BT problem after problem

Dear BT Complaint Blog,

I have had a problem since March 2008 when I returned to BT. My telephone has interference. BT told me the line was OK. We have since purchased 3 new telephones, all have the same interference, same story from BT, they do nothing.

I have also had a problem with my Broadband, around 5 weeks ago they the so called technical department of BT which of course is India. They cannot speak English that you can understand and I cannot understand them.

I have spent approx 35 hrs on the telephone trying to get the problem solved WITHOUT SUCCESS. They have lost (India) all my emails dating back to 2003 which included all myself and my wife's previous hospital appointments and the future ones, we are both disabled and pensioners, also very important emails were lost.

NO ONE CAN FIX THE PROBLEM WHICH THEY THEMSELVES CAUSED.

I was told by Trading Standards to contact the complaints of BT In Durham, STILL NO FIX.

We should never have gone back to BT,I was also told by the sales of BT Vision that I would be able to get previous programmes that had been aired through my contract free. Now I am told this changed in May and you now have to pay.

I explained that I was told a very different story. I was told it does not matter what I was told!

Disgusted
Mr M Ferguson

Gillian Lewis is made up person

All BT Complainers. I recently had contact with a ex BT employee who informed me that Gillian Lewis is a made up character.

He said "Its company policy to offloads complaints to India"

A Typical BT Complaint

I was so happy to see your BT problems website. I was actually looking to see if I could somehow get the head of customer services of BT to write him/her a letter. I have already contacted BBC watchdog and below is my letter explaining my situation.

I hope you can add this to your BT complaints page and put foward to offtel or whoever can help us out here. Here is my BT Complaint letter:

Hi,

BT sent me a letter saying someone was interested in my phone number and if I haven't contacted them by April 24th they would disconnect me.

I called (in disbelief) saying that I do need it, so they said fine they will cancel the cancellation request. They didn’t and so my line was disconnected.

A lot of expensive calls(was on hold for ages) from my mobile phone were made and eventually I was put onto a woman called Barbara who apologised, organised for the activity of the line the following day and said my old number will be back within the week. All this time my sky broadband was cancelled because of no active line.

It’s the 3rd June and I still don’t have my old phone number back. I do have service but as everyone has the old number they can’t contact me.

To add to insult I received a bill a few days ago for £41.

I was offered 1 months free rental and £10 as a gesture of goodwill for the following:

• disconnecting my phone line without my permission
• A mth of no broadband which they argue isn’t their fault
• massive mobile phone bills calling BT and being put on hold
• constant promises from people in foreign countries that all will be sorted and then nothing ?
• continuously calling BT as in the 1st few weeks no-one bothered to call me to review the situation?
• costs of my visits to the internet cafe as I am in the middle of organising a wedding and have to do it out of office hours
• Over a month of missing calls as everyone has our proper phone number
• The stress I have suffered in the last month because of the incompetence of BT.

If I don’t pay this bill I will receive a CCJ yet nothing happens to BT for the lack of service.

They boast that the last thing they do is disconnect landlines after non payment of bills so there are a lot of unpaid debts with a phone line yet they disconnected a bill paying customer and caused all this bother and stress.

I am looking into other landline providers as we speak but would appreciate your response on this.

Sincerely

Majella Foley

11,000 Visitors to btcomplaints.com

Hello Everyone.
Firstly, I want to say a big thank you for everyone who has contributed to the BT complaints site.

Secondly, the site has received over 11,000 visitors since October 2007 with many of you leaving a complaint about the terrible service you are receiving from BT.

A report will be produced over the coming months which will detail every BT complaint received via the two websites and sent for investigation:
BT Complaints Blog
Send Your BT Complaint

Finally to say you are not alone in your struggle with BT as you can see from the vast amount of complaints varying from customer service to connection speeds.

Below is an example of just one of the many complaints we have received over the past 8 months.

BT Cold Calling Complaint
"I run eight houses which accommodate adults with enduring mental illness. We recently had a cold caller from BT, who spoke to one of our residents to ask if he wanted broadband installed.

He was pressured into saying yes, although the contract is in my name.

When I rang BT to query the broadband charges, I was told it was an 18-month contract and that we would have to pay to cancel.

