The lost art of customer service

Please can I post an entry in the slightly grumpy category? Oh, please? It has been ages since that last one.

OK, here goes. Customer service or the lack of. An example at random: BT Broadband. As you may remember a month or so back I asked everyone about broadband for Maddie_C’s house and got lots of helpful responses. Well, we decided to go with BT. Things you should know when signing up with BT broadband:

• BT inform you of the day that the broadband will be turned on and ask that you make jolly sure that someone is there for the day to make sure that the equipment can be delivered. What they do not tell you is that it may or may not arrive that day, so you may take the day off work and wait in for nothing, twiddling your quite literal thumbs. It is not their policy to warn you if this is going to happen. (This is common apparently – see the account that Liz wrote.)
• If you then telephone to ask what has happened and ask when the equipment might be delivered they may promise to phone you back. You may get a call back, or you may not. That’s part of the fun of it.
• If there is a delay in the setting up of the broadband BT will not temporarily reinstate any form of dialup internet even if it is vital to the wellbeing of the world that you have internet access. There is nothing that can be done about this.
• If BT discover that the whole fiasco is their fault, and admit that it is their fault it is still their policy not to give any compensation for the fact that you have had to wait in for a second day and have had a period without internet access and that as a result your life has gone horribly wrong and you haven’t been able to read your spam.

To cut a long story short the delivery did eventually arrive 2 days late. Wireless internet broadband was installed and worked gloriously for approximately 4 hours, at which point it died quite severely. It may or may not ever work again so we may have to scrap the whole thing, put the subscription fee down to experience and go back to dialup, or perhaps the old system where people used to write e-mails down on bits of paper and pay a man on a bicycle to deliver them.

It is a fiasco I tell you.