BT last in home phone survey. Sky phone tops poll

BT is the worst telephone provider according to a large-scale consumer survey, which found that more than a quarter of its customers were not happy with the company.

It is the second year running that BT has come bottom of the survey, carried out by the price comparison website uSwitch. It found that 28 per cent of its customers are not satisfied with the overall price, service, bills and ease-of-use of the telphone offer.

The blow for BT comes despite successful attempts to improve its offers over the last year, after it lost many customers following it being stripped of the telephone monopoly in the early 1990s.

The survey of 12,000 people found that just 59 per cent of telephone customers in Britain were happy were the service they received from their phone company, and 76 per cent were satisfied overall. BT customer's recorded a 72 per cent satisfaction.

The industry, as a whole, appears to have improved slightly with many companies lowering customers' bills over the last year. The overall proportion of people satisfied has increased from 74 per cent to 76 per cent. The company that came top was Sky, with just 14 per cent of its customers dissatisfied.

Jason Glynn, at uSwitch.com, pointed out that BT had improved over the last year, and that it should be given praise for becaming the first provider to stop charging for calls to 0845 and 0870 numbers. However, it come last in all but 1 of 11 categories, including value for money.

Mr Glynn said: "Customer friendly steps, such as BT introducing free calls to 0845 and 0870 numbers, have been very welcome. But consumers will still be concerned by increased line rental costs and being hit by charges for receiving paper bills.

"While these measures will bring in much needed revenue to companies, it could be at the cost of customer satisfaction and trust built up over many years."

BT, which has 11 million customers, angered many of its customers last year when it introduced a fee for all of those who chose to pay their bill by cash or by cheque.

More than five million customers, who did not like paying by direct debit, were charged £13.25 a month for line rental, compared with direct debit customers who paid £12.50 a month.

This itself is more expensive than most other line rentals on the market. Sky, for instance, charges just £10 a month for line rental.

One customer, nicknamed "the cash martyr" unsuccessfully took BT to court in an attempt to stop what she claimed was an unfair charge.

BT said the survey "had no credibility", arguing that because it had been conducted online it missed out on the many loyal, especially elderly BT customers, that did not have access to the internet.

A spokesman also pointed out that uSwitch failed to make clear that it accepts commission every time a customer switches from one provider to another via its website.

BT fared marginally better in a separate survey from rival price comparison website Broadband Choices. It was ranked 7 out of ten providers for the best Internet Service Provider. The winner was O2, and the bottom-ranked company was AOL Broadband.

Best Overall Customer Satisfaction:

1. Sky 86%

2 TalkTalk 82%

2Tiscali 82%c

4. Virgin Media 78%

5. BT 72%

Source: uSwitch and Telegraph

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BT charges pensioner for line mistake

It was bad enough when vulnerable pensioner Elizabeth Tuck was left without her vital phone line after a BT mistake but now, to add insult to injury, she was also charged for the gaffe!

Mrs Tuck of Leam Lane Estate, Gateshead, 79, was left with no way of calling for help when BT cut off her phone line. She had just come out of hospital after a fall and was also coming to terms with the death of her husband George.

But she was left unable to make any calls when BT said she had failed to pay a £61 bill she never received. That meant emergency services could not be alerted by the grandmother-of-three if she got into difficulty.

And this month, BT added insult to injury by charging Mrs Tuck for their mistake.

BT added an £11.50 fee to Mrs Tuck’s April bill. The charge was for passing the account to their credit control department, after the non-payment of January’s phantom bill. Mrs Tuck’s son, George Jnr, is furious his mum was branded with bad credit for a mistake that wasn’t her fault. George, 50, said: “I was assured that this problem had been sorted out, but they charged mam again.

“BT imposed a fine of £11.50 for referral to their Credit Control division. An assistant explained it was due to mam’s disconnection for non-payment in January.

“I thought that the previous bill was bad enough, but for mam to live now with the belief she has been referred to a ‘bad debt’ agency leaves her a frightened elderly lady. BT have caused an elderly lady distress and expense at the very worst time in her life.”

BT apologised and refunded the charge, as well as three months’ line rental.

A spokesman said: “The £11.50 charge was raised automatically by the billing system after the advisor had dealt with the case. “However, this was incorrectly raised and has been removed from the bill.”

Mrs Tuck’s problems started in January when BT restricted her phone line, saying she had failed to pay her bill, which only arrived four days later. BT accepted the error and offered £100 in compensation.

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BT UK's cheapest broadband deal?

BT has launched what it claims is the UK's cheapest landline and 3G broadband bundle, offering home users an ADSL plus mobile broadband package for £15.65 per month.

Over 18 months, the cheapest BT Total Broadband deal, which includes 8Mbps wireless broadband at home and 1GB monthly usage for mobile broadband, costs £308.88. That compares to £528.48 with Orange and £435 with Virgin, according to BT's calculations.

The mobile broadband service runs on Vodafone's HSDPA network, which offers 'up to' 7.2Mbps speeds and covers 80 percent of the UK. BT said the 1GB monthly data limit is enough to surf the web for 400 minutes, download one film, 48 photos, and 144 songs. Customers who need more than 1GB per month, can pay more to top up their plan.

"This is an absolutely fantastic deal, the most complete home and mobile broadband for only 56p a day is a no-brainer," said John Petter, managing director of BT's Consumer division.

