BT Complaints & Escalation

Lolli101

Thank you Stuart for your offer to help sort this out.

I've sent the email, I copied my post and at the bottom I've detailed what I am happy to pay to BT.

I've also stated briefly my concerns that we've possiblybeen overcharged for very high broadband usage, in some cases 40GB over our allowance which doesn't add up to me. I tried to log into and then register last night onto the forum but my password kept being thrown back saying the 2nd password didn't match the 1st. I gave up.
Anyhow hoping you can sort stuff and be a shining example to the poor quality staff that man the phones and don't want to do their job to the best of their ability.

NonFibreBroadband

Can anyone out there tell mehow to get out of a loop where BT tell my ISP every two days, that therouting problem on my telephone line, will be fixed within two days?

This has been happening fortwo weeks and the problem keeps getting "escalated" but not resolved.
No-onewill talk to me directly, so I can't find out why everyone else in my villagecan apparently connect to the new fibre service, but I can't

Mumzzy

Hi, I have 'phoned and written BT about the shocking service I have received from them. After being with the company for years, paying all my dues regularly and never causing the smallest of ripples despite having been wrongly over billed I am now looking elsewhere. I can't get any response to my 'phone calls or written complaint regarding the mess they made replacing outdated wiring. I have now sat for hours on the 'phone on my one and only day off. Not one of the options regarding complaints take you to a live person and on the one time I sat the duration even then it has gone nowhere. They have my mobile and landline numbers and yet despite being a communication company have not 'phoned to respond. I now have 2 complaint references and no resolution. My next day off will be spent sourcing another provider.

Emanef

Don't know if it's any help but the number of the guy at BT complaints who did get mine resolved last year (Oct) was [FONT=&quot]0800 085 7806.[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT]

BT_company_representative

Hi Mumzzy

I am sorry you have had trouble getting this sorted out. I'll be happy to help and get everything straightened out.

Could you email me using the contact form under my user profile please?

Cheers

Craig

another_fedup_BT_user

Why can't BT sort out its customer care? I'm still waiting for Ian Livingstones response to my letter sent recorded delivery over 6 weeks ago -although I did receive a letter from Warren Buckley welcoming me back to BT!!! I had no option as it appears they are the only provider in my area. This morning I came in to find a recorded message telling me I hadn't paid the bill - that's because I haven't received one!!! I have tried to contact BT and spent hours on the phone today even going so far to press the return call button - all to no avail. And I don't have a customer number as sadly Warren missed this off his correspondence....BT really are a BIG disappointment - have tried executive complaints but they appear to have changed the number yet again. Before I moved house was with Plusnet and they spoke English and were very good on customer care so come on BT get your act together - you are the cause of a lot of stress and problems!

Lolli101

:j Thank you to Charlene at BT Social Media Dept for investigating and finally resolving my final bill with BT.

I posted on here originally out of serious frustration with other BT employees refusing offers of payment and basically not giving a damn about esculating my problem to a senior staff member and not willing to provide ANY customer care or service.

Anyone else who posts on here can be rest assured that finally their BT problems will be addressed and resolved thanks to the BT Representatives that are on this site and do their job 100%.

Praise and thanks to Charlene.

BT_company_representative

Hi another fedup BT user,

I am really sorry no-one has got back to you about this yet, I'll be happy to have a look into your complaint asap.

Could you send me in an email using the contact form under my profile please?

Cheers

Craig

AndyArmstrong

Hi,

I sincerely hope you can help us. My partner and I have been trapped in the nightmare that is the BT customer service system since the start of our contact.

Having just moved into our first house at the end of last year, we were eager to get broadband. Since BT is a household name, we never expected to have any problems.

Even though we have only been with BT for four months, the service we have had has been beyond diabolical.

We have suffered missing refunds, errant charges (albeit small ones), no giftcard, and to top it off incredibly poor and now none existent service.

After countless (and I really do mean countless) stressful hours on the phone over the past five months (on more than a few occasions being dealt with by some seriously rude and down right nasty people) we finally wrote a letter of complaint about three weeks ago.

Sorry about the following wall of text, I'd summaries it but I really don't feel I can give BT anymore of my time!

---

"Order 1:

We placed this order on Thursday the 15th of November 2013. We paid the line rental, a charge of £129.00, and the delivery for the router, £6.95, up front.

