ANOTHER BROADBAND BROADSIDE

My blogging has been suspended again because of a recurrence of the disconnection of my BT broadband/ADSL link as first occurred last October and again in the week before Christmas. The pattern of my dealings with British Telecom over the last fortnight has been a disheartening variation of what played out before.

The connection spontaneously died on Tuesday March 6th. Initially I phoned those contacts whom I had found helpful last time. The engineer who came to the house just after Christmas and who was bracingly scornful of the BT Broadband Technical Support line in Chennai, India did not return the messages I left on his mobile. Admittedly, he had told me that he was being promoted and was not likely to be the engineer who would come to see us if there were a recurrence of the disconnection. But I thought that he might at least pass on the message to someone who could deal with it. No such luck.

The man at the grandly named Office of Higher Complaints in Coventry who had been diligence itself last time – to the extent that I had to discourage him from phoning daily, after the engineer’s visit, to assure himself that the problem remained resolved – was successively “not in yet” and “off sick”. I then spoke to a man who claimed to be him (but I knew that he wasn’t) and he said that nothing could be done until a new ticket was issued from BT headquarters because the file on the matter had been closed. I then rang the woman at BT HQ who had issued the ticket on the earlier occasion but she too had been promoted – clearly negotiating with this particular relentless customer wins many brownie points at BT – and all she could suggest was that I call Chennai.

So I began a repeat progress down the British Telecom rabbit-hole, characterised as before by earnest but broken promises to make return calls, referrals to departments that were rather less helpful than their predecessors had been, refusals to accept that BT’s own equipment was in any way at fault and endless procrastination in face of my increasingly angry demands that an engineer be sent to the house. I knew from the first that, unless I made a nuisance of myself and refused to accept BT assurances that the problem was not theirs, I would not get my connection restored. So it proved.

After several fruitless conversations, repetitions of identifying data and useless expressions of apology, I finally (on the Friday) got myself put through to BT’s technical area. Three times members of the line maintenance team promised to instruct the line engineers to call me to make an appointment for a visit to the house. On the first two occasions, the line engineers sent me texts to say that they could find no fault on the line and had therefore closed the case. Both times, I called the line maintenance team again (the line engineers themselves are not available by phone even within BT and can only be raised by email) and said that the fault was not rectified. I had, I said, been again told that there was no fault on the line but, despite what the line engineers reckoned, there was no fault on my computer or on my wireless router. Perhaps then the fault lay with the junction box and/or the built-in filter, both of them BT property. Hence, I was therefore unilaterally reopening the case and it would remain open until, if necessary, it came before the high court.

On the second of these exchanges, I was told that the line engineers would call me “within 24 to 48 hours”. I said “you mean ‘within 48 hours’ because any time within 24 hours is within 48 hours”. “Er … yes” said the line maintenance man. On the third occasion, I was promised a call “within 24 hours” but after some 30 hours I had had no call. They must have got bored with me.

So I went back to the Account Management Desk that had put me in touch with the line maintenance team in the first place. My contact there prevailed upon the line maintenance team to call me again and this time they undertook to book an engineer to visit the house, perceiving perhaps that any customer this persistent was not about to go away. From a preliminary assessment of the problem from their end, it was decided that a conventional line engineer should do the honours. I was warned, as I had been warned several times previously, that there would be a charge for this call-out. Anyone would think it could run into six figures. I was told that it would be some £200. Fine, I said, but I didn’t expect to be charged for a fault on BT’s own equipment. I was told that if the main junction box was more than a year old, there would be a charge. It seemed to me that this item was BT property in a way that, for instance, the phones were not but I wasn’t about to haggle over £200.

I had a further call from the maintenance team to say that they had decided after all to send a broadband engineer to the house. He would be with us between 8.00 and 11.00 the following morning (Tuesday 13th) and would call ahead of his visit to say that he was on his way. The Account Management Desk man said that he in turn would be calling at 11.30 to see what had transpired.

