BT's shockingly consistent, poor customer service
The Calm Before The Storm
Our server installation had gone relatively smoothly. Downtime over the Christmas shutdown period had minimised any interruption to service, and things had been running well for a week. Then we tried something as simple as changing broadband provider….to BT.
Yes, we’d been suckered by the lure of high speed broadband, a carrot dangled in front of e-maciated businesses hungry for bandwidth. Even that seems like something of a mirage – the scheduled date being pushed back and back until it seems it might arrive just in time to stream England hosting and winning the football world cup in 2098 (unless of course a cryogenic Blatter’s still pulling the (purse) strings).
So a simple changeover with almost no downtime expected. Just a fluffy ten day “settling period”, its description suggesting something akin to house training a cute little puppy.
Imagine my horror then when the puppy turned out to be an aggressive, biting little lunatic who managed to rip chunks out of an entire day’s worth of email access. Needless to say as operations manager I felt as popular as if I’d cocked my own leg in the corner…but without the satisfaction.
So what went wrong?
Well sorry BT but this one lies with you. I can see no better advertisement for the competition commission than your dysfunctional company. Each and every one of the approximately twenty employees of BT that I spoke to operated on a spectrum from cordial through to downright helpful by nature – but in practice they may as well have had the customer service skills of the lovechild of a Parisian waiter and…well two Parisian waiters (not sure I want to imagine how that’s possible).
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, but they simply weren’t able to. At one stage I was passed around the same loop three times, between broadband technical support and COT (which stands for customer options team, not Cut-Off Team, although this was in doubt when they abruptly ended the call as they tried to connect me back into the matrix).
Each and every time I got through to a new team, the previous operators’ notes had evidently evaporated into the ether, only to reappear slightly later like a photo you wished had never turned up. This had the effect of confusing the issue immensely and no one could actually connect me to the person I’d been speaking to previously as I tried desperately on their behalf to build some kind of continuity.
I also had to re-state the phone number I was calling about, my name, company name and address each and every time I spoke to a fresh department, equally friendly, equally attentive and equally hampered from helping by the incredibly narrow remit and acute lack of awareness of the inner workings of their labyrinthine organisation. Every time I tried to start the conversation with the courtesy the next innocent operator deserved, I wondered where I was storing my frustration and whether I’d later develop some strange facial tic.
Questions so good you ask them twice?
On the five or six occasions I had to call in again from scratch, I spoke to an annoying robot (albeit with an unerringly good voice recognition programme), then keyed in the number I was calling about as instructed, only to be asked for the same information immediately on speaking to someone. WHY WHY WHY? BT I ask you again, why bother recording the information and making the customer waste valuable patience when it obviously doesn’t appear on your operator’s screen?
Each caller was being willed by my Jedi mind control to make themself a hero and go beyond their confines but - somehow ignorant of this (must have been a bad line) - failed to do so, let down by their lack of training, the strictures of their remit or simply the impenetrable nature of their company’s support service.
The icing on the cake was when I’d been transferred so many times I could hear such a delayed echo I thought I could hear an original airing of Bullseye on in the background. I didn’t even get my BFH when after presumably the maximum number of onward transfers the line simply went dead. My face flickered in a suspicious approximation of that tic I’d been dreading.
And no-one called me back, despite my having clarified my mobile number to each and every one of the twenty people I spoke to (“in case we get cut off and need to call you back”).
Keep Calm and Cary On
In the end, I was answering their questions before they’d even asked them which must have confused them no end as the echo kicked in and they were being talked to before, during, and after their demands for information that SHOULD BE AVAILABLE on screen.
But that was as close to being an awkward customer as I came – there was no point in losing control when they were all there to help. The problem wasn’t theirs but the system’s.
And a hero did eventually emerge in the form of a second line Ethernet support technician, who quite honestly could have spared me three hours of messing around simply by having been made more accessible by the broadband customer service front-line. In fact those front line operators I now believe must be incentivised to provoke the customer into solving his own problem by providing a dense mesh of interconnected guardians, each with the same objective, before only the most obdurate or desperate callers are finally allowed through to the sanctity of someone who can solve the problem. And not solve the problem in any grandiose way, but with a few clicks in around 5 minutes of call time.
Keep the ball in the customer's court...and see them learn to hate you
I have long said that poor customer service often seems to outsource the inefficiency of the problem solving process to the customer – which may make for efficient looking operations but wins no brand loyalty. In fact quite the reverse – I really, really dislike BT; (Conversely as a result of consistently great customer service, I love Sky).
Once again BT, you have my nomination for worst customer service offered to a business. And perhaps I deserve a wooden spoon for choosing you in the first place.