We then received a bill for £438.48. I am disputing this, but am frustrated at every turn by BT — one of the many people I spoke to denied that a complaint had even been lodged. At one stage our phones were cut off, too. P. J., Birmingham

Margaret Stone, Money Mail's Money Doctor, replies: I think BT's treatment of you and your residents was appalling. Once you had explained to BT that it had made the agreement with a resident who had neither the authority nor the mental capacity to deal with a pushy sales person, the contract should have been cancelled immediately.

But it appears that there was no one in BT prepared or willing to help. It was not until you got in touch with Money Mail that action was taken.

Within days, the matter was resolved. The contract is cancelled. The account balance is now £339.90 and these charges — which I can only describe as spurious — have been cancelled and thus cleared.

In addition, BT has sent a hamper of chocolates to the resident who inadvertently triggered this sorry saga. I think this is a wholly inadequate gesture given the appalling way you have been treated.

Meanwhile, a warning note has been put on all the accounts in your houses, advising that you are the only person who can make a decision about them.

0870 cost will fall after complaints

Plans to cut the price of calls to 0870 numbers and to introduce tighter regulations for 0871 lines have been announced after complaints about price clarity.

The communications watchdog Ofcom wants calls to 0870 numbers to cost no more than calls to geographic numbers.

On average, calls to 0870 numbers cost between 6p and 10p per minute in the daytime, from a BT landline, and 1p to 5p at other times. Ofcom wants this to be reduced to about 3.5p a minute in the day and 1p to 1.5p a minute at other times.

Ofcom's proposals also include improving protection for customers calling 0871 lines, which cost anything from 5p to 10p per minute, by bringing them under the remit of premium-rate services regulator PhonepayPlus.

The plans are part of Ofcom's wider review of "non-geographic" telephone numbers, after complaints over the lack of transparency about the cost of calls.

Many businesses and organisations use 0870 numbers to provide information including road traffic advice, customer service and financial advice.

Calls to 0870 numbers are currently priced in a way that allows organisations to share the revenue generated by per minute call charges. Ofcom's proposals would effectively end this.

Businesses that wanted to charge higher rates for 0870 calls would have to make sure their customers knew the costs. PhonepayPlus would also be able to investigate complaints about excessively long call queuing times. Ofcom said it hoped to have the proposed changes in place by autumn.

BT Complaints Pirate FM

Hello everyone, this is the web master of this blog.

This morning I heard a the debate on my local radio station Pirate FM in Cornwall. I moved to Ponsanooth in Cornwall last year and tried to get BT to fit a new line to our house. Simple yes? No way was this simple!

I'm not one for complaining but after 6 months of problems including 3 separate bills for £300 for one phone line, total lack of communication with BT customer service reps, the list goes on, I decided to set up a BT complaints blog on the web where people like me could submit there BT Complaint online.

The idea behind this is to put all BT complaints received into a report and send off for investigation from Offcom, Watchdog and such like. So far I have had almost 10,000 people visit this BT Complaints blog in 6 months with hundreds of complaints received.

Join me and together we can get some action to put right this terrible service we are receiving.

Thanks for all your complaints so far - They will all be going into the report so we can get some answers

BT named worst home phone provider

BT has been voted the worst telephony provider for the first time ever in a poll to gauge customer satisfaction.

In a survey conducted by uSwitch.com, BT - the largest home phone company in the UK - finished last in nine out 11 categories, including value for money.

Among the sample of its customers, 30 per cent described themselves as not satisfied with the service they receive - equating to some three million people.

The top-performing provider was revealed to be Sky, which came top in seven of the 11 categories and boasts a customer satisfaction rate of 85 per cent.

Commenting on the figures, Tim Wolfenden, head of home Services at uSwitch.com, urged consumers who are unsatisfied to vote with their feet and switch provider.

He said: "The key point is that loyalty does not pay, and it's now up to the 7.5 million customers who have never switched to make competition work for them and vote with their feet.

"Switching home phone is a very simple process and by shopping around for the best deal, consumers could save up to £200 a year."

Trackback URL

BT Customer Service - Nightmare still unresolved!