The engineer telephoned the next day at 11.20. He said he had isolated a fault in the local exchange that affected our line and the one adjacent to it. He didn’t need to come to the house. So it was after all a fault with BT’s own equipment, something that ought to have been spotted in routine maintenance at least six months ago. The engineer said that he knew how to fix the fault but, being a broadband engineer, he was not allowed to touch it. The equipment belongs to something called BT Wholesale. He, like all the engineers, works for a franchised operation called Open Reach.

I asked if there were not someone else there who could do the job. He explained that, under Ofcom’s rules, BT Wholesale is not allowed to repair faulty equipment for five working days (a week in the customer’s life) because that would be how long it might take to do such a job on behalf of Tiscali, Orange, Virgin, Sky or any other broadband rival that uses BT’s phone lines. BT is not allowed to favour its own customers – those whose ISP is BT itself – as this would amount to unfair competition. I found it hard to believe that he was in earnest but he promised that he was.

I called my contact at the Account Management Desk but he was unavailable. The man I spoke to (who said he was a manager) refused to put me in touch with the man who had been on my case. I explained what I had been told by the engineer and the manager expended a great many convoluted sentences neither entirely confirming nor entirely denying that what I had been told was true.

At this point, I began the process that I believed would allow me to register a formal complaint but that I hoped would also raise a BT employee sufficiently senior – or having sufficient gumption – to be in a position to ensure that the fault was put right at once or sooner.

This proved less straightforward than on the previous occasion, perhaps because the woman at BT HQ who had helped me greatly then had been promoted out of harm’s way. I was now informed that I had to find a department manager who would be in a position, in BT’s curious jargon, “to escalate the complaint”. I talked to a manager in the UK Technical Help Team who was not able or willing to tackle any escalation himself but who gave me the number of the BT chairman’s office. Someone on that number gave me the address to which to write to make a complaint: Customer Service Director, Correspondence Centre, BT plc, Durham DH98 1BT – evidently they only disclose this address in exceptional circumstances but you, dear reader, may have it from me for nothing. It seems bizarre to me that of all organisations it should be BT that obliges you to write your complaint rather than phoning it.

I was also given a number for the BT Fault Management Service (0800 800 151). On this number I talked to two men successively, the first of whom found it difficult to credit much of the saga that I repeated, the second of whom seemed only too familiar with what I described as an Alice in Wonderland operation. “I realise you can’t comment on that” I said. “No, I can’t comment on that” he said. “But I can grin”. Neither of them was able to direct (officially or unofficially) that the fault be put right in fewer than five days. At this point, I decided I had to admit defeat.

During the course of this long week (and another week will have passed by the time we are reconnected and I can post this blog), I have become horribly familiar with BT’s customer service style. If ever I encounter the most used on-hold muzak in later life or in some different context, it will fill me with Pavlovian gloom. It’s a slow dirge for harp, strings and oboe or electronic simulacra thereof, presumably designed to calm the savage breast but all it does to me is enrage. The conversational style of the respective call centre staff in Chennai and Delhi is punctilious to a fault but (in their very patience and apologetic assurances) utterly maddening. They are always undertaking to “do the needful”, a charming phrase surely not heard in Britain since the 1950s but very current in modern-day India which is in so many ways a living parody of Britain in the 1950s.

There is also the ever-present suspicion that those employed to deal with the public are not able to be wholly candid, frequently referring as they do to scripted formulae and unable as they are to accede to the customer’s criticisms, save in a very generalised way. One begins to fall into familiar patterns of response oneself so that one hears oneself yelling, for the umpteenth time: “yes, well, a succession of your colleagues has already apologized profusely but what good is that to me? I can’t eat it. I can’t spend it. I don’t want apologies, I want action”. And all the calls end with their routine mantras – “is there anything else I can do for you today, Mr Gilbert?” and “thank you for using BT Broadband”. In almost every case, I have declared, at some point in the exchange: “if you won’t authorize an engineer to come out to fix this disconnection then I shall be summoning an engineer to remove BT Broadband altogether and I shall subscribe to one of your rivals instead”. Still they thank you. And BT really should instruct all its staff to avoid the cant phrases “no problem” and “not a problem”. They don’t play well with a customer who has already passed the end of his tether.