When we received the order confirmation, we were shocked by the installation date given. Nearly eight weeks away, on the 8th of January. We thought this must be a mistake at first and decided to call customer services.

We contacted yourselves the next day to enquire as to whether this waiting period was correct, or if it could be reduced, only to be abruptly and rather rudely informed that the instillation date was indeed correct and that if we wanted the equipment to be installed at an earlier time, we should cancel the order and go with another service provider. Naively, perhaps somewhat to do with the woman's rather rude manor, we decided that cancelling our order was the best option.

The order was cancelled and we were told we would receive a full refund for both the line rental and the delivery charge.

After only a short time shopping around we quickly realized that we had been misled by your representative. As all broadband companies use BT's engineers to set up the phone line, the wait would always be the same!

The problems with this cancelled order continued. Between my partner and I, we made over a dozen calls to your customer services department chasing our refund. We were assured every time we called that it would just take “3-5 days” and the full refund would be with us. We always waited the “3-5 days” and there was never any refund made. I would call back on the 5th day, only to be given various excuses. This went on for over two months. We were finally given a refund on 24th January.

Unfortunately the issue did not end there.

The refund of £129.00 that we received only covered the line rental, not the delivery charge! I am still chasing a refund of £6.95 for the delivery charge at the date of this letter. (Still chasing as I'm posting this now).


Order 2:

Unfortunately, before we realized the horrendous problem we would have receiving our refund, we placed a second order for broadband & calls: AGTAA4611022 (placed 22nd of November 2012).

This was set to be installed on the 16 January 2013.

The 16th arrived, and in the allotted time the first engineer arrived to install the phone line. Regrettably our installation would not prove to be a smooth one. The engineer appeared to be having trouble getting the line to work. Eventually he spent some time at the junction box down the road before returning and saying there appeared to be a problem at the exchange. He would investigate and return to the property to explain or continue the installation.

Two hours later a second engineer arrived, this time to install the broadband. He found this task impossible because the phone line had not been implemented by the first engineer.

The first engineer never returned and did not contact us further.

This then left us in a position whereby we had to call you again, the next day, to find out what was going on. We were stunned to be told that we were going to have to wait three more weeks to have the internet installed as we had not given the first engineer 'access to the property', despite taking a day off work specifically to do this. We can happily describe the engineer who visited our property, tell you exactly what he did and even how many sugars he had in his tea.

It is clear that because he could not fix the problem, and apparently did not even have the decency to call us to explain, he decided to lie and say that we had not given him access to the property.

Eventually after two more stressful hours on the phone, it became apparent the engineer had lied. We were therefore given an expedited call-out date to have someone return to the property and fit the phone line, but not the broadband at the same time.

Unfortunately, it would turn out not be as simple for the broadband. We were then forced to spend numerous more hours on the phone trying to get an expedited call-out for a broadband engineer, before finding out that in order to get an earlier engineer call-out, we would need to cancel our original broadband order and then place another! We had no choice but to do this, and hope that BT did not let us down again with a long wait.

Three days later, we were then given a new date for an engineer to return to the property and install the broadband. In the meantime, the phone line was successfully installed on 21st January by simply switching over the wires in the phone line box in the house wall. Why did the original phone line engineer not try this on the 16th? So, I (Andrew) then booked another day off work to wait in for the broadband engineer, who arrived to successfully install the broadband on 31st January, 10 days after the phone line installation.

It happened to be the same engineer who had tried to install the broadband first time (a very nice gentleman who was very sympathetic about the situation and did his job both quickly and efficiently). So in total it took us 76 days to receive the service we ordered.

We naively hoped that our problems with BT would end there.

When our first bill arrived, there was a strange charge for 0.26p in the 'calls' section of the document. As we did not, and never had at that point, had a phone connected to the line, it was impossible for us to have incurred those charges. So we rang to report the issue, and to hopefully shed some light onto it. We were dealt with by an individual in billing, who was abrasive and rather unhelpful. Her best advice was to 'call the number and see who it was'. It was clear to us that she thought we were lying about not having connected a phone (even though that was the only call made on the entire of the first bill).

At this point in the process we were despairing with the customer service offered by your company, so we ended the call there and decided to call back the next day.

In our next call, the woman was much more helpful. She identified the 'call' as the engineer actually testing the telephone line after installation. While we were please it was nothing more sinister, we were then shocked when we were flatly refused a refund on the charge. How am we liable for the charges incurred during installation, when it clearly states the fee has been waived in our order summary as part of the deal?

