A long list of complaints that no one at BT will a...

Question

I was a customer of BT for about 2 years and before that had always had a BT landline in properties I lived within and never found any problems with their service until I came to moving house and then some very serious customer service problems started and my relationship quickly deteriorated. I would gratefully accept any advice or tips on how to resolve my problems of which a brief outline of them are below. At the end of October 2010 I moved house. At that time I cotacted BT to see if they could transfer my previous phone line to my new address. At this point in time the person that I contacted at BT told me that there had never been a bT line at my new address and I would have to pay the full price for a new installation – or if I took out BT’s broadband then the price would be half of the 127.99 original price. Being the best of a bad set of choices I went for the taking BT broadband and installation. We booked the appointment for the engineer to come out on a Tuesday afternoon 6/11/10 however on the Monday an email was received to let us know that the phone line has been fixed and there was no need for an engineer to call out. This we found very odd indeed, as we were told that there was no line ever going into this property. Concerned about this we rang BT to try and find out what was happening and how they possibly managed to install a phone line without gaining access to the property.. The person on the other end of the line insisted that the engineers fixed the line at the exchange, this at the time I disagreed strongly and kept the arrangement in place for the engineer to call out on the Tuesday. Tuesday morning came and another email came through and it stated that the issues had been resolved. This again was followed by a telephone call to argue with the call centre that the line can not have been fixed, they still insisted that it had, and to be honest by now I was starting to doubt myself. I got home and spoke to my partner who had taken the day off to wait for the engineer and we looked for a phone line that we were lead to believe by BT that was never in at this address. After a bit of searching we discovered that there was indeed a BT phone line going into the property however this wire was not connected. By now my patience was starting to wear thin, I’d be lied to consistently, first that I’d need to pay for an expensive installation, that an engineer would call out, that the line had been fixed (twice) and any time I rang I was being told a different story of what was happening or what had happened. I rang to let the engineering people know that the hadn’t been fixed, and they assured me that an engineer will call out and sort my problems on Wednesday. Wednesday came and no sign of an engineer came. As it got close to lunch time there still was no sign of an engineer, I gave BT a ring to see what was happening, the person on the other end of the phone then provided to tell me that the engineers wouldn’t be calling with us today as the system that is used to allocate the work to engineers was not updated properly and they could not call out with us today. That afternoon we contacted BT to speak to the cancellation department, we informed them of the situation and they were very helpful after they transferred us through to a member of staff in an English call centre that understood our complaints and frustration. The member of staff then informed us that we would not be charged for the installation of the phone line or any of the broadband. However a bill had already just gone out to us, but we should ignore this and the correct bill with the installation and cancellation charges taken off and as in lieu of the poor customer service received the cancellation charge from my previous address would also be removed, leaving us with just the calls we made at the previous address. We were told that this would be sent out 14 days after the date of cancellation. The bill arrived full of charges for installations and cancellations so we did as instructed and ignored this. Then a week or 2 later a reminder came which paniced us a bit, so we gave bt a call and again this was just a standard reminder and they are generated automatically so I should just ignore this as well and the new bill was going to posted out in a few days. On the Thursday after we had cancelled every service we had with BT a engineer called at our house just was we were preparing to go to work. As we had we had cancelled BT the day before and none could afford to take another day off to allow them access to the property we informed him that we did not require their services and they left. So we sat waiting for this amended bill for BT to come and a few days ago a bill came, however no amendments were made, in fact there was the entire previous bill with a late charge added in for good measure. Very confused and annoyed we tried to speak to someone form bt however the call centre worker either, couldn’t understand what we were saying, why we were not happy, or the systems bt use to check customer accounts is completely different from one call centre to another. He said that the matter is being transferred to the investigations department but to be honest I’m not a 100% confident that this will be done. I’m really not sure what to do any advice would be most welcome, I don’t really want to be paying 127.99 for an installation that never happened and then another 30.00 cancellation fee for a service I never received in the first place. I’m also not best pleased that they have also added in late fees for a bill that on 2 occasions I was advised to ignore.
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Answer 1

Hi alx845208,
Welcome to the BTCare Forum.
Sounds like a right mess, sorry you've had to go through this. If you can email in your forum username and BT account details (this will be in the bills you received) I'll look into this and see what we can do to sort this out.
Thanks,
Stephanie
Stephanie
BTCare Community Manager
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