BT Complaints & Escalation

POPPYOSCAR

I would like to also join the list of "I Hate BT".

I have also liked the "I Hate BT" Facebook page.

If I could do without them altogether I would.

Fed up with being lied to and treated like they could not care less if they have my custom or not.

dackers

Read down for a quite incredible level of dis-service. I have emailed the Group CEO. His email is as follows:

[EMAIL="gavin.e.patterson@bt.com"]gavin.e.patterson@bt.com[/EMAIL]

Dear Gavin,

My sincere apologies for contacting you directly as a retail customer and via my office email. However I am so utterly outraged and frustrated with the service I have been subjected to by BT that I felt you would want to know. I certainly would if it were my company.

My family moved into a new property in early July and quite naturally ordered a landline from BT. We paid £279.83 up front for the installation and phones. The install date was confirmed. All smooth until the date of the install for which my wife stayed at home to deal with. No show from the engineers and finally I received a call at 4.15pm that day to say they would not be arriving and a new date would be arranged. The new date was arranged and I received a call a couple of days before to say was I at home as someone needed to “drive by” to approve the install.

This seemed bizarre but it was done. Then the install date was changed again. Finally at the third attempt the team arrived, only after a phone call with your team assured me that the install would be complete that day as I had called to cancel the order as the level of service was unacceptable. Based on that assurance we reinstated the order and went ahead. The day came, the team arrived and left within half an hour as they did not have the right cable, despite the drive by check.

The next date was scheduled and the team arrived and after a full day finally we were operational and given a phone number.

We then advised all the relevant contacts of the new phone number that you need to do on moving home…insurers, doctors, bank….etc.

Yesterday at 7am we received a bill…I had not had a chance to open the bill and look at it but by the time I got home from work yesterday evening the phone was not working.

My wife called today to enquire as to why the line was down and she was told it was because the bill we had been sent 24 hours earlier had not been paid..when in fact we had paid it up front on July 14th.

She then challenged that and has been told that a new order to install a line needs to be raised, a new number will be set up (not the one we have been given) and then a further order needs to be raised to change the number back to the original number.

I don’t know about you, but if this were my business I would be beyond embarrassed. Working in a commercial enterprise as I do, I would expect to lose that customer for good, along with a host of other clients who they informed and my market reputation would be in tatters. Unfortunately I do not work for a monopoly who appear to take their customer base for granted.

At this stage, I am quite relaxed about whether or not I have a land line and will happily exist on mobile phones and internet (not provided by BT or its subsidiary companies), but I am keen to hear your thoughts, or those of a senior manager in the retail division who you may choose to pass this onto on how you would like to restore any faith in your company.

passenger

Having nightmare with BT who have signed me up for service I did not request Have called complaints team 4 times to no avail

We are legal services co so watch this space as we are about to issue proceedings for breach of contract against BT

BT_company_representative

Hi dackers & passenger,

Your posts don't make great reading at all and I'm really sorry about the problems you've both had with BT recently. If you need any help please use the contact link that can be found by clicking on my profile to send in your details and we'll be happy to help.

Thanks
Neil

suedeapple

I have a BT Business Infinity Unlimited Account. It is meant to provide me with my telephone calls at £19.00 per month for line rental + 500 minutes of free land calls, and we negotiated our Infinity Package to Include for the Unlimited Internet to cost £35.00 a month less £3.00 discount for having both billed together as one package. We were also offered an incentive of £210.00 to change to Infinity and this was added to our Internet account as a credit. And there was another discount of 0.80 per month for paying by direct debit. Doesn’t sound too difficult does it.
This was meant to start in April.
[COLOR="Cyan"]Important note
Prior to this our phone bills had been , at a maximum £28.00 per month, but more often£25.00 per month, so for the 5 months since we started this I would be expecting not to pay any more than £125.00, + vat up to this point in time (September 10th 2014)[/COLOR]
It’s a sad case, but this didn’t happen once,
I have been charged as follows:-
[COLOR="rgb(0, 255, 255)"]12th May £276.10- I was charged for a fictitious engineer visit, [/COLOR]that never happened
8th June £90.84
June £276.10 - the same charge was deducted again from my bank account - this time we didn’t bother waiting for bt to perhaps refund the money to us within 7 - 10 working days and instead we got our bank to cancel that and refund us straight away.
8th July £68.05
7th August £62.98
19th August £50.32 - they kindly used some of my credit to pay this bill in full - even though it wasn’t correct.
and finally 8th September £128.61

