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Having been a BT customer for years with very few problems, I signed up for an all-inclusive broadband and telephone package in December 2006, though only after a fair amount of research, plenty of advice, and an assurance that what I was getting was suitable for my requirements.
Six months and two bills later, I was still being billed for my telephone calls on top of my supposedly all-in fee. Repeated calls to BT trying to find out what the problem was got me next to nowhere. On one day I was on the telephone to them for a total of five hours. I was constantly shoved from department to department, with the people either not being able to help me at all, telling me that it wasn’t their area and putting me on to someone else, or telling me to ring back on a different number. Each of these took ages, what with going through the various automated procedures and then long waits each time before I got to speak to anyone. On one occasion I got an automated procedure which after four or five prompts and answers then told me that I wasn’t a BT customer at all, and proceeded to cut me off. Sometimes the people I spoke to were in this country, and so I was at least able to communicate with them in a satisfactory manner, but on other occasions they were clearly many continents away, at the end of a crackly line and with a less than brilliant grasp of English. One of these had such a strong local accent that I couldn’t understand at all what he was saying sometimes – he seemed to be asking me about ‘Ryvita’.
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To be fair, BT were perfectly prepared to refund the money I had been erroneously charged for my calls, but no one seemed to be able to give me a genuine explanation as to what the underlying problem was – I was given all sorts of advice, entailing continually altering my set-up, getting new cables and filters, all of which ended up festooned around my flat, and still I was getting billed for my calls. Not to mention all the wasted time, and the simple stress of it all.
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Contacting OFCOM, I was given a new BT number to ring, but when I tried this I again got an automated procedure which told me that I wasn’t a BT customer and then cut me off. A further call to OFCOM gained me a different number for BT complaints. I had to hang on to this for an hour (with an automated message about how busy that number was – surprise, surprise), before it was answered, only to be told that no, it wasn’t the complaints number at all, that indeed there was no such number, and that if I wanted to complain I had to write a letter. The final irony was that I had in fact got through to the department responsible for people who were leaving, or returning to, BT.
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Eventually I managed to speak to someone at BT who was prepared to go right through everything that had happened to me from the start, at which point I was told that I had in fact been mis-sold a package that was never going to work with my existing set-up. There was no willingness on BTs part to try and sort this out, and indeed when I said that in that case I was going to leave and find a different supplier they were perfectly happy not only to refund me everything that I had paid, but to throw in a bottle of wine as a gesture of contrition.
Even that didn’t go quite to plan: I had another lengthy battle to actually get my money back, it came in assorted dribs and drabs which didn’t seem to bear all that much resemblance to what I had originally paid, and I even got sent two bottles of wine.
I’m now with TalkTalk. They aren’t exactly great either, but they are half the price.
I’m not sure that too much of all this is broadband’s fault, or even BT’s (though they could surely sort out their customer service a bit, and tighten up on their salesmen), but mostly the lack of regulation. Whatever happened to the basic principle of supplying a service?
By: Steve Dent
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