My BT nightmare - And I was only with them for aro...

Question

Hi,
This post is a rant at how appalling I have found BT customer services, and I have only been a customer for 2  ½ days!
I placed my order around the end of January for BT Infinity & BT telephone line, I was to be transferring over from Sky. Anyway, I received an activation date of the 16 Feb 2015 and a few days before this I received the HH5.
So late on Sunday 15 Feb I realised that I did not know what time the BT engineer would be arriving so I got onto BT live support and discovered that there would be no engineer visit, I would just connect up the HH5 and the Infinity would be ready a few hours after BT take over my line from Sky. Great, as I had already booked a day off work I figured I would make the most of it so I spent the day playing on my Playstation waiting for the infinity to start working.
Well my Sky internet went off at about 9am, this was the time my wife tried to dial up her works remote connection. No worries, I connected the HH5 and told her that it would be active in about 2 hours (It states this on the HH5 box). Well it didn’t activate and my wife had to tether her mobile to her laptop so she could work. Kinda sucked but there we go these things happen, after all BT said on the order tracking that it could be up to midnight before it activated. Well midnight came & went and it was still not activated.
I should also mention that I run several online shop’s all of which have had to be closed since Monday 16 Feb as a cost of several hundreds of pounds lost each day my internet was off.
So Tuesday 17 Feb I contact BT via live chat and get passed from pillar to post and eventually an Indian lady calls me and says Infinity will be active by 16 Feb at midnight, Ummm yeah that was like 10 hours ago as it is now 10am on Tuesday morning. She then started saying something an all I could understand was the word ‘engineer’ and that she promised the Infinity would be active by midnight on the 17 Feb.
Well you guessed it, midnight on the 17 Feb came & went and Infinity was still not active.
So today Wednesday 18 Feb, day three of my online shops being turned off at about a loss of £900 in turnover and my wife racking up a huge bill tethering her mobile to her laptop so she could be able to work. I again contact BT via live chat and again get passed around several departments until a lovely lady (cough cough) who appeared to take great delight in disconnecting our chat before I had finished asking questions.
Anyway, this lovely lady eventually told there was a routing problem and that BT would have an update – An update, not a resolution but an update on the 24 Feb, 6 days time -  During this time I would stand to lose about £2000.00 in online shop sales not to mention the huge bill my wife is running up on her mobile by tethering it to her laptop.
Surely, this two week wait between ordering Infinity and it going live BT Openreach should be making sure everything is actually working at the exchange/cabinet so on the go live date it actually goes live. And the go live date does not mean we will see if it works date.
I told the BT support girl that this time scale was completely unacceptable and I must cancel my order immediately as I need to get internet access. No problem she said I can cancel it now, should she proceed? Yes I said please do. There was a long pause and she came back on to the chat to say it had been cancelled. Great I thought…..
I then said that I presume I will not be charged for the cancellation and she replied that I had two weeks to cancel after I had placed the order. What the heck, how is that fair? I placed the order about 18 days ago and BT have failed to provide the service. How the hell am I supposed to know that that BT could not provide infinity to me until these two weeks after my initial order has passed?
Surely this has to be some breach of the distance selling regulations? When I sell something online the customer has 30 days AFTER receipt of the goods to decide if they want to keep them. If I was to follow BT’s cancellation policy then I would only allow my customers to change their minds after I posted and before they received the goods…. This type of cancellation policy to totally unacceptable if you ask me.
Anyway, the BT chat girl then say that my line will be gone by tomorrow (19 Feb) and everything will be cancelled. Again great I thought, I can get back on to Sky and get them to supply ADSL again. Then it occurred to me, if BT are ceasing my order my line will go dead. I pressed the BT chat girl about this and she then admitted that yes, the line will be ceased and I would probably have to pay to get it reconnected! WTF – BT have caused all these issues and are quite happy to totally drop me in the dodo and they really don’t give a toss about their customers.
I then asked the BT girl about the potential to recover loss of earnings from BT at this point she disconnected me and that was the end of that.
So it remains to see if I will be charged for a service I have not received but I for one will never ever use BT for any of my services in the future.
Now, later that day I contacted Sky via live chat whilst I was out on a job and they were extremely helpful. At one point my laptop did a restart and lost the chat with Sky just as I was making progress with my internet issue, I couldn’t believe it but before my laptop had restarted the Sky rep I was chatting to called me up on my mobile! Awesome.
She then proceeded to see what she could do to get my phone number & line back from BT and she said the system was letting her pull it back across, this is great as I won’t have to pay a reconnection fee and my landline number stays the same.
But that is not all, she went on to say that I also qualified for 12 months free Sky unlimited internet (ADSL – the same package that I was on before) she did not know how but something to do with BT taking the line away from Sky and then her puling it back across. Result!
She then said that it could take up to two weeks to get the ADSL back on my phone line, bit of a bummer I thought but it was my fault really for trusting BT to get me up & running when they said they would. But she then proceeded to tell me that she would be crediting my Sky account with £25 so I could go out and buy an internet dongle so I could get back online and open up my online shops (I was going to do this anyway but Sky have said they will pay for it!)
So there we go, just look at the difference in customer support between BT and Sky.
I wish I had never tried to move to BT and I cannot believe what an incompetent company they are and the contempt they treat their customers with.
BT sucks if you ask me!

Answer 1

damage2008 wrote:
Hi,
I should also mention that I run several online shop’s all of which have had to be closed since Monday 16 Feb as a cost of several hundreds of pounds lost each day my internet was off.
So today Wednesday 18 Feb, day three of my online shops being turned off at about a loss of £900 in turnover and my wife racking up a huge bill
Anyway, this lovely lady eventually told there was a routing problem and that BT would have an update – An update, not a resolution but an update on the 24 Feb, 6 days time -  During this time I would stand to lose about £2000.00 in online shop sales not to mention the huge bill my wife is running up on her mobile by tethering it to her laptop.
Welcome to the BT Residential Customers forum
As you are a business user, perhaps you should post your comments on the BT Business forum at http://business.forums.bt.com/
BT do not permit you to use a residential account to run a business anyway, as its against their T&Cs.
BT Business broadband has a proper SLA, and compensation arrangements on certain packages.
It may be wise to see what Sky say about business usage, and their compensation arrangements.
As both BT and Sky use the Openreach network, that is where any future failures ar most likely to be.
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.