for you.

Cheers

Shane.

mcfield

Hi

I've never posted here before but felt i had to due the complete ineptitude of BT in getting a line installed.

I needed to get a new line installed for my 80 year old mother (her only means of communicating as mobile reception is very poor in her area). Now it all started off smoothly, got the free connection with an 18 month contract, engineer came out to survey the house, everything was ok and openreach were due to connect on the 14th.

The 14th came along and my mum waited in for them to turn up, i tried calling her on her new number throughout the days and was getting no answer. Eventually called my sister (who lives nearby) and was told no-one came from bt.

Understandly i was pretty annoyed but couldn't contact bt until the next day. When i spoke to them i was told that openreach had re-arranged the apppointment for the 26th October !!!!! would have been nice if someone had told me that.

WHen i explained the situation that it was the only means of contact for my elderly mother the bt lady was very sympathetic and said she woudl try to move the appointment forward and would call me back...... i never heard from her again.

Three more times i've contacted them trying to get an answer as to why the didn't turn up and to get my mother connected. Everyone always seems sypathetic but no-ones gives me an answer or arranges an earlier appointment.

I cannot believe a company can be this inept, i would have thought that the fact they missed their appointment, didn't bother to tell me and the fact they are leaving an 80 year old cut off in her home would compell them to actual do something.

Worse still my mother is getting upset and worried now that she can;t contact anyone.

M

DVardysShadow

mcfield wrote: »

Three more times i've contacted them trying to get an answer as to why the didn't turn up and to get my mother connected. Everyone always seems sypathetic but no-ones gives me an answer or arranges an earlier appointment.

That is their job, to be sympathetic. It's called Customer Service, being sympathetic. Their job is not to give you an answer, arrange an appointment or even get your mother's phone connected. You are more likely to get a bunch of flowers.

mcfield

No its not, being sympathetic is the job of a social worker.... the job of customer service is, and this is quite a revolutionaty statement "to provide a service to a customer"...... not just agree its bad and do nothing !

BT_company_representative

Hi mcfield, I have now sent you a PM if you would like my help please PM me back! Thanks Natasha

culpepper

BT_company_representative wrote: »

Hi folks,
Hi Culpepper, also sorry to hear about the problems with your billing. If you can send me a PM with your details I will be happy to look into this for you.
Cheers

Shane.

Thankyou very much shane for the offer,it is much appreciated ,
OH wants to wait and see if we will be wrongly billed yet again though, as he hopes his last call will have done the trick.

RobinLondon

Another complaint for the pile.

Last week I switched my BT calling plan from Unlimited Weekend and Evening (UWE), to Unlimited Anytime (UA).

My existing UWE package had included free Friends and Family Saver (!!!!!!) - if I looked online online it would show the UWE calling plan and underneath would be the !!!!!! package at nil charge.

I was told that the new UA package also included free !!!!!!.

When I looked at my calling plan online the day after switching, I was being charged £1.50 per month for !!!!!!.

So I rang up again, and was told that UA included free !!!!!!, and the charges would be deleted.

I checked my account online, and instead of it showing !!!!!! at nil cost, there was no mention of !!!!!!. Just the UA package showed up.

So I sent another email to check that I was getting free !!!!!!. The reply stated "Currently there is no Friends and Family Package on your account. You need not pay £1.50 incl. VAT as you are eligible to get this offer free of charge for 12 months contract."

So I sent another email saying that I was most certainly meant to be getting free !!!!!! and could these please be added to my account.

And lo and behold I get a reply telling me that !!!!!! is no longer included for free with UA and I have to pay £1.50 per month if I want it.

Round in circles, heading backwards.

Since then I've found it impossible to speak to anyone at BT by phone and I am completely fed up!

sara539

Well it seems I'm not alone! I moved house on 18 September and have had HUGE problems with my BT 'home move'; honestly it has been worse than actually moving house!

Today I composed a letter of complaint only to find that there is really no facility to complain, other than to phone them - as if I want to do that after I estimate I have spent at least 6 hours on the phone to them over the past month just to get my phone line and broadband up and running. And it's STILL not sorted.

I am going to post my letter here in the hope that someone from BT may actually read it and respond.

I have never, ever, experienced incompetence like it.

Letter to follow - apologies in advance that this will be a long post, but it may be my only chance of having my say!

sara539

Apologies again for the length of this post. Here's the letter:

Dear BT

I should like to draw your attention to the service I have received following my recent house move.

Monday 21 September
I telephoned to place my order for my ‘home move’. I was advised that it would take 3-5 working days for my phone line to be active, 48 hours later I would receive a text to confirm that my Broadband was active.

Saturday 26 September
The line was not active so I phoned again. I was advised that the order I had placed on 21 September had been cancelled. When I asked by whom (obviously I hadn’t cancelled it), the adviser was unable to tell me and said that the matter would have to be referred to another team who would ‘investigate’ and contact me within 24 hours.

