Lies, damned lies, and BT Customer Service

Isn’t it tempting, now and again, to believe that some companies actually build mendacity into their customer service complaints system?

Of course, I would not for one moment suggest that BT is a rotten, dirty, low-down lying bunch of scumbags. Nothing could be further from the truth as legions of satisfied customers will attest.

But twice in the past 9 months I have been obliged to have broadband installed in new premises. Each time it has been late/non-functional and each time the escalation of my complaint has received an eerily similar-sounding progression of explanations:

1. Five days later than promised, no service – order processing, takes time, don’t you know? And anyway, it was never supposed to be on before now, someone gave you the wrong date. (How????)
2. Two days later, still not on – well, it has been provisioned. We’ll check.
3. Five more days pass – ah, there’s a fault at the exchange.
4. Two more days – general network outage in your area, everyone’s been hit. (They hadn’t.)
5. Five more days, close to going postal – OK, OK, we’ll send an engineer.

Engineer arrives, problem solved in 5 minutes. Turns out some bozo had got the wires the wrong way round at the exchange. But you get the idea…a simple issue, but dressed in increasingly apocalyptic terms, all to keep one at bay.

Now, I repeat, it would be ludicrous, disrespectful and downright wrong to accuse BT of being anything other than a brilliant, fine and upstanding provider of communications services, and any similarity between the two experiences is just a coincidence.

Makes you think though, doesn’t it?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Fresh News, News, Sceptic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.