BT - Extremly (sic) Efficient

Below is the details of a survey I filled in on the BT website, having had the misfortune of speaking to one of their technical support staff. Funnily enough, if you click all the negative boxes, they won’t accept your feedback.

So rather than keep it between me and British (although outsourced to any country that we don’t have to pay a fair wage to) Telecom, I thought I’d go down the open letter route.

BT Homehub 2.0 Problems – A Phonecall of Tragic Proportions.

Please share your thoughts with us

Your views are really important to us, please help us improve our service by completing this short questionnaire.

Was your issue resolved by the support team who handled your call?

No (as my BT Homehub 2.0 is still broken)

How would you rate your recent experience?

Negative (for reasons discussed below)

Please let us know what you liked about our technical representative and what they could do

I liked the fact that I won’t have to speak to your technical representative again (because the next time I have a problem your contract will meet my shredder and my wages will meet another broadband provider).

I disliked pretty much everything else.

I’d identified that the issue with my Homehub was a hardware problem to begin with and explained this to the representative. Luckily for me, he doggedly ignored what I had to say and stuck to his script, taking me through what I said I’d already done.

A highlight for me was when he asked me to reset the router. I explained I’d done that this morning and would do it for him in a matter of seconds once he stopped talking. Luckily he reasoned that I may have forgotten how to hold the reset button down in the six or so hours since I’d done it last and wasted a good minute explaining exactly how to perform this taxing operation.

He finally explained that he thought this was a hardware issue (original thinking!) and he’d replace my router. It should be with us in 4 working days – “Friday or Monday” in his estimate.

I’m now extremely impressed that he can’t even count properly. Friday would be the 5th working day and Monday the 6th.

Had he been able to use his fingers to work this out, I might even have had a borderline positive outcome, as your technical representative would have done what I needed. However, now I’m not sure whether or not I’m going to see this replacement router.

Overall, how satisfied were you with the level of support BT provided to fix your problem?

Extremly (sic) Dissatisfied (Not least because they can’t work a spellchecker)

Please let us know what you liked about your experience and what we should improve.

Firstly, kudos on the two almost identical questions. That’s something I love about your customer survey.

The performance of my technical representative and my “customer query experience” are intrinsically linked, so it probably won’t surprise you to hear that I liked very little and you can improve on almost everything.

In case you’ve forgotten what’s written in the box above, here’s a little set of bullet points that you can take to your “product feedback development operations department”

How to Improve BT Customer Services

• Get technical staff that can listen to a customer.
• Ensure that said staff have a good enough grasp of English that they can understand the customer’s issue and act appropriately.
• Realise that not all problems can be solved by reading from a script.
• Stop outsourcing your customer services to places that insist on all problems being resolved by catch-all scripts.
• Stop assuming that your customers are idiots. If we’ve got reason to believe we’re having a hardware problem due to your shoddy plastic routers (sorry, “HomeHub 2.0″), you shouldn’t automatically go to the “customer is a moron, can’t differentiate between hardware and software” script.

Thanks for taking the time to pore over the important views I’ve shared with you. Normally when I offer companies marketing advice, they pay me. I started my call at 18:00. It’s now 18:25. Let’s round that up to half an hour and call my consultancy fee £50.

You have my bank details – I gave them to you three times when setting up this service as your accounts department couldn’t simultaneously set up “phone” and “internet” payments, didn’t tell us this, and sent us threatening letters.

Then cut off our phone.

Then lost the direct debit details we provided.

Then repeated the above.

Your views on my marketing suggestions are very important to me. Please help me improve my service by sharing your views with me.

Overall, how satisfied are you with the broadband service BT provides?

Extremly (sic) Dissatisfied

Our contract is up in March (I sincerely hope). Can anyone recommend a better broadband provider for me?

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