Wonderfull Service (Not).

Thought I would share my experiences of BT customer service.

Previously a Pipex customer I was one of thousands who thought that their customer service had to be the worst. Eager to change to a new provider and to try and avoid moving to a small company who like Pipex would get bought out in the near future I thought BT would be a safe bet. After all the complaints on this forum BT seemed to get far less than those of Pipex so I went for it.

I ordered the BT Total Broadband Anywhere service with the MAC code I had got from Pipex and all was well. I had ordered on Saturday morning so didnt expect the order to get looked at until Monday.

After about a week, I had heard nothing but then on the Friday I received the Hub Phone. On the following monday I got the mobile device but still no home hub.
I telephoned BT customer service and was told by a very nice lady that my MAC code was invalid. I had heard a few complaints from Pipex members that they had received invalid MAC's so thought it must be the case here so phoned Pipex who were insistent it was correct.

Back to BT and after being transferred 3 times and put on hold for nearly 40 minutes, I finally got to speak to someone in order management who after a few minutes of trying the MAC told me the line was already activated and had I tried to connect. I told him I didnt have the hub yet and had not had any communication from BT about this. He said the hub would now be dispatched on Thursday (apparently BT had forgotten about it or something!) and although I tried to get them send it sooner as I would be away at the end of the week and thus wouldnt receive it, BT were insistent even though this was their mistake they would send it on thursday and that was that.

So eventually I received the hub but I still had no login details, e mail addresses. I put a complaint in to BT but after their stated 2 days had heard nothing (no surprise there).

Couple days later and back to BT customer service and after well over an hour of telephone calls, the longest being some 40 minutes when I was transferred 4 times and was then cut off, I finally got through to someone, somewhere who couldnt understand what I was talking about. I tried to explain that all I wanted was the e mail that I was due with my login details. Eventually after being on hold for some 20 minutes on and off, the nice lady told me BT would send the details in a letter which would take 5 days to arrive (didnt matter as it never arrived anyway). She then passed me my login details over the phone (it would appear BT simply took the password I registered with and made that the username / e mail - good security heh).

That night some 2 weeks after registering, I finally managed to get back on the internet after over a week of downtime. I managed to log into the BT yahoo mail site and found all those missing e mails which had been sent to the new address (although no one had bothered to tell me what this was and hey I didnt have any internet access anyway!).

A coupld of days later I got a reply to my complaint which simply stated that It looked like I was now connected to the internet and had received the hub and all was well. I replied with my disatisfaction but got nothing resembling an explanation in reply.

Today I received a CD by courier which contains instructions for BT Broadband Basic which isnt even the same service. I am also now experiencing speeds just above my old dial up connection.

So quite amazingly I now regret actually leaving Pipex in the first place! It would appear that once you have signed up to an 18 month contract, BT simply are not bothered about your interests and I think they are so big that no body has any idea what anyone else is doing.

Welcome to BT Broadband!

I am really surprised. When I moved to BT 20 months ago everything went very smoothly. They have been reliable and faultless. I have no idea what Napster infers by his/her comment with no detail.

If you are getting bad service then I suggest you sit next to your phone and demand the service you asked for. Don't accept a fob off from anyone. With BT it is an 0800 number so it costs you nothing. Had you chosen another ISP you might have to wait for ages on an 0870 number.

The only negative comment about BT is that most of their support is in India. They are polite but generally useless. If you cannot understand them or if you think the responder is useless then be polite and quietly ask to speak to another support person. If that fails then politely ask to speak to a manager. (People on the Indian subcontinent respond to politeness and will cut you off if you are rude.)

Good luck.

Edited by KillerexV21 (Tue 12-Aug-08 23:50:41)

It took me ten weeks to get a decent connection after subscribing to BT. I didn't know about how their complaint system operated but luckily I received a call from a pollster conducting a customer satisfaction survey for BT when I responded quite bluntly about how useless I had found the support lines to be.

A day later I got a call from the high level support team in India (they're based at a different centre) and was given a reference number for the complaint. After that they were calling me to check on progress and organised two Openreach visits to check the poor connection I was getting. I kept refusing to close the high level complaint until I'd received a full week with a satisfactory connection, and arranged times for them to call me to check and report on progress. This made sure that they stuck with it, which I'm sure helped.

Therefore get the complaint escalated ASAP.

The Indians are pretty useless generally but some tips on getting the best out of them:
As already mentioned stay polite
Ask them to spell their name to you then use it now and then in the conversation
Explain that you are very unhappy with BT but not with them personally
Keep your own logs of calls and daily connection statistics handy.

When you get a better than average one, a bit of flattery works wonders "you seem to be much more knowledgeable than your colleagues, I'd be happy if it was you that called back" often works. The benefit of this is that you don't have to start from the beginning again for each call - the way they log calls is sparse, ambiguous, and often lacking critical details!

In my case getting to the root of the problem was rather like peeling an onion and just had to be endured though.

Thanks for the replies and the guidance.

For what its worth, the info I have now got is fine, Its just the small details (like sending all the e mails to a new address but not tellign me what it was) that has soured this transaction for me. Ie, the setup was a lot more painfull than it should have been.

Speed today is a lot better getting nearly 3500 kbps so will just keep an eye on it.

Cheers

I only came back to BT for the BT anywhere package as it looked good and to be honest it is pretty good. I was dreading coming back, because being with Bt a few years back I remember what I went though then. This time was ok, The Hub, hub phone and mobile came 3 days early all in the same box, my connection was on when they said it would be. The only problem was with the mobile phone setting it up and that sorted it self when I was in the middle of a call to BT. I did have the problem of no letter with user name and password, but a quick phone call and they gave me that.

I had a small problem trying to get my bills online, phoned them up and they said their system was down and they would phone me back, never expected them to, but the next day they did.

4 weeks in and so far all is fine, the mobile have a few software problems, but it still seems to work ok, hopefully BT will sort it out.