This is a complaint I received about an anonymous person who is obviously very angry and upset with BT Customer Service. Just one of many BT Complaints I have received over the past 6 months. This will go into the report I will send to BT and complaint companies later this year for investigation including Watchdog.

Dear Sir or Madam,
I’m writing to try and clear up an outstanding issue with BT that goes back to 2004.
Despite attempts in the past, I feel as if I’ve been fobbed off and a cursory look at the issue has not resolved it.

I was a BT customer during 2004 and a little before that when I moved back to Edinburgh from the Hebrides. I was waiting to move into a house in April 2004 and knew I would have to have the phone transferred to the new flat across town.

I gave BT several phonecalls, months in advance to make sure that there would be not loss of service. I checked that the new flat had a working BT landline and no fault was detected on it.

I was simply moving area by about two miles. This did mean having a new number but I was assured on several occasions that my new service would go on within an hour of leaving the first flat. Certainly, the same day. I checked to make sure that this would happen as told.

This was vitally important to me as I was having a life threatening operation and living alone, my close family were all living in Australia, and the only one normally resident in England, my mother was also in Australia for several months to help assist my sister with childcare.

The day for the telephone allocation to change to new flat came and there was no service. I was then hospitalised for my operation. When I came out of hospital I was extremely weak and was to rest with lots of bed rest for minimum three months. I could not leave the flat nor walk about in the flat because I had lost several expected pints of blood and would pass out frequently.

I was lucky to have someone – a volunteer to check on me every couple of days during workdays and although not in their remit they brought me in some groceries.
Normally I am a young fit woman. But without the access to the phone I would have starved and possibly died from an accident in the house, without the help of a volunteer charity organisation.

Before they started the few weeks support on my first morning in the new flat I tried to get up to answer an unexpected call from workmen – who should not have been trying to work on my flat at that time. I tried to get out of bed and blacked out fell off the end of the bed – cos I was disorientated and then unconscious and almost broke my collar bone, I gashed my arm, cut and bruised my face and cut and bruised my shoulder landing on a bare floor.

For three months I had no phone service, then someone tried to charge £190 to me for an engineer call that was not needed and never happened.

The distress of these months was so bad that instead of recovering from the operation within three months I did not heal up and was physically unwell for fourteen months and am now need counselling for depression brought on by my experience in 2004.

At first I was unable to talk and was too tired to sit up for long with postoperative pain & fatigue. I did not have the volunteer for long but for the first eight weeks of living in the new flat the volunteer tried to phone using a mobile phone on my behalf. Usually with me next to him.

He would try and get through for the hours allocated to help me (6 per week) without any success. And when he was connected to customer services they refused to deal with anyone other than the “bill payer” – even though he was authorised to do so by me and at one point several weeks in – I said so down the phone. But still my phone was not connected.

I was due to get the phone and broadband – because in the previous flat the BT dial up internet service was appalling and I was constantly cut off by poor signal whilst web browsing. And physically had my service terminated on several occasions EVEN THOUGH I PAID MY BILLS IN ADVANCE BY DIRECT DEBIT AND WAS IN CREDIT. I had to check several times with my bank that the direct debit was operating properly but they checked thoroughly and said EVER TIME the fault was at the recipients end – BT.

I had moved into the new flat that needed many repairs to be carried out and though they were to take place when it was convenient for me – I had no way of phoning and booking the work. So without the phone I had NO GAS SUPPLY for COOKING, HEATING and HOT WATER and as I had lost so much blood I was incapable of maintaining a warm core temperature, it was freezing in the flat even in summer – colder than outside without heating as there is not a lot of direct sunlight. On the property.

My Mother was absolutely frantic in Australia because apart from a brief call to me in the hospital she had heard nothing from me for three months and was starting to think that I might have died.

I was angry, frustrated and very frightened that I had no way to contact anyone – not even a doctor or nurse in case of problems and the stress caused me to be rehospitalised for a few days only a week after the operation. I did know how I would be able to eat.

The water supply to the toilet was faulty so half the water was off until it was repaired meaning I had no flushing loo for 6 weeks (this POST OP from abdominal surgery) a pipe and radiator was also leaking. But I couldn’t chase the repairs up without access to a phone and only having a volunteer by chance, who used his work mobile phone to try and help. But the time he was meant to assist me he had to spend on the mobile phone trying to get through to BT customer care to get my phoneline connected.