Although this annoyed us, as it was such a small amount, we let the refusal go.

At this point the issue is currently unresolved.

Meanwhile we were still waiting for the £50 Sainsbury’s gift card that was supposed to come as part of our order. Having spent further countless hours of our time on the phone, we were again met with blatant dishonesty. At one stage, your representative told us that the card had been dispatched 'last Tuesday', but when asked what date this was, he was totally unable to tell us. I highly doubt my account said 'dispatched last Tuesday', without mentioning a date!

Having still not received the gift card, this has been proven be a lie once again. Since this time we have called several times to trace the gift card to finally be informed that there was nothing your staff could do regarding gift card, and that we would in fact have to contact Sainsbury’s ourselves to secure what you had advertised. It is absolutely the responsibility of your staff to chase this matter as it is being provided as part of the offer that encouraged me to take out the service with BT in the first place.
As of this date, no gift card has arrived.

During our entire ordeal with your company, the broadband speeds we have been receiving were fluctuating heavily, and even taking into account diminishing returns based on distance from the exchange, at times we were not receiving a fraction of the speed it is reasonable to expect (or stated in our contact). I have evidence demonstrating the incredibly poor broadband speeds you have been providing, and I would happily send this to you. Recently, a speed test was performed on 19th April when the laptop was connected to the router via a wire, and the speed returned at low 0.21mpbs download and 0.56mbps upload speed. This is completely unacceptable!

To compound our troubles further, the phone line then failed on March 6th and there was no dial tone. Bearing in mind that we are still paying our bills, for a service that we are no longer receiving, we were once again forced to deal with your atrocious customer service team.

We rang and reported the issue not long after. We were told by a representative that they could see there was an issue and it would be investigated. We should therefore wait 3-5 days and the issue should be sorted. Before the 5 days was up, we went on holiday and were unable to call to track the repair, but consider our disbelief when we returned home over a month later to find the line unfixed!

We finally sent an email to your company on April 15th detailing our situation, and as a result of that Andrew was called by one of your representatives. In this call he was told that an engineer would finally be dispatched to the exchange, as it was clear there was a fault on the line that needed fixing. However, if the engineer deemed that the fault was with the phone line in our house, rather than at the exchange, we would be charged £99 to sort out the problem!

After one of your engineers had already lied about being given access to our property during the phone line installation, we felt in no position to be able to trust in the integrity of your employees when deciding where the fault with the phone line rests. We also feel that it is unacceptable to charge us for the phone line to be fixed, when it is in fact a BT phone line and therefore BTs responsibility. It is likely that the fault is a result of poor installation of the phone line in the first place, as few of your employees seem to be properly trained to do their jobs.

So we are now trapped in the disheartening situation of having no phone line, and yet still being forced to pay for this service. As of our latest bill on 22nd April for £43.45, we have paid £30.90 for our phone line, which has not even been operational over this two month period! Naturally we called up to discuss this issue, and to see if the phone line charge could be removed from our latest bill as it is not even working. The representative was rude and dismissive and after almost two hours on the phone to customer services, we were told that we had no choice but to pay this bill, and that there weren't even any notes on our account to say that we had informed BT of this issue!

At this point in time, the service you are providing us is not acceptable. Our internet is variable at best and our phone line is has not been operational for over 8 weeks. Andrew works from home, and his job required a stable active internet connection. (The quality of the service we receive is paramount as I work from home; something I have not been able to do due to how poor the broadband speed has been).
You have cost us hundreds of pounds worth of our time, in hours on the phone and time off work, with an endless stream of issues we have had to deal with, and as a result of the stress BT has caused us, Andrew is now suffering ill health."

---

We received a reply today, which seems to be written by someone who hadn't actually read our letter at all.

I know our problems may seem trivial compared to some people on this forum, but to us they have caused a great deal of stress and more than a few sleepless nights.

At this point in time, all we want is to be out of the contract with BT. Unfortunately because of my inability to work efficiently, due to the very poor broadband line quality, we cannot afford the huge cancellation fees. Catch 22.

I really hope you can help us.

Andrew

BT_company_representative

Hi Andrew,

Could you send in your details and we'll get back to you? You can find our contact link by clicking on my profile.

Thanks,

Stephanie