We Love BT 2010

• 12th August 2010 at 20:09

I've been moving house again, so that can mean only one thing - yes, that's right! It's time for another episode in this long-running series that I affectionately refer to as "BT's Continued Reign of Relentless Incompetence".

Knowing what has happened in the past whenever I have dealt with BT, I thought this time we'd just keep things simple. I rang their house moving line, and said that I'm moving to a house half a mile down the road, gave them the date, and said that because we'd be on the same exchange, we'd like to keep our number. Sadly they couldn't process my order that day because their systems were down, so I rang back the next day. That time the system was up but she didn't know how to use it, so kept me on hold for about 20-30 minutes while she asked for help. But as Ben said, a house move is such a rare event, how can they possibly be expected to cope?

Eventually the order went through, she assured me we could keep the number, and as the days progressed I checked the system to make sure that the order stayed there (unlike last time). I was up at the new house on the day of the move, so I kept checking the system to see how it was going. When it said the order had been completed, I was very excited and plugged the phone in to discover that the line was dead. I thought maybe it was just taking a while to go through - ever the optimist - but when I got home that evening, I discovered that the other line was dead too. Well, not entirely dead; there was a dial tone there, we just couldn't make or receive any calls. Nice.

I rang customer services to find out what was going on. I ended up speaking to someone in a call center in India; I wouldn't mind this if the people on the other end of the phone had a firm grasp of the english language, but it's often the case that as soon as you start trying to go into the details of a complicated issue with them, they get a bit confused; I explained my situation, and after a long pause, I was not entirely thrilled to hear "So, you want to move house?"

(I must admit that I was delighted when this call was followed up by a BT survey - particularly the bit when they asked me if I had any comments, that was fun)

I registered a fault; "it looks like it might be a problem in the exchange", they said. Gosh, really? I whined at various departments in BT, but nothing happened until the faults team looked at it the next day. I plugged it in and it worked! They had managed it, I thought! Until I rang my mobile, and discovered they had changed the number. Oh well, can't have everything. I made enquiries about it, but they said it would take 3 working days to change the number over, and I was keen to order ADSL, so I decided it would be best keep BT out of it, and started telling people my new number.

No sooner had my order with my new ISP gone through than I recieved an email from BT customer services, replying to one of my queries from a few days before. They apologised, and explained that my phone number should have been moved across, so they had helpfully put in an order to have the number changed back, due to happen on the day before my scheduled ADSL activation. BT assured me that the change would only be in their database, and wouldn't affect my ADSL order - which begs the question, if it's just a database change, how come it takes 3 days?

Miraculously, the number change went through without any problems, didn't interfere with my ADSL order, and everything was brilliant! At least until the next day when they tried to activate my ADSL, when they turned off my line again instead.

I registered another fault; "it looks like it might be a problem in the exchange", they said. Sounds familiar. It's almost as if there are two people working in our exchange - the provisions guy prefers playing Farmville to doing actual work, so just turns off the phone lines in question and leaves it for the faults guy to fix the next day. When the fault guy got round to looking at my ticket 3 days later, he flicked a switch and suddenly it was all working. Awesome.

Only 12 days to get it working this time, which must be some kind of record for them - certainly is when dealing with me. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised at how easily it had all gone. Almost too easy...

Needless to say, their incompetence didn't end there. In a last-minute twist of truly BT-level corporate efficiency, a few days later I discovered that if you tell BT that you are moving house and want your phone line moved, they assume that you only want your phone line to move, and that you want your billing address to stay the same. After realising why I hadn't had any of the promised post, and a mere half an hour on hold, I managed to explain the situation to someone in another distant call center, who assures me that the address is now all up-to-date. Time will tell.

Many of the people I have spoken to throughout this process, and on previous BT-related escapades, have seemed like very nice people. Based on their answers to questions, they sound intelligent and understand the area they are working in, but are crippled by confusing systems which make their jobs harder than they need to be. It astounds me that something so common as moving house can be so complicated to get screwed up in 5 different ways, and I think it's quite telling that in over 10 years of dealing with BT, the only thing that has got better is their process for registering and dealing with faults.

Personally I'd just prefer it if they got something right the first time.

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