To top it all I was billed for three months line rental, without ever being connected. And when I requested that this be reimbursed to me on other occasions I was told that I was “in credit” and so would not pay the next quarter. This is absolute rubbish because my line rental always is deducted from my bank account by direct debit and I have never had the money refunded to me – rather than someone juggling figures and saying I’ve not paid in advance when I have!!

When the phone was eventually put on after dozens and dozens of mobile calls to BT, the line that existed already was perfectly fine and there was no special work needed. The engineer said it could have in fact been connected the day I originally requested it to be live and he couldn’t understand why it was not.

I have never got over the intense fear and isolation and worry about feeding myself and getting help that I went through the first three months of my new flat in 2004 without a phone to reach the outside world. I had indeed worried that my line would not be connected and so had asked for assurances and checked that everything would go ahead as scheduled but this didn’t happen.

My family was also put through an ordeal being 14,000 miles away and not knowing if I was alive or dead. The lack of contact with anyone at this time even emergency services ruined my health and recovery and brought on severe and lasting depression.

I ask again once and for all to take notice of the serious consequences that poor management or whatever cock-up (certainly not technical) caused me to have to go through this ordeal without the support of a voluntary charity (whose remit was just to help me move in! not health related in any way) I would have possibly died from complication, accidental injury or neglect and starvation for want of a phone – that I’d even paid for in advance.

I feel that the result is not just the “missing” first quarter line rental taken under false pretences from my account but the injury and long-term effects of stress and consequences this unnecessary situation had on my health and long term wellbeing. I have never in my life suffered from anxiety. Pre op I was a robust camera woman working in the film industry and Alpine Ski Leader, I made documentaries and films in remote locations such as Ben Nevis and the Mid Atlantic I combined my creative and technical training with outdoor skills self taught and self financed. I was due to go to Antarctica in the last four years but have never regained the confidence I had before this fiasco in 2004.

My mother had a similar operation a few years before me and was sailing in Sydney Harbour three months after her operation. It was expected I would do well after my operation because I was younger and extremely fit and looked 15 years younger than 39. I’m now 43 and live like my late octogenarian grandmother having stopped going out at all and have remained confined to the house. Even though the almost forty years prior to that I was someone who preferred living outdoors, such is now my lack of confidence and outlook from being robbed of communication and help and the knock effect it has had. So much so that it has taken me a long time to face writing this letter, although it is the second I have sent on the matter and made several phonecalls 2005/6.

The tardiness in connecting my line also meant a delay in email for when I was stronger to not only contact family in Australia but restart my search and self promotion/networking for commissioned work self employed to my cost.

From Anonymous

Pensioner Woman sues BT for extra charges

28 March 2008, A woman is suing BT after she was charged extra for paying her bill in cash.

Solicitor Ros Fernihough, 62, has been a BT customer since 1964 and pays her bill over the counter in her local bank. In May last year, BT introduced the £4.50 charge to cover administration costs of processing bills not paid by direct debit.

The move has been highly criticised as a 'stealth charge' that targets the company's poorest customers. Around 2.9 million customers pay by means other than direct debit and Mrs Fernihough's action could affect them.

The grandmother-of-seven claims the telephone company is unfairly penalising its cash-paying customers and is making her case at Walsall County Court.

Mrs Fernihough said: "£4.50 may not be much to someone who is working with a reasonable job but if you are on a state pension it is crucial."

Read hundreds of BT Customer Service Complaints

See Channel 4 News report

BT Help

Here's two more recent BT Complaints made to BT customer service and there are many more just like this on the send your BT complaint page.