Share your thoughts on this blog by tweeting @meridiansp.
Our server installation had gone relatively smoothly. Downtime over the Christmas shutdown period had minimised any interruption to service, and things had been running well for a week. Then we tried something as simple as changing broadband provider….to BT.
Yes, we’d been suckered by the lure of high speed broadband, a carrot dangled in front of e-maciated businesses hungry for bandwidth. Even that seems like something of a mirage – the scheduled date being pushed back and back until it seems it might arrive just in time to stream England hosting and winning the football world cup in 2098 (unless of course a cryogenic Blatter’s still pulling the (purse) strings).
So a simple changeover with almost no downtime expected. Just a fluffy ten day “settling period”, its description suggesting something akin to house training a cute little puppy.
Imagine my horror then when the puppy turned out to be an aggressive, biting little lunatic who managed to rip chunks out of an entire day’s worth of email access. Needless to say as operations manager I felt as popular as if I’d cocked my own leg in the corner…but without the satisfaction.
So what went wrong?
Well sorry BT but this one lies with you. I can see no better advertisement for the competition commission than your dysfunctional company. Each and every one of the approximately twenty employees of BT that I spoke to operated on a spectrum from cordial through to downright helpful by nature – but in practice they may as well have had the customer service skills of the lovechild of a Parisian waiter and…well two Parisian waiters (not sure I want to imagine how that’s possible).
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, but they simply weren’t able to. At one stage I was passed around the same loop three times, between broadband technical support and COT (which stands for customer options team, not Cut-Off Team, although this was in doubt when they abruptly ended the call as they tried to connect me back into the matrix).
Each and every time I got through to a new team, the previous operators’ notes had evidently evaporated into the ether, only to reappear slightly later like a photo you wished had never turned up. This had the effect of confusing the issue immensely and no one could actually connect me to the person I’d been speaking to previously as I tried desperately on their behalf to build some kind of continuity.
I also had to re-state the phone number I was calling about, my name, company name and address each and every time I spoke to a fresh department, equally friendly, equally attentive and equally hampered from helping by the incredibly narrow remit and acute lack of awareness of the inner workings of their labyrinthine organisation. Every time I tried to start the conversation with the courtesy the next innocent operator deserved, I wondered where I was storing my frustration and whether I’d later develop some strange facial tic.
Questions so good you ask them twice?
On the five or six occasions I had to call in again from scratch, I spoke to an annoying robot (albeit with an unerringly good voice recognition programme), then keyed in the number I was calling about as instructed, only to be asked for the same information immediately on speaking to someone. WHY WHY WHY? BT I ask you again, why bother recording the information and making the customer waste valuable patience when it obviously doesn’t appear on your operator’s screen?
Each caller was being willed by my Jedi mind control to make themself a hero and go beyond their confines but - somehow ignorant of this (must have been a bad line) - failed to do so, let down by their lack of training, the strictures of their remit or simply the impenetrable nature of their company’s support service.
The icing on the cake was when I’d been transferred so many times I could hear such a delayed echo I thought I could hear an original airing of Bullseye on in the background. I didn’t even get my BFH when after presumably the maximum number of onward transfers the line simply went dead. My face flickered in a suspicious approximation of that tic I’d been dreading.
And no-one called me back, despite my having clarified my mobile number to each and every one of the twenty people I spoke to (“in case we get cut off and need to call you back”).
Keep Calm and Cary On
In the end, I was answering their questions before they’d even asked them which must have confused them no end as the echo kicked in and they were being talked to before, during, and after their demands for information that SHOULD BE AVAILABLE on screen.
But that was as close to being an awkward customer as I came – there was no point in losing control when they were all there to help. The problem wasn’t theirs but the system’s.
And a hero did eventually emerge in the form of a second line Ethernet support technician, who quite honestly could have spared me three hours of messing around simply by having been made more accessible by the broadband customer service front-line. In fact those front line operators I now believe must be incentivised to provoke the customer into solving his own problem by providing a dense mesh of interconnected guardians, each with the same objective, before only the most obdurate or desperate callers are finally allowed through to the sanctity of someone who can solve the problem. And not solve the problem in any grandiose way, but with a few clicks in around 5 minutes of call time.
Keep the ball in the customer's court...and see them learn to hate you
I have long said that poor customer service often seems to outsource the inefficiency of the problem solving process to the customer – which may make for efficient looking operations but wins no brand loyalty. In fact quite the reverse – I really, really dislike BT; (Conversely as a result of consistently great customer service, I love Sky).
Once again BT, you have my nomination for worst customer service offered to a business. And perhaps I deserve a wooden spoon for choosing you in the first place.
Share your thoughts on this blog by tweeting @meridiansp.
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