The heart of the corporate failure remains what it was during my last encounter with the BT hydra. The company will not send out an Open Reach engineer until it has absolutely no choice precisely because the engineering is franchised out and therefore costs BT to activate. A number of times, a harassed BT spokesperson told me gravely that if an engineer was sent out it might cost me money. At this I would scream that being without internet or email contact for a week was already costing me money hand over fist and that if it cost £10,000 to restore the connection it would be worth every penny but that, if the fault were found to be BT’s – as of course it would be – I would not expect to be billed for BT’s failure, rather that I would expect some kind of handsome recompense. This did not bring the arrival of an engineer at the house any nearer.

What BT needs is obvious to any customer who has the misfortune to have to resort to it for assistance. It needs to provide one all-purpose number that may be dialled which will raise someone who is empowered to say “yes, sir, leave it with me. I will [if necessary] do the needful and expedite the assistance you require. I will call you within 15 minutes to bring you up to date with the situation” and then to do that very thing, preferably with the words: “will it be convenient if an engineer calls at your address between 9.00 and 11.00am tomorrow, sir?” It would be handy too if one were not obliged to choose between a number of recorded options, none of which precisely fits the case at hand.

BT also needs to rethink its corporate attitude to its customers. Gordon Selfridge’s great dictum – “the customer is always right” – has been forgotten by the vast majority of commercial enterprises in Britain and across the world. Customers have grown used to being treated as mere economic counters in an accountant’s dream of share-holder profits but when those who work on the front line for corporations like BT encounter a customer who is not prepared to be walked over, there ought to be a widely understood Plan B, designed to take the sting out of the complaint rather than to exacerbate that customer’s frustration and indignation.

And BT should never have agreed to Ofcom’s restraint of its trade in imposing such a ludicrous delay on repairs undertaken on behalf of its own customers. This is the kind of lowest-common-denominator thinking that ought to have died out in the 1970s. Nobody benefits from the policy because any fault in BT’s equipment must have the potential to affect the working of lines that BT rents to its rivals as well as those reserved for its own customers. Everyone using a service dependent on the telephone grid needs repairs to that grid to be carried out expeditiously, not after a delay and certainly not after an artificial delay. What is more, BT is in fact put at an unfair disadvantage by Ofcom’s ruling. Its own customers feel grotesquely penalised by a pointless gesture. And BT’s rivals can all say that any delay is BT’s fault because they (the rivals) are dependent upon BT for repairs to be carried out. Thus BT ends up in bad odour with, on the one hand, its own customers or, on the other, everybody else’s.

BT is placed in a curious position by the privatisation of the telecommunications industry, analogous to neither that of the BBC, nor to that of British Airways, nor to that of Railtrack. But being called British Telecom and having the duty of maintaining the national telephone grid, it is inevitably seen as the national instrument of the telecommunications service. It needs to sit down with Ofcom again and reconfigure its own status, defining once and for all what it means to be primus inter pares.

Meanwhile, at the time of writing, we still await reconnection to the broadband computing grid so that we may resume our access to email and the net and I can resume my work that has been largely on hold for two long weeks. I shall be calling the compensation line (0845 600 7030, as I believe) when I finally know exactly how long we have been disconnected and I shall expect to be amply recompensed. Of course it is impossible to compute the value of the business that I might have generated had I been on-line for the period in question. Nor can I put a monetary value on the hours I have wasted talking on the phone – or more often holding on the phone – while connected to BT staff. I do not know whether all the numbers that I have been obliged to call are free or which of them might be at national or at local rates.

What I do know is that the frustration and bafflement that BT has caused is injurious to my health. Several times I have been conscious of the waves of tension and stress as I have found myself having to give out information I have already given many times or having to insist that various tests of the equipment have already been carried out and proved fruitless. I know that no individual BT representative who happens to pick up my call is responsible for my problem, nor that he or she can be expected to grasp its elaborate history within seconds. All the more reason to have a system where one person takes charge of an issue and sees it through to its conclusion. Recorded messages frequently tell us that our calls may be recorded for training purposes. It is time that somebody listened to those recordings and concluded that BT’s methodology needs a comprehensive rethink.