Now you might wonder why we allowed this to continue for so long, the reason is we didn’t even know it was happening until the last week, because BT would not give us access to our bills online, and would not post our bills to us either, infact for most of the summer they had lost my bills, so I was having money removed from my account without ever being given a bill first. We emailed BT about this, they ignored us, We phoned BT about this, their representative put the phone down on us, we sent letters and emails to their escalation team, this has also been ignored

That’s disgraceful enough,

My husband started looking at the account to realise none of what we had been promised was actually happening, our account did not show the right charges and he spent a considerable amount of time trying to get bt to acknowledge the fact they were ignoring us after " robbing us blind" I think the phrase would be.
Eventually he felt he had no option but to refer this to the Ombudsman who found it difficult to understand what on earth BT were doing with our account, said we would be lucky to get any compensation for our trouble and stress ( £50.00 was the general maximum that BT offered), and eventually tried to persuade us to agree to a resolution that would involve BT paying us 3 months rental ie around£150.00 compo, as well as putting our account package correct and correcting all our bills, making sure they were present for us to see. (That is down to my husband to agree, he did the leg work to this point)
Our bills turned up online, but BT never told us this had happened, it was pure luck that we checked the account quite anally.
Once the bills turned up I noticed that the phone part of the account was looking very odd indeed and have now spent hours analysing the bills to find they have been overcharging us left right and centre every month, they have been charging us for our phone calls, our free 500 minutes seemed to have vanished or never appeared in the first place and they have been using our credits to pay off bills that should never have been charged in the first place and then when the BT representative gets involved they feel they only have to credit us the balance.
This has got so confusing its unbelievable, and because BT have only recently made the online bills available to us, so we can only check what is going on , and because we have only been aware of these billing errors on our phone part of the contract very recently the ombudsmen tells us we have to go through the BT Billing department once again to get the account errors resolved first, and then if this doesn’t happen we should then go back to the ombudsman. Of course this means we have to start once again at the bottom of the food chain. I am sure there are people working for BT who have a few brain cells, but I don’t think I have spoken to them yet. I think I have dealt with the ones with a degree in stupidity. Each time I speak to any of them they look at our account and say "oh yes you have had a credit applied its all sorted now."
:mad:
We have been given credits for goodwill (at the start of the contract) £210.00
credits for overcharging us, which then get removed from our account as they are used to pay fictitious bills
and then we have to try and keep a track of our account,
it gets very difficult to work out what has happened with all the credits

for example lets say

we have a credit on our account of £50.00
we have been overcharged for a service (lets say £100.00) and the credit has been used against the bill and the remainder was removed from our bank account, we didn’t have any knowledge of the bill or access to it at this point. so at this point the bill is showing as being £50.00 when you look at the account billing overview, and has been paid by using our £50.00 credit and £50.00 removed from our bank account
we speak to bt, and they say oh yes see what it is I tell you what we will give you a credit of what's on the bill plus a few quid more and that will clear it off and make things right, but what they actually do is give us a credit of £69.00 which is £50.00 for the bill and another one months telephone service credit, but they have totally ignored the credit they seized from my BT account and so the £50.00 credit that they used , which in any ones terms is MY MONEY has gone unnoticed and seems to be lost forever and so I am still overpaying for the agreed service.

Never mind the free minutes for the landline calls etc……… where are they…… lost forever as well it would seem.

