Asked if the 2 month installation time could be sp...

Question

I have just moved house and as our Exchange has finally just been upgraded to adsl2 (some two years after it was originally planned) I decided to go with BT. I placed the order online and was given an appointment date of the 17th of November.
I placed the order a week before moving so once I actually got in to the house I rang BT to see if they could speed this up at all because I have to be able to work from home for my job, and a 2 month delay causes me huge problems.
I got through to the people in India who then told me I hadn't booked an engineer and as such the whole order needed to be cancelled and started again. I tried to explain that the web site booked the engineer for me and that I actually had a date and time window when the engineer would be coming but this got me nowhere. I asked to speak to a supervisor and got put on hold for several minutes only for the person I originally spoke to to come back to me and tell me that they had spoken to the supervisor, who agrees that I had placed the order incorrectly and we would have to start again.
I gave in at that point and let them do it. My new installation date is now the 27th of November. Great! I asked again if this could be improved, and was told someone would call me back within 3 days. I left it a week and called again. This time I was assured someone would call within 24 hours. Same time the next day nobody had called back, so I called again.
This time i was told it would actually be up to 48 hours so I should give them another day. Still nothing so I called again. This time I was promised that someone would definitely call within 24 hours and I didn't need to worry.
Can you guess what happened next? Yep you guessed it - absolutely nothing.
The worrying thing is I am a new customer to BT and this is the way I get treated. I deal with BT for the company I work for and that is usually a reasonably positive experience, but then I have access to a local business team who are 30 minutes down the road and understand what I need.
Indian call centres may be much cheaper than UK based ones, but you can't put a price on good customer service - something that my bank thankfully realised a few years ago.

Answer 1

BT do not provide or maintain the external network. This is done by Openreach who work for all service providers. BT do not get any special treatment.
Openreach have a backlog of work due to the recent bad weather, so installation and repairs are taking much longer than normal.
Long delays are common at the moment, with all service providers. There is not much anyone can do about it. Business customers usually get priority.
There are some useful help pages here, for BT Broadband customers only, on my personal website.
BT Broadband customers - help with broadband, WiFi, networking, e-mail and phones.