As well as accessing the web via 3G, BT Total Broadband customers can use a network of wireless hotspots to get online when on the move. BT has partnered with Fon to give customers access to 400,000 hotspots around the world, and Starbucks to provide a free internet connection at 650 coffee shops in the UK and Ireland.

Original Source - PC Advisor [Link]

BT Broadband Experiences
Looking at the amount of complaints we have received about BT Broadband, we hope that they have addressed this in their new service...but we very much doubt this! Please let us know your BT Broadband experiences by commenting below.

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BT complaint goes on from 1996 to 2009

A BT Complaint here that dates back to 1996. Surely BT can sort out this problem! Here is the complaint...

Dear Sir
I sincerely hope that you will be able to get somewhere with this. BT are the giants in telecommunications and the catalogue of disasters which I could list would fill hundreds of internet pages so I wont. Suffice it to say that it began in 1996 when I had to be paid compensation for a line going in a week later (into a remote home, me disabled and needing the ability to phone) to a 36 hour marathon which, eventually, got me screaming but also saw me claim for £400 in wasted time and shabby treatment.

But the reason I am writing today is that I have an elderly friend who is completely alone (sadly she lives 45 minutes from me and I cannot just pop in to check on her), has been very ill over the last year and whose landline (and with that her community "panic" button) and mobile phone have been cut off.

When telephoned BT told me (lovely Indian girl... I grew up in India yet she couldn't understand a word I said. I speak even more clearly than I write) that my friend owed them £500+ and that she could still make emergency calls. Also that they would make sure that she was listed as a vulnerable person (because of the panic button) and that someone "superior" (to my lass) would telephone me to discuss assistance/clarification.

I have not heard from them, the panic button does not work and no calls of any nature can be made from that line. BT are still taking regular payments from my friend's bank account by Direct Debit. :/

BT now claim that she owes them over a thousand (how is this possible? They told me it was £500+ and with her phone cut off she is hardly likely to be have been able to accrue any more charges..?) and she is left at home with no way of speaking to anyone.

HOWEVER- they did phone her and sold her some fancy new package which gives her free evening and weekend calls through her Broadband...

And are taking payment for that quite happily. Only without a telephone she cannot make use of what they sold her. Never WAS able to as her phone was already cut off and the lad who she spoke to said he'd sort it for her (as he agreed that she must have her panic button).

So- knowing that she had no landline BT sold her something she cannot use. Then I find a message from BT simply entitled: "BT Broadband Talk Softphone - Hub Cease". Are they going to cut off her Broadband as well? Even though they are still helping themselves to her money?!

Come on BT- get the staff properly trained, don't out-source your customer relations staff and have the courtesy to deal openly and plainly with people approaching you for information on YOUR products/services. No lying, no passing the buck to "supervisors" and a little more commitment to the truth.

Without some serious adjustments in customer training BT will continue to be a joke. If my friend falls and cannot drive herself to a doctor, she may not be "found" for a week. That is shabby!

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BT offers UK businesses new broadband and phone bundle

BT is helping UK businesses beat the recession with a new broadband and call package. UK businesses now have the freedom to combine BT Business Total Broadband Option 1 internet access with a number of new BT One Plan call packages that offer inclusive calls to landlines, mobiles and international numbers.

BT says that by taking out the two plans together, UK businesses will see the cost of calls to UK fixed lines introduced savings of up to 50 per cent on the price per minute for calls to UK fixed lines for businesses taking a call package with their broadband package.

BT says by combining the two packages, UK business could save up to 20 percent on the price of purchasing the two services separately.

"In uncertain times, cash flow is king," said Bill Murphy, managing director, BT Business.

"With the introduction of these changes, BT is helping businesses manage their communications spend with one low fixed cost package that they have the power to define themselves based on what they need. This is a natural evolution in the market of communication services."

BT Business Total Broadband Option 1 costs £12.50, while the BT One Plan call start from just £5.

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BT Digital vault service complaint

After reading this BT Complaints website, I had to tell you about my appalling experience recently with the BT Digital vault service. This is a service where you pay a fee for BT's online storage in order to back up your important and personal files from your computer.

We had paid for this new service with our broadband as we had lost some files due to a power surge which damaged our HDD so we thought this was the safest option to protect our important documents and more importantly photos of our 2 children when they were born.

To my anger BT recently sent me an email informing me that they had now deleted my BT vault account for an unknown reason and had deleted all my saved files.

When I called them to find out I was put through to their "less than helpful" foreign call centres who were unable to tell me why it had happened. Finally after over a month of my own investigation I was able to determine that BT had in fact deleted the wrong BT digital vault account.

We had decided to purchase a new digital vault account and pay more as this provided more storage space, this meant I had 2 accnts. I used the newest account to save all our files and precious digital photos and left it at that. Little did I know that BT deleted this account without my knowledge or authorisation and deleted all our precious photos.

To cut a long story short when I spoke to the complaints dept they gave me a measly £90 compensation for the loss of hundreds of priceless photos of our children and tried to sell me the digital vault service and other services as well!!!

I was then told by a UK advisor in the Digital Vault team that my photos will not be lost and I would get them back, but then told by a foreign advisor in the Complaints team that this was not possible! So who is telling the truth and who is caring for customers?

To say my wife and our family were upset is the understatement of the year. We were all in tears.

I think you need to put out to the public that BT can and will delete all your saved files in peoples Digital Vault accounts without telling customers before they do it and will not give customes a chance to save their files before they do so.

Thank you and happy to discuss.

Gary Prince

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