Thursday, July 22nd, 2021, 3:20 am
The Optical Fibre Experience — Part V
Previously in this mini-series: Part I, Part II, What Bad BT Engineering Looks Like, Part III, Part IV
T has failed, after 16 days, to deliver what it promised would be a trivial job. It was BT pushing me to accept the offer, which I wish I never accepted (their sales people were super-eager for me to move to fibre; I never asked for it!). In this part I want to show segments of communications, excluding addresses but not reference numbers (which BT has anyway and only BT can make sense of).
My hope is that for the many people who are going to have similarly bad experiences there will be more information available online. Yesterday even Openreach took note of my complaint and sought to intervene:
Openreach in an ‘outreach’ (PR-ish)? This is only a day old.
In part 4 I explained that there was poor communication with the client. BT was supposed to get back to me later in the day. That never happened. Instead, the following day (as before) I was asked to phone them, probably for a very long call.
BT: Just phone us because we’re too busy to phone you and please speak to a machine until you get through to an actual person (who likely knows nothing about your case, so wait on the line some more and get ready to tell us stories)
The prior message to the same effect (a week earlier):
I’ve already had to explain my case to about 5 different members of staff (BT and Openreach)
This is quite telling:
They keep closing complaints without actually solving the problem and without asking for the client’s consent to do so
They think dozens of hours of my time (and two scheduled downtimes, in vain) are worth a couple dozen quid:
Nowhere near enough to compensate for loss of time, nuisance, and many other things. Bear in mind I’ve paid BT about 5,000 pounds this past decade.
They have sent several such messages already:
It’s tiring to have appointments in vain (waiting for up to 5 hours for a person to show up and get nothing done)
As if it’ll get done this time around
As noted before, they didn’t even bother sending the bag/envelope for this until I phoned them to request one (we finally got it only a couple of days ago or about a week late).
The message caused confusion on numerous levels; in fact, it contradicts what the sales people from BT said (they don’t like disclosing the less convenient facts that allude to future hassle)
Then there’s this:
Oh, trust me, you don’t really want me to do this
It has now been 16 days (mind date of this E-mail). I’m still waiting.