An Open Letter to BT

To follow, an open letter to British Telecom from Carol Pipe - I am sure many of you will know where we are coming from!:

19^th April 2011

Dear whoever the faceless wonder is that is (in charge of) running BT,

This seems to be the only way that I may be able to speak to anyone who knows how BT works (or on this occasion, doesn’t).

I won’t bore you with all of the details, so will give you the abridged version…I spoke with one of your business advisors about how we could reduce the cost of our business telephone charges. We agreed to disconnect one of our defunct lines, and to sign up to a two year deal with reduced charges – all very good.

I sent her a list of the numbers in operation at our business address (along with a list of their uses) and all was agreed…until BT cut off our broadband internet line on April 1st and not the spare line – their mistake, and sadly not an April Fool! Therefore we have been without our internet connection for almost three weeks (remember this is business broadband)! After twenty or so phone calls to around forty or so advisors (afterall, you are always pushed around from pillar to post and are never speaking to the correct department!) we have been assured that we would be “fast-tracked” (what a joke!).

Many, many letters later we received the glorious date – we would be reconnected on Friday 15^th April at 8.00pm. Could you please tell me who at BT is working at 8.00pm at the weekend on business lines? When we rang on Saturday 16^th April at 9.00am to say that (unsurprisingly) our broadband still wasn’t working, the gentleman told us that no-one would be able to do anything about it until Monday morning.

Needless to say , we are still without broadband and another several phone calls later, today we have been told that the order had not been signed off correctly…but don’t worry – we will be “fast-tracked”! I wonder when we will actually be back on-line? It would be great to speak with someone who actually knows what all of the different departments are doing – it certainly isn’t communicating with each other.

Also, can you tell me why it takes only a matter or moments to be disconnected, while it takes several weeks to get the same number reconnected?

Would you like to know the best part? Apparently we are able to track our order on-line! How stupid is that when BT can’t actually connect us?!

Yours

Mrs Carol Pipe