We're aware that some users are experiencing technical issues which the team are working to resolve. See the Community Noticeboard for more info. Thank you for your patience.
📨 Have you signed up to the Forum's new Email Digest yet? Get a selection of trending threads sent straight to your inbox daily, weekly or monthly!

BT Complaints & Escalation

Options
1959698100101110

Comments

  • JJ_Egan
    JJ_Egan Posts: 20,281 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Have you used your members community forum .Found via BT account / help .
  • boatman
    boatman Posts: 4,700 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Another happy BTcustomer... Moved from Plusnet but beginning to wonder if it was a good idea. Indian call centre is like talking to a brickwall, tell you anything!!
    Not great so far, managed to miss my broadband order completely and just gave me a phoneline. I've swapped phone/broadband now with half a dozen companies and locations so would say I know what i'm doing, perhaps its my time to suffer, it just happens to be BT..
  • boatman
    boatman Posts: 4,700 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    JJ_Egan wrote: »
    Have you used your members community forum .Found via BT account / help .
    I tried here but no difference, just think the whole BT system is just too large. If you look on the bt forum it's littered with pretty much the same complaint,

    THEY ARE USELESS.....NOT INTERESTED IN THE CUSTOMER
  • You are coming in well along a saga which has lasted a month so far. On 26 July I had the BT service moved from one house to another. This time on BT Infinity. I was staggered when BT billed me £92 for the move service! The huge bill payment came from my bank account. Anger built up but I thought that that was "one of those things".
    On 20 August my 2 year old email address collapsed. Spam flooded into it. I changed password, created a new filter on BT Mail and created a new email address. This required a massive amount of time and effort on my part. I wrote to the Chief Executive. Newcastle Complaints took over. They have been not much help at all. What really annoyed me is that BT state that if their email service screws up I as a customer can receive no compensation. I am seriously angry. In the latest phone call today I think that the caller advised that there are big spam problems with their server now! Is a broken spam filter now supposed to be normal!!
  • I joined BT in February this year after receiving phone calls about how good BT internet is and how fast it is etc. For the first 6 months the service was great, then all of a sudden i got a bill for £91 for my Infinity 1 package (normally £30). I phoned up to ask how i had got this bill and they said i had gone over my allowance, i was amazed because they said we sent you 3 emails to warn you that you were near my limit. I never received the emails and when i explained that to the member of BT staff, she basically turned and said well its your responsibility to monitor your usage. I said strange that your company can phone me to tell me how good your internet is and how fast it is but not to phone me to tell me i was near my limit and would you like to upgrade to same you going over your limit. I then explained to her that i am on my notice from work and they sum of money they took from my account will leave me short for the month but their attitude was terrible. I asked to escalate the call and was told there is nothing my manager will do....i spent over 30 minutes on the line. Is there anything i can do about this....i want to leave BT but still have another 5 months of my contract left?

    I really cant understand the way companies treat people, do they think i will use them again when my contract ends.
  • A Heads up for anyone looking to drop their BT Broadband!

    Having tried for several years, including contacting and speaking person to person on several occasions to the Regional Director, BT decided not to bring Super Fast BB to our village. In their absence another provider has brought fibre to the premises and I was thankfully connected this week. My "unlimited" service from BT gave me speeds of between .25 to .69 Mbits - utterly useless in today's world. My speeds were transformed yesterday, thanks to my new service provider, to 111Mkbits . A life changing difference. I contacted BT to say, politely, that I wanted to cancel my Broadband but for the time being, keep my phone service as it is. After nearly half an hours discussion was told that I could not do this without either renewing mt telephone contract for a further 12 months or cancelling the whole lot because they were "bundled" and they cannot break one from the other without a new contract. Further more if I wanted to keep my BT Sports Channel access I would have to pay £21.99 as I would no longer be a BT Broadband customer. Unreasonable doesn't even come close!
    I am utterly appalled, I and my village including the local Council have tried very hard to get BT to deliver a high speed service. I have paid without complaint for a pitiful service from them for years and now through no fault of mine they want to bully me into a 12 month contract for their phone service and pay through the nose for their sports channel.
    Has anyone else been treated like this? Has anyone found a way around this situation?