"Why has BT set up a separate payment department for which I am paying for ie £4-50.
I do not trust BT to take the correct variable amount out of my bank account as it is.
It is bad enough that you have to pay £5-00 if they consider your payment to have been late but to have to pay an extra £9-50 for the privilege of paying by check is a B......... Liberty.
I always pay my bill, have never defaulted, have been with BT for..... forever.
Considering leaving now.Very disappointed".
Miss L Callaway

"I've just bought a new second home and need a phone line. My wife called BT and they said we'd need an engineer, even though the previous owners had a BT line. They have now missed four separate confirmed appointments without ever once warning me they would not be attending.
I have wasted so much time waiting for engineers and in BT's endless phone queues (50 minutes was my longest wait).
No-one I've spoken to has any idea what's going wrong and all they do is offer a new appointment which the engineers then miss again. The last manager I spoke to said we didn't even need an engineer and the line would be activated within 48 hours from the exchange.
It wasn't. We've just called BT to confirm the latest appointment to be told it's been concealed for some unknown reason and they won't be coming".
Malcolm Lochhead

Complaint Advice to BT

My advice when complaining is:

a) Contact BT using email rather than over the phone, as this means you have a record of correspondence and also that you don't have to wait on hold.

b) Explain yourself clearly and concisely and be specific about the action you would like BT to take. Always be polite.

c) If your complaint has not been dealt with (and it is reasonable) then begin following BT's complaint escalation guide

Do not keep using their basic complaints service.

BT Call Centre of Death

Today I received an interesting email which I would like to share with everyone regarding BT Complaints:

"I recently visited your very impressive BT complaint website. I thought I would offer you the option of sharing a little gem that I recently came across in the fight against BT and their ‘Call Centre of Death’.

Without going in to massive detail I was the victim of a spectacular and sadly all too common BT cock up. The resultant billing error was so ridiculous that I was barely able to comprehend the stupidity required to make this error in the first instance, let alone comprehend a solution.

It was then that my brainwave struck me…Instead of even picking up the phone I decided to write; not to complain about stupidity but instead to approach the problem from a more interesting angle…Fraud!

I was obviously aware that the origins of my billing error were not related to fraud or criminal activity; naturally it came down to the hopeless attitude that a BT Goblin in the ‘Call Centre of Death’ had demonstrated to me months earlier. However, it was precisely the inefficiency as displayed by the ‘Call Centre of Death’ that made me try my alternative solution.

I sent a letter by recorded mail that simply stated that my account had been fraudulently accessed and my BT account had been amended possibly for a criminal purpose. I further stated that this ‘criminal’ activity had resulted in the compromise of my personal data and that I wanted a full investigation in to the matter. As an add on, I mentioned that my quarterly bill was also incorrect and I trusted once a full investigation in to the suspected fraud was done my bill would be amended accordingly.

The results were interesting, I received a call three days later from a lady stating she was in the presidents office at BT. She informed me that I could sleep easy, it was not fraud, but in fact had been employee error that had caused the problem. (No Sh*t!) She refunded my bill and gave me three months free line rental, also saying that my future bills would reflect my ‘line rental only’ option.

I was delighted by this until last week, when I received a promotional letter that effectively stated my account was still set up on the incorrect price plan …. Another letter complaining of suspected fraud (attached) has now been issued and I await the response with baited breath.

The moral of the story as far as I can see is that if everyone with a billing error wrote and made a complaint of fraud / illegal activity BT have a much greater obligation to investigate and get it right. In my case this has been far more efficient that having to queue on the phone for over two hours to then be frustrated by further call centre incompetence.

I have a small but dedicated Facebook group imaginatively entitled ‘BT Are Rubbish’ where I bitch about these things as they occur. Feel free to look us up / join or use any material you find on there!

Best regards
Richard Burnell

Some BT Complaints

This is an update on BT Complaints in February 2008. Thanks very much for sending all your BT complaints in. The complaint submission page has received 5420 total views so far in 7 months. In February alone there has been 1404 BT Complaint visitors so feel rest assured you are not alone in your plight!

It seems that BT Customer Service is getting worse rather than improving.

View a full list of BT Complaints

Below are just a few of the BT Complaints received so far. All of these complaints will be produced into a report format and sent to the necessary organisations to investigate and also to BT Customer Services.

