BT engineers - missed appointments

I used to be with BT...

...and their service was shockingly bad. They missed appointments more than once, and even used the weather as an excuse. However, I since switched to Sky for broadband and phone. When an engineer dicks about with the exchange and decides to knock off my broadband and/ or phone (it's a busy exchange and this happens a couple of times a year), Sky put in a service call with BT, and an Openreach engineer comes out to fix it. They've turned up on time, every time, and fixed the problem quickly. Same engineers, much better service.

Whether this is because their hefty deals with Sky are more important to them than their own customers, or just because they have actually improved overall, I can't say.

Business visits are no better

We have a maintainance contract with BT for a Nortel phone system they installed a few years back. We booked an engineer visit to do a reconfig in early February. We were given a date of Friday the 8th of March (a pisstake in itself).

Come the day, no engineer, no call to say there wasn't one and when I finally got through to someone at 3pm to ask where our engineer was I was told "we don't have any resource to send you an engineer". Now a cynic may suggest that the local engineering office being Swansea, and the day after our appointment being an away Wales/Scotland match at Murrayfield might have something to do with it, but I couldn't possibly comment...

Now, the real fun comes on Monday. BT are now quoting a date of the 28th of APRIL for a visit, and apparently can't tell me when an engineer is free before then. And it's not like we're a small company, we do £32k's worth of business with BT a year.

Yeah I tried to switch to fibre in january.

The openreach guy showed the first time but then couldn't fit the card in the green box so said he'd be back in about a week.

Got an appointment for 3 weeks after - No Show.

appointment the week after that - no show, but apparently because plusnet hadn't confirmed it.

Appointment the week after that got cancelled by BT with no reason - if they're doing that it may explain why their no-shows are going down officially!

I'm still on adsl.

Hmmm

I waited for one that Plusnet had arranged, sat with clear view of the front door. Just as well..

I saw the van pull up. I saw him get out. He came bounding up, never knocked, slipped a "Sorry I missed you" card through the door - carefully - and was on his way back to his van when I ran out and collared him...

All because my wiring needed to be checked. Apparently, my wires know the difference between daytime and nighttime, and that's why it's slower in the evening... Plusnet said "not contention", I of course had to wait in.

So he got to work, everything fine. I explained it was obviously contention but plusnet assured me it wasn't. He the phoned his BT helpdesk and they said "yup, hot virtual path" and switched me to another. Problem solved. So, a good result - but was still unimpressed at the "missed you" bit. If I hadn't been watching at that minute, I'd have wasted the day.

This all assumes that you get an actual appointment. A relative reported her phone line not working on Sunday morning, and the best response she's had is that it "should be fixed by sometime Thursday". Not sure how that fits in with the SLA of a maximum of 3 working days.

No figures rebuttal by BT

If it were the case that no shows were going down then BT could have easily proven the case by showing hard figures as I'm sure the probably compile these on a service KPI basis. The lack of hard figures makes me think that there is truth in the allegation.

Help them help you

I'd moved furniture, removed the dust and spiders so that when the engineer turned up...

Straight in and out.

Less than 20mins later; new cable run, new box, new router, FTTC installed tested working.

He mentioned this was an easy job, sometimes he's climbing over furniture, under beds, got knows what.

If we could all try a little to make it easier, they'd probably be late less often.

BT? Untruthful? NEVER!

Yet again:

* Oh, no, fewer people are complaining than ever before

And again in BT's high standards of integrity shine through; from http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/2/2013/01/16/bt_asa_ruling_line_rental/

* BT's "six-month free broadband"

Along with the following from http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/01/16/bt_asa_ruling_line_rental/

* No, we've never intercepted web traffic

* No, we've never had anything to do with DPI

* No, we'd never do something like impose bevavioural advertising trial on our customers without asking them first.

* No, it MUST be your PC

* No, we're not scamming prices.