    This is the same company who a few years ago sold my mother a BT Infinity package. She has dementia, no computer, no smartphone, tablet or any other method of accessing the internet and wouldn't know what an Infinity Package was from a packet of biscuits. It took hours on the phone to get them to cancel the "contract" and I think they still charged a disconnection fee.
  • juca
    juca Posts: 44 Forumite
    OK, i see many posts about crackling phones, broadband dropouts well heres my issue....I have one phone socket in my house,in the hall, with one port and a hidden one behind the lower faceplate, with the phone and broadband plugged in via a BT filter. The phone line started crackling and getting alot of broadband dropouts about 4 weeks ago so when i eventually got through to a human being ( oversees i may add ) they did some tests and come to the conclusion it was my LAN and that it would be looked into. A couple of days later the drop outs got worse and i just couldnt use the phone, so onto the dreaded customer services number via my mobile ( yes i used the free number ) i was taken through the usual turn off, wait, turn back on steps, issue was still there so a new hub was ordered and sent out. New hub arrived Hurrah! no, still had the issue, back onto customer services, ran usual tests again, swapping the connections around, not connecting braodband but connecting the phone and vice versa the phone issue was gone so the conclusion was the filter, new filter ordered and sent. Two new filters arrived hurrah! again, erm no, new filter swapped issue was there again. I even went a brought my own 3 port filter with surge protection and nope still got issue. So onto this evening, dropouts are affecting my Sky, the iphones are playing up so is the firestick but laptop ok...ish and the crackling/interference is still there. Services were called again, i am now dropping the customer part as reasons will become apparent. I explained i had new hub, filters, purchased my own filters i even brought a new landline phone after the first occaision costing £60, the oversees services agreed that eauipment checks had been exhausted so an engineer would have to come out and inspect, great i thought until the scripted services told me i would have to agree to a £129 charge if the fault was found to be within my boundary, well i argued that why should i agree to that when BT had sent a new hub and filters and that the wall socket has not been interferred with since the property was built 5 years ago, the response was that unless i agree to this charge then they would not book an engineer, hastily i went into overkill with the services person " you want me to agree a £129 charge on a 50/50 chance that there is an issue within my boundary when im confident there isnt ". Well the scripted responce was the same " i cannot book an engineer unless you agree "..." well i do not agree, its your equipment and your line im renting so why should i pay for it, even if fault is within my boundary "..." unless you agree i cannot book an engineer "..." so, if i dont agree you are leaving me, a BT custome with a fault, that will not be rectified unless i agree to the possible £129 charge ".. I continued on my irate argument, in a nice way the best i could...they hung up on me, conclusion, unless i agree to the charge, im left with a fault that affecting my phone line and broadband. Im not entering into an agreement for a engineer to come out when its possible, but highly doubtful, the fault could be with me and not them. Poor show BT very poor show, i was contemplating shifting our mobiles to BT in February but not now, not after this. In fact as im with vodafone ill probably switch to their rent free broadband or maybe go the whole package with sky. One final point all this started a few months after i upgraded to infinity and im forever seeing the openreach van at our exchange, coincidence, you decide, but BT are on thin ice as to whether they keep me as a customer. Rant over
    DEC 1st Target £1000 / Current £1521
  • I posted here Saturday 24th September 2016. Do the posts go somewhere else ?
  • As I am only credited 1 post. It seems it was lost.
    I posted to say BT is a totally unscrupulous company. Some of the posters here, seem to expect the company to behave honorably. A mistake I made some time ago. If you don't ask for anything too complicated, or check your bills, and are a domestic customer, you may well be able to hold that view, for some time.
    HOWEVER, I can categorically state that this is not a nice company. They lie, cheat, bully, and ultimately steal from their customers, and they are brazen.
    My story mirrors many of the depressing tales of many people here. A few years ago I looked at changing providers, mainly due to reading the copious tales of woe on the online review sites.
    Upon checking my bills I found I was being charged for an extraneous line, that did not exist, and had been for 9 years. A tidy sum. I immediately contacted BT, expecting them to laugh, apologies and refund the money. Not a bit of it. They said they could cancel the line if I wanted, but I would still have to pay for next month, because I was giving them enough notice. I pursed the line of inquiry, that they jokingly call their complaints procedure. Although the staff I spoke with were polite and helpful, ( a common theme, with many complainants, not all ) The most they could offer was a refund of two years over payment. After I was given the deadlock letter, I followed the procedure of contacting OFCOM.
    OFCOm was useless, as confirmed by several other posters here and elsewhere. The general opinion is that OFCOM is colluding with BT, and I agree. I offered to accept 3 years for the sake of expediency. But was refused, it is not a negotiation apparently. So I am going to the small claims court . I am advised, that they may marginally increase their offer, after being served, and that they may settle for the full amount out of court the day before the case. Or equally they may send a legal team to fight the case, if they think losing might set a precedent, for the many thousands of customers they have cheated.
    I have written to my MP, as a business customer, I expect very little the government generally tend to refrain from interfering in business to business disputes. I have written on all the review sites I can find,and encourage victims of BT to contact their MP. Who knows with enough criticism, something might change.
    After finding the initial error, I scrutinized my BT bills more carefully. Wow one line had ' a single line entry' it means an advert in yellow pages, who knew it still existed, any way BT fell back on the usual defense that the customer should check their bills. It is not BT's problem. Astonishing, why didn't the banks use that defense, could have saved billions in PPI repayments. Anyway after much debate, they generously conceded, that they would repay 1 year of the 2 years charges. In the event they credited me 8 months, which coincidentally was almost exactly the amount of my next bill. So no money changed hands. Another line was charged a quarterly rate, OK you might think, but they charged it every month ! Still trying to sort out some refund on that. Almost every month now one line or another has a late payment charge ?? All the bills are paid by direct debit, always have been.
    Every month I phone for hours on hold, always most polite agree to refund the £ 30.00. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes I have a £5 or £8 credit for who knows what. I think this might be BT's standard compensation, when they have had a few hundred pounds off of you.
    So my message is, if you are not with BT, congratulations. If you are, find out when your contract or contracts end and start moving, in the meantime do CHECK YOUR BILLS. You may not get your money back, back you could save hundreds, in my case thousands. Good luck
  • Is there any advice or UK contacts that can help with this problem ?