So I go through the process again, do a live chat, as at least this way we get to keep a record of the conversation, clearly saying which bills this applies to and I try to explain how I want this sorted asap, I am on holiday I don’t want to be tied up with this on my time off, and am told, sorry cant happen BT person has to raise it as an issue then try and highlight it as urgent and hopefully someone will come back to us in 10 to 14 days, I say this is no good please put me through to your line manager and than am told the manager is in a meeting and cant be disturbed, so it is left for the bt person to do as she is told, raise this as yet another issue and highlight it as being urgent. Then today I get an email from the BT person I spoke to the previous day saying they had looked at my account and have seen that credits had been raised after discussing this with my husband, and perhaps I should speak to him to find out what has been going on, and that the issue has not been highlighted or passed on at all. At this point I hit the roof, the only saving grace was that this communication was by email and so I could not get accused of abusing the BT person. I slammed off a very irate email, pointing out I had explained to them beforehand that there was existing issues which were being dealt with and that this issue applied to bill a and b for values £100.00 (and by process of elimination not c which had a value of £128.00) I have now passed on to them and the Ombudsman my bt bill analysis, which attempts to track all my credits and refunds etc, but I am not so sure this will be understood by the Numptys Anonymous at Bloo*y Terrible.

So has anyone got a contact that can be passed on for someone responsible at BT. I am pretty sure I am not the only person that hasn’t been able to access their phone bills, apparently this was a system error, and so I think we can be pretty sure that this situation has probably happened to many more of the BT paying public.

I have requested a much larger compensation payment for the time I have spent on this, I obviously had to do this as their staff were incapable of working out what£25.00 x 5 was and instead of charging me £125.00 - £86.66 credit, (total of £38.34 due) they instead have charged me £953.00,
here comes my Martin Lewis Impression
that’s right £953.00 YES £953.00

crin

I so agree with your sentiments suedeapple. I am leaving BT after 12 months of hell when my contract ends and have done a spreadsheet of what my actual August bill will be instead of their stupid calculations I ni longer ring as I can;t understand a word they say and yes, they hung up on me too. Going via this forum did at least mean I got someone to email me direct that I could try to get it sorted out with. I inly got a goodwill offer if £20 and even though I consider it an insult I accepted and went about doing some research so I could change when my contract ended bye bye BR we will never see each other again ever and if anyone asks I sha;; tell them to avoid you.

borkid

Sent to me from a friend acouple of months ago so hope its still working.

Maureen Taylor (one of many working there)
Executive Level Complaints
Direct line: 01977 593224
Email address: [EMAIL="enniskillen.manager1@bt.com"]enniskillen.manager1@bt.com[/EMAIL]
Correspondence Centre, Durham, DH98 1BT

POPPYOSCAR

BT_company_representative wrote: »

Hi dackers & passenger,

Your posts don't make great reading at all and I'm really sorry about the problems you've both had with BT recently. If you need any help please use the contact link that can be found by clicking on my profile to send in your details and we'll be happy to help.

Thanks
Neil

Fair enough you have offered to help but why are we all having so many problems in the first place that are not being sorted out to our satisfaction when we complain direct to BT?


Why does it take coming onto a public forum before things even have a chance of being sorted?

BT need to get their act together.

Valentin_B

I would say stay away from BT, they don't seem to do what they say.
I have signed up for a contract with BT on the 1st of July but I have changed my mind withing the two weeks(which they say you can).
Called them on the 11th and asked for my order to be canceled.
When calling back on the 21st to ask why I have not received any notifications that my order was canceled, surprise, my order was not canceled because of a "human error" they said.
Then they refunded my 12 month line rental I have paid when singing up.
But when they have sent the last bill the line rental money were added back because I have not canceled the order within the 2 weeks.
Now they say there is no proof I have canceled the line on the 11th and the call was not recorded.
I cant see where my mistake is, I have called within two weeks but BT say I have not.
Regards

Slingbex

My complaint is about repeated overcharging by BT for broadband service.

I have spoken to BT several times about this issue over several months, without any satisfactory resolution.

I have been a long-time BT phone service customer, and after constant cold-calling by BT sales staff as well as letters, against my better judgement, I agreed to take BT's current broadband deal in April this year. The deal was attractive: no extra charge for six months for 10Gb/month broadband connection.

I was shocked by my first BT bill incorporating broadband. I received a first bill of £155.77, of which £106.00 + taxes was for excess broadband charges.