Sunday 27 September
Not having received a call, I phoned again. I was advised that I should place the order again. I went through the whole process again with another adviser, who advised me that the same 3-5 working days time-line would apply. At the end of the process, he advised me that he was unable to submit the order as there was ‘a problem’ with it. Again I was advised that someone else would contact me when it had been investigated. Needless to say, nobody did.

Tuesday 29 September
I phoned again and was advised that my order (which supposedly hadn’t been submitted) was being processed and my phone line would be active on Tues 13 October. Naturally I was unhappy with having to wait a further 2 weeks without any form of explanation. I spent over an hour on the phone trying to speak to a Manager. Eventually I was put through to a Manager who, when I asked him to explain what the problem was and why I would now have to wait another 2 weeks, said my order had ‘got stuck’. Unhappy with this explanation I tried, in vain, to discover what on earth had been going on with my order. The Manager advised me that my order was now ‘a working line take-over’, quite how this could be when my line had never actually been working, I don’t know. Finally I accepted that there was nothing he could, or would, do to bring the completion of the order forward. He assured me repeatedly that my phone line and Broadband would be active on 13 October. When I told him that I had absolutely no confidence in that being the case, he was quite flippant and reiterated that there would be no further problems.

Tuesday 13 October
I received an email to say that my phone line would now be activated on 20 October. The phone number quoted was not the same as the one I had been given, which was the first indication I had that the number was changing. Given that I only have access to email at work, having had no Broadband for 3 weeks, it was fortunate that I had even seen the email. There was no explanation as to the even further delay so I phoned again and once again explained the situation. I spoke to a helpful adviser called Barnaby Hall who was sympathetic to my frustration and annoyance. He advised me that he could see no reason for the further delay, except that it might have been due to the need for an appointment for an engineer to visit my house (which obviously was unnecessary). He spoke to an engineer whilst I waited and advised that the phone line would be activated the following day and that he would call me the following morning to check.

Wednesday 14 October
Barnaby Hall phoned me to check whether my phone line was active; it wasn’t. He advised that he would speak again to the engineer. Later that morning I received a text to say that both my phone line and Broadband were active. When I returned home, the phone line was active but the Broadband was not.

I phoned yet again to query the Broadband. The first adviser I spoke to was positively disinterested and unhelpful so I asked to speak to someone else; the second said she wasn’t trained to help me and passed me to someone else. The third adviser repeatedly said it was ‘a problem with the exchange’ and the Broadband would not be active until 20 October. She was completely unsympathetic and unhelpful, given that I had at that point been waiting more than 3 weeks for my order to be completed. So again I resigned myself to having no option other than to wait, again.

Tuesday 20 October
Having been advised by text that my new Home Hub would be delivered whether I was at home or not (ie I did not need to be in), I arrived home to find that it hadn’t. Royal Mail had left a card for me to collect it from the Sorting Office. To add insult to injury the name on the package was incorrect. I wrote to you on two occasions last year and also telephoned to advise you that I had changed my name. Still, you persist in sending me bills addressed to my previous name, although sometimes I do get them in my new name (!). Now I am faced with the possibility of not being able to collect the Home Hub as I cannot prove my identity.

As I still have my old Home Hub, I have actually managed to get my Broadband on. However I got a call on my way home to advise me that my BT Vision would not be active until Monday 26 October, 5 weeks after I had placed my Home Move order. So the saga continues.

I am sure you can see from my account how many times I have contacted you during the last month. Needless to say, not having access to any other landline, the vast majority of these calls have been from my mobile and of course I will be charged for these. I estimate the time I have spent on the phone to you during this whole saga to be in excess of 6 hours, given that every single call I made was more than 30 minutes and one or two were more than an hour. Much of this time has been spent waiting to speak to an adviser and then explaining my situation over and over and over again.

The service I have received has been appalling; I can honestly say that I have never experienced anything like it. The staff I have spoken to, with one exception, have been either unhelpful or incompetent, or both. However, I am most annoyed by the Manager I spoke to and his attitude towards my situation; to my mind, the worst thing you can do when things go wrong is make idle promises, I would have much preferred an honest explanation rather than being ‘fobbed off’. Regrettably I do not have his name, perhaps you can identify him from the record of my calls.

I should be grateful for your response to the above and for a refund of the cost of the calls I have made to you from my mobile.

Yours sincerely

dirtmother

Just to offer my sympathy as we are in a similarly Kafka-esque mess with BT after moving into a house which was previously with Pipex. The status quo is that no-one is replying to our complaints and it has been suggested we phone them on 29th October when they may be prepared to start an umpteenth new order.

The 'best' bit of our own farce was that they wrote to tell me they'd installed a new line. Letter was addressed to new house, line installed at old house...