    Telephone + Broadband Fiasco with BT[/U][/I]
    Account No.SW*********

    In the beginning of September my mother, who is 85 told me that every time she calls my phone the line is busy so I asked how long has this been happening and she said around 2 to 3 weeks. I checked my phone and the tone wasn’t the same as normal so I went up to Argos and bought a new phone because I thought that would sort out the problem but the same unusual tone was on the new phone.

    4th Sept. I went onto the BT website and completed a line check and a problem was detected, I reported it. This was stated as fixed on BT website on 7th Sept. It was NOT fixed
    Why was it flagged as fixed on the BT website?

    12th Sept. I once again went onto the BT website and completed a line check and a problem was detected and I reported the line as faulty and when the engineer came to do the repair he phoned me and told me that a new 150 slot board was being fitted in the Cabinet but it had to be commissioned by a senior engineer and I had a choice of keeping my Broadband or having the landline, I said I wanted my internet much, much more than the phone line and that I was prepared to wait for the repair to the landline. It was marked as fixed on the BT website a few days later. It was NOT fixed.
    Why was it flagged as fixed on the BT website?

    19th Sept. I once more reported the line as faulty and when the engineer came to do the repair he phoned me as he was outside my house and wanted to do some checks, I was out shopping but returned to my house. Everything was OK from the house and he went to the BT street cabinet and called me and told me the same as the previous engineer but when I came home I had NO Broadband but I had a working telephone line. I called the engineer to ask what was happening and he told me to call BT as he was working for Openreach and because I reported a Line fault his job was to repair that fault. He repaired the line fault but created a fault 100 times bigger by disconnecting my broadband.
    Why didn’t he leave it the same as the 1st two engineers?
    I then called BT, it took 15mins to get through and the agent kept me waiting another 15 mins while she done some ‘checks’ and I was still without Broadband.

    20th Sept. Broadband fault was reported and another engineer came out and he called me on 21st Sept and explained that he as he is not ‘Fault Finder’ trained but he has to call his boss about the problem, he did and his boss told him to report the problem again for another engineer to deal with it.
    Why is BT sending an engineer to solve a fault when he is not ‘Fault Finder’ trained?

    22nd Sept. I called BT again – 15 mins to get through and 15 mins going through the same time wasting questions and checks. The agent told me that he has reported the Broadband fault and raised it to Level 2 but it will not be done until Monday 26th Sept. and even after I explained all the problems and he had all the engineer reports on his computer screen explaining that the problem was in the BT Cabinet, I was warned verbally and by text that £129.99 would be charged if the fault was inside my house.

    26th Sept. The BT engineer called me early on Monday and said he is at the Cabinet and that that there is nothing he can do because the problem requires a PCR engineer. He couldn’t give me an approximate time for when the job will be completed.
    Just to rub salt into the wounds I received a 3 text messages at 11.00am, 11.54am and 12.21pm to tell me that an engineer was on his way and 3 emails at 11.00am, 11.54am and 12.21pm to tell me that an engineer is at my property but he had already been and left the village at 8.45am.