According to this bill, from 1 April - 30 April I used 55Gb extra broadband data (in addition to 10Gb allowance) and from 1 May - 31 May 2014 I used 50Gb extra broadband data (in addition to 10Gb allowance). That is, BT is claiming I used a total of 65Gb data in April 2014, and 60Gb data in May 2014. This is a wild claim, and totally untrue. I have paid this £106.00 charge under protest, but I want this money refunded. I was (supposedly) sent a warning when I (supposedly) approached the limit of my data allowance, but this warning was sent to my new 'BT' email address. I have never used this address, and I had supplied my correct email address to BT, and they already used it to contact me on other matters.

I am aware of my internet use, and totally rebut this huge usage claim over this period. A BT technician on the phone connected to my router, and argued that my usage was very high, as shown by the large number of devices connecting to my router. However I regularly repair and test internet-enabled devices, and connect them to the internet to test them, and occasionally to download driver software for them. This is almost my whole internet use! Large numbers of different devices (at different times, not all at once) does not mean heavy internet use. I do very little else online, and only use it occasionally for other things. My monthly use is well within the 10Gb limit.

During this period my router was faulty - it stopped working and/or rebooted whenever I received or made a call on the landline, and sometimes randomly. This may be be a cause of the misreading of my internet usage. I have read that the BT usage meter cannot be relied on under these circumstances.

A visiting BT engineer replaced and changed my line filter as part of his fault-finding; it is possible that the original filter was faulty.

I removed the filter from the phoneline on instruction from a BT technician on the phone who talked me through some basic tests. S/he didn't state that I needed to replace the filter after the test. In any case, the router problem pre-dated my removing the filter.

It is easy to notice that many BT broadband customers have very similar complaints to mine. I believe that BT has a general policy to make money from their broadband customers by charging them for services that they didn't use. I also believe that BT use underhand tactics to force users of their 'free' broadband service to upgrade to their paid unlimited service, no matter how little they go online.

BT has either wilfully miscalculated my broadband usage, or has simply guessed it. I have also read that BT maintains an attitude of ignoring complaints, hoping that the customer will give up their complaint. I will not be giving up, I will escalate this complaint as necessary, as I am being asked to pay for service I didn't receive, and cannot afford.

BT's consistently poor handling of so many complaints would seem to be grounds for a class action with a good chance of success. How are they getting away with this kind of 'service'?

For days at a time my router was switched off, as I was not using the service. I would switch the router on for use. Somehow this has made no difference to my supposed usage, another reason why I believe my broadband usage was guessed rather than measured.

I am so angry about this issue that I have left BT and have signed up with a rival broadband and landline provider.

However, my issues with BT are still outstanding.
These are:
I want the excess broadband element of the bill I have already paid, refunded (Bill date 13 June 2014, paid £106.00 + taxes), as I did not use that level of the service.

I have also received a (final) bill from BT dated 5 September 2014. It includes a £53.00 charge (+ taxes) for excess broadband use. I want this charge cancelled for the same reason.

I also want the DPC for HomeHub 4 charge cancelled (£55.00 + taxes)- I was sent a BT Freepost envelope, and have used this to return the BT router.

I want the Broadband and Calls cancellation charge (£187.81 + taxes) cancelled, and the Broadband Access cessation charge cancelled (£30.00 + taxes).

It was not reasonable for me to continue as a BT customer when I was being so seriously overcharged. By overcharging me, BT created the circumstances wherein I was forced to break the contract, so I will not pay BT fees for having to do this.

I want the charge for additional broadband usage June 1 - June 30 (£53.00 + taxes) on this bill cancelled, again because I did not use this excess data (65Gb), and so I will not pay for it. It is another wild claim.

On 18 September I sent a letter to BT complaining about this situation. I received a response, (via BT Correspondence Centre), but it was unsatisfactory. The reply was badly written and spelt, and did not actually address any of my concerns.

I am hoping that this public complaint will get more attention and enable my issue to be finally resolved. I am simultaneously sending this complaint (and any further correspondence) directly to the BT CEO [EMAIL="gavin.e.patterson@bt.com"]gavin.e.patterson@bt.com[/EMAIL], and also to our friendly BT rep who posts here at MSE.