Follow this link if you wish to send a BT complaint

BT Complaint example 1:
Just wanted to say well done for being pro active. My only complaint about BT are the charges for of £4 50 for those who choose to pay manually and the working days & notice given to pay it! I sent them an email to ask when the next bill would be coming over 2008 to avoid going on holiday!! as then they slap on additional charges for late payment. But then thats been well covered in the Guardian moneys and Ofcom simply aren't interested in the plight of customers. Janice Stanway

BT Complaint example 2:
I have not been able to get anyone at BT who can sort out my billing enquries. I have been charge £456 for line rental and no amount of phone calls has been able to resolve my issues. I have now cancelled my standing order and have informed them that I am willing to pay what I owe but not until this matter has been resolved I have contacted BBC watchdog and raised this with them so i need help as this matter is causing me a lot of stress and this has been going on since last October, BT are the pits as far as I am concerned.
Anonymous

View a full list of BT Complaints

167 BT complaints so far!

Thank you to everyone who has submitted a BT complaint

So far I have received 167 complaints and these will all be put into a report and sent to BT for comment later this year (2008). I will publish the response I get back from BT (if I get one!) on this blog.

Please keep your complaints coming!

Here is just one of the recent BT complaints I have had:

"My phone has recently ceased working. I get no incoming calls and even though I can dial out the line is so scratchy I can't hear anything and have to terminate the call. This had gone on over a week

I called the BT fault line and was told by a recording that due to high volume they cannot receive any calls. I emailed them to which I eventually got a reply.

In the reply I was told the fault was raised with engineers but that I better make sure the fault is the line and not my phone because if it IS my phone the engineer will charge me A MINIMUM OF £99 plus VAT.

This is extortion!!!!!!!!!!! I worked at a telecommunications company in another country and as far as I know it is the telecommunications supplier's job to identify why you are not getting a phone service. This is what we pay them for!!!!!!!!!!! You don't get charged for a qualified person to figure out what is wrong!!!!!!!!!! I am completely fed up with the highway robbery that goes on in this country!!!!!!!

Read many more and submit your BT Complaint

BT appears on Watchdog for its complaints

BT yet again appear on Watchdog in December 2007 for their poor customer service for new customers. View further details here on the BBC website

On 10 October, the BBC reported that BT had kept customers waiting months for new phone lines and even when someone had no line, it didn't stop them sending bills.

BT blamed the delays on teething problems with its new IT system and promised things would improve. However, since October scores of you have contacted BBC Watchdog to say that your lines haven't been connected either.

There are also many more BT Complaints on this BT complaints submission page from a variety of BT customers wanting to complain about the service they are receiving.

BT yet again apologise for inconvenience to customers and blames problems on the IT system it has installed to comply with commitments to the regulator, Ofcom. But the company insists it has reduced the amount of time it takes to resolve problems and significantly cut the number of people still waiting.

It has now installed lines for the cases we've told them about. But if you're still waiting, let BT know by clicking here

BT Voted Number 1 for customer service

To mine and i'm sure all of you out there who have had to deal with BT and make a BT Complaint in 2007, to my disbelief I have just read that BT has claimed the title of ‘Best Customer Care’ at this year’s World Communication Awards in London!!! What a joke!

In addition to winning ‘Best Customer Care’, BT also won The Convergence Award for 21CN, and was Highly Commended for ‘Best Global Operator’. Is this some kind of Joke?

Just look at all these BT Complaints

Read the full news article on the BT website

BT customer's YouTube complaint

A BT customer had a letter of apology and a refund after he resorted to putting a video of his complaints on YouTube.

This priceless news item was published on the BBC website on Fri 23rd November 2007. This just shows how poor BT have become.

He is not the only one having trouble with BT Complaints

"Warwick resident Patrick Askins' troubles began when an extra £90 was added to his phone bill. After six months of calling the company the problem was not resolved so he decided to give up and pay, but put a video recording his despair on YouTube.

Shortly afterwards the company apologised and refunded his bill. He said: "After six months my son said, 'Dad, you have done everything you can'.

"So I phoned them up and told them I was giving in and paying the money."
But, he told them of a message he was leaving on the YouTube site.

The message said: "I have been a loyal BT customer for over 30 years and I don't find my experience a good example of BT demonstrating they are straightforward, trustworthy and helpful."

That was two weeks ago. Shortly afterwards he got a letter refunding all his costs and offering an apology. He said: "All I wanted was an explanation and, in my case, confirmation I had paid my bill."

A spokesman for BT said the company was in the process of resolving the situation before the YouTube clip was posted. "However, we apologise for not concluding our investigations into Mr Askins' enquiry more quickly."