    Why send a normal engineer to sort a Broadband problem when a PCR engineer is required?
    The 2nd engineer on 12th Sept knew that the 150 slot board needed a PCR engineer to commission it, why are normal engineers sent out every time and each time they fail to resolve the problem and I have to wait an extra 4 days or more each and every time?

    I then called BT 150 Complaint section and went through all the same router description, telephone, identity etc. checks. I had to wait 15mins to get through another 20mins before the she came back. The call was 32mins long. She said she spoke with some high level people and that the fault will be completed by 1.45pm Friday 30th Sept.
    I then received a call from a level 2 agent at BT and I explained the story so far and he said he would investigate and get back to me. He did not get back to me.

    27th Sept. Received a call from a Complaints Manager who told me he is going to raise my complaint with a Level 2 team.

    28th Sept. Opened BT Chat. Took around 15 mins to get answered when the page stated “2 mins waiting time” I and wanted BT to ensure that a PCR Broadband engineer comes out on Friday. Asked for a transcript of the chat and advisor said it will be emailed to me.

    29th Sept. BT called me and told me that the engineers are working on the fault in the exchange and will be rectified by 2nd Oct. I suspect I’m being lied to and this has become a totally and utterly disgusting amount of time to sort this minor problem out. This has become an absolute fiasco run by what seems like a Micky Mouse bunch of amateurs that is supposed to be a Tech Giant in 2016. Flabbergasted by the stuff I’m being told by these Customer service agents.

    30th Sept. BT engineers are working at the green street cabinet where my faulty connection is situated but still no Broadband. BT called my house phone when I was in work at approx. 3.30pm when I already told them to call my mobile if there is no answer from my landline. I went onto BT Chat to find out who called and asked for a phone call to be returned. 50mins on webchat, passed from one agent who took 25mins to ‘check things’ to a supervisor who took another 25mins to ‘check things’ and was eventually told that someone would call me.
    Nobody called me back.

    1st Oct. Called BT to cancel my contract - took 25mins for an answer and was told I can’t cancel without charges unless there is a no ‘held to term’ action put on my contract by Openreach Technical Services which would allow me to leave due to BT failing with their service. So was advised to wait after engineers visit 2nd Oct.

    2nd Oct. Today is the day that I was promised to have my Broadband up and running. As I suspected absolutely nothing has been done. Phone call was promised between 1.00pm and 4.00pm but couldn’t wait and phoned BT and as normal an unusually high amount of calls was relayed to me and I opted for the ring-back option at 2.30pm. Ring-back came after 65mins but I when I picked the phone up the line went dead. Called BT again, they answered after 22mins and the call was 24mins while checks were made. The agent told me that nothing will be done until 4th Oct. I asked for a no ‘held to term’ action on my account and the agent told me that he can’t provide this and that it would have to be a manager. He arranged for a manager to call me 3rd Oct at 1.00pm – 3.00pm.
    At 5.25pm I received a call from another agent at BT to tell me that the work couldn’t be carried out as no engineers work on Sunday, I questioned this Sunday fix on 29th but was told that it will be done by today (Sun) and when I asked why I was told that it would be done by Sun 2nd Oct. She didn’t know what to say. Just a laughable pile of crap.

    3rd Oct. BT called at 2.50pm. Couldn’t give me any update or information. Couldn’t give my account any ‘held to term’ action. Promised another call-back between 1.00 – 3.00pm
    Over the last 2 weeks I’ve spent over 90mins waiting for my BT calls to be answered.
    Over 100mins waiting or talking when the phone was eventually answered.
    Over 100mins on Web chat and 6hrs waiting in for BT call-backs.
    This is now making me ill!!!
    Mark Hughes' blue and white army
This discussion has been closed.
Meet your Ambassadors

🚀 Getting Started

Hi new member!

Our Getting Started Guide will help you get the most out of the Forum

Categories

  • All Categories
  • 350.8K Banking & Borrowing
  • 253K Reduce Debt & Boost Income
  • 453.4K Spending & Discounts
  • 243.7K Work, Benefits & Business
  • 598.5K Mortgages, Homes & Bills
  • 176.8K Life & Family
  • 257K Travel & Transport
  • 1.5M Hobbies & Leisure
  • 16.1K Discuss & Feedback
  • 37.6K Read-Only Boards

Is this how you want to be seen?

We see you are using a default avatar. It takes only a few seconds to pick a picture.