And one can probably add "I won't come in your mouth"

I used to work in customer service for a well known ISP. When we had missed Openreach appointments it was often our fault, not BT's.

The reason - poor software. Our appointment management system would fail to react correctly to OR's system when a booking was attempted. So on the surface it looked like an booking had been confirmed. In reality it had been rejected. In effect no appointment had been made. It often wasn't until the customer called to ask where their engineer was that it became apparent what had happened.

Now I know Openreach also miss appointments through their own incompetence. But a significant number of appointments are missed due to the ISP, at least in my experience. Of course it's very easy for the ISP to blame BT, especially as it fits into people's preconception that BT are incompetent.

Ass Elbow

BT made a complete hash of my install too. I moved into a new build house a few months ago. Fortunately the developers had already installed a BT line as they had used it as a site office, so I assumed that the activation process would be easy. How wrong I was.

Firstly BT refused to acknowledge the existence of the phone lines - despite me providing them with the DDI numbers - and quoted a 60-day lead time. After two weeks of ultimately pointless phones calls to their engineering department there was no other option but to wait for the 60 days.

BT arranged to send a engineer on install day but predictably they didn't turn up or even attempt to call. When I finally got to speak to someone I was told that they had determined a visit wasn't required and could do all the work from the exchange. However - the phone still wasn't working. This was, I was told, due to some work in the exchange and I would get a phone call later.

24 hours later, no service, and no call-back I called again to be told there was a major fault in my local street cabinet affecting all of my neighbours. Strange, I commented, since I'd just been next door to use their broadband connection.

My gripes were now three fold: no service, an engineer no-show, and being outright lied to.

Service, of sorts, was finally delivered three days later - with broadband a massive 768Kbps with CRC errors and a further week of arguments to get a half decent service.

My compensation offer for all the phone calls, inconvenience, etc? £10. An absolute disgrace.

Scared witless

You have scared the bejesus out of me now. I'm waiting on an engineer to come and fit infinity on Friday. This after having had three orders cancelled without so much as letting me know. I would have wasted those days sitting in if I hadn't checked online to see that everything was going ahead as agreed over the phone.

So from my end, it's not the engineers that are the sole problem, their order system is clueless, the online tracker is slow to update and sparse in it's information when an order isn't going through. I have been sent the hubs multiple times (including the delivery charge) due to the orders being cancelled their end.

As is typical with BT and the way it's all structured, one hand doesn't know that the other is picking it's nose in the car park whilst on a fag break.

Hopefully Friday will pass without incident, don't much fancy a third week in my new place with no access to cat pictures.

How topical

I just had a BT line installed today (for the Zen FTTC product that I have ordered). I was given an 8am to 1pm slot. The engineer arrived at 12:30pm and left about half an hour ago (3pm). Apart from the fact he went past the alloted time, I'm pretty happy. I told him exactly where I wanted the copper cable to be attached to my house, and exactly where I wanted the socket and he did exactly what I requested.

For some reason I had to get a separate appointment to do the FTTC part so I'm crossing my fingers that will go just as smoothly.

I haven't had a phone line for almost 3 weeks..

... Enough said. They've showed their face a couple of times, but that's about it so far.

Still waiting. No internet at home other than GPRS or possibly HSDPA in the right place is getting tedious.

Third time lucky

I got FTTC last October. At the first attempt, two nice guys from Openretch (apparently a roving team of FTTC installers) showed up - with the wrong paperwork, and despite getting confirmation it was a BT error, they were told from higher up not to complete the installation, since a box not being ticked on the order form is something they can't fix on a same-day basis. They rebooked for later that week ... no-show: apparently, BT's ordering desk had booked the visit with too little notice for the paperwork to come through to the engineers, so nobody was sent. The following week, a local guy showed up right on time (calling first!), swapped the sockets round, hooked up and tested the new kit and went away.

BT wrote to me today to announce that FTTC's available here now. Having been using it for five months, I would certainly hope it's available...