View the YouTube video here:

BT Contact Details

How to contact us

Our main contact numbers are listed below and are all free to call (unless you call from a mobile phone, when the charges will depend on the terms and conditions of the network you are on). Other services may have their own contact numbers or websites so, where possible, we have shown these throughout this document in the relevant sections.

Residential enquiries

If you have questions about residential sales, bills or general matters, please phone
0800 800 150 between 8am and 8pm, Monday to Saturday. To report a fault on a residential line, phone 0800 800 151. This line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Business enquiries

If you have questions about business sales or services, please phone 0800 400 400 between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Saturday.

If you have a question about your bill, please phone 0800 800 156 between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Saturday. To report a fault on a business line, phone 0800 800 154. This line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We monitor a percentage of calls made to us to make sure that our customers receive the standard of service they are entitled to expect. As a result, you should know that a supervisor might record or monitor calls you make to us.

You may also contact us through the internet at www.bt.com/feedback/feedback.jsp.

If you are not happy with the service you're getting

We are committed to providing the best communications service in the world. Despite our best efforts, things can go wrong. When they do, we want to know so we can put them right as quickly as possible.

If you are a residential customer and your complaint is about sales, a bill or general matters, please phone 0800 800 150 between 8am and 8pm, Monday to Saturday. If the complaint is about repairing a fault, please phone 0800 800 151. This line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our customer service advisers will try to solve the problem while you are still on the line.

If you are a business customer and your complaint is about sales or services, please phone 0800 400 400 between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Saturday. If your complaint is about a bill, please phone 0800 800 156 between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Saturday. If the complaint is about repairing a fault, please phone 0800 800 154. The line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our customer service advisers will try to solve the problem while you are still on the line.

If you would like to make a complaint about a BT payphone, please phone 0800 661 610.
If you prefer to put your complaint in writing, please address it to:

Customer Service Manager
BT Customer Correspondence Centre
Durham
DH98 1BT.

We will normally respond to your letter by phone but will gladly confirm any particular points in writing, if you prefer.

We aim to deal with the problem to your satisfaction, and our customer service advisers will try to do this as quickly as possible, preferably during your phone call. If this is not possible, we will agree a course of action with you. Complaints about a bill may take longer to put right. If you are not happy with how we have handled your complaint, please ask to speak to the manager. He or she will review your complaint and will work with you to try and sort out the problem. If, after contacting the manager, you feel that we have not dealt with your complaint properly, please ask for your case to be reviewed by a more senior manager.
If you are still not satisfied with how we have dealt with your complaint, we offer a Complaint Review Service. You can contact this service on the following numbers.

• Residential customers - 0800 545 458

• Business customers - 0800 555 257

• Payphone customers - 0800 252 745

If you prefer, you can write to our Complaint Review Service. Please phone the appropriate number for the address.

BT - Worst Customer Service Award 2007?

My 3 month BT nightmare began in June 2007. We just moved into a new build house in Cornwall and simply wanted the new phone line set up and activated. Simple? No. In no way was this simple. We had had one engineer simply not turn up. Another turned up in Durham the other side of the country.

Last night (22rd October 2007) I was on the phone for 6pm to 8pm listening to 'we are currently very busy'!!!! for 2 hours!!! I got passed around 6 people who cancelled my order, set up a new one, cancelled again, credit check, booking engineer etc. Finally I spoke a very helpful and polite lady, the first polite person have spoke to from BT (I even had one person when I asked I wanted to set up a new line say - "You what?") and then when I finally thought I was getting somewhere I got cut off

Even better, this morning I got a BT bill for £370 for my new address, the address with no telephone line. This is payment for the engineer that didn't turn up and the engineer that turned up in Durham plus 2 BT Packages. You can begin to understand my frustration i'm sure! I have written a letter of complaint mid September to Head of Customer Services and have had no reply.

I can't bear to get on the phone to them again. I cannot believe how poor their customer service has been, their operations management and their total lack of support for BT telephone customers. I was told of the problems they are having are because of the new systems in place for BT Broadband customers.

Why this should effect me not having a telephone line for 3 months is a joke.

Please submit your comments below so I can write a report to the necessary organisation to have the BT service investigated.

Technorati Profile