It’s Good To Talk – so why won’t anyone talk to me?..(or how a once iconic brand lost it’s voice!)

I can’t be alone in this thought but why is it so difficult to speak to BT nowadays?

I would advise you to try their website but, for a world famous telecoms company, it’s a wilderness of useful contact numbers. And when you find them it’s because you’ve lost the will to live, accidentally click on a pretty icon and, hey presto, a number appears to entice you to waste hours being told how busy BT are at the moment – before someone within BT puts down their newspaper and coffee in, happily, Newcastle or Glasgow, utters monosyllabic nonsense and then packs you off into ‘Telecoms Hades’ to wait for another useless answer.

But, before this becomes another ‘Grumpy Old Man’ rant, let me put this in context. Over the last 5 years, I have been one of the old-fashioned creatures who actually pay for a ‘service’ from BT – in detail, I pay for a land line to a London Apartment, providing the ‘old tech’ link for the rather more ‘new tech’ Broadband service from another provider. It’s a phone line, plain and simple. In the early days we could even make phone calls as well as receive digital bandwidth, but that stopped 3 years ago (no reason why). The fault was suitably non-invasive so we didn’t report it – mostly because the broadband kept working.

Recently, however, the broadband stopped working. We tried to speak to BT about what was wrong and were told that the line had been cancelled. Why we asked? No idea came the typically BT response, you’ll need to talk to the Technical people, someone has cancelled it and the ‘system’ doesn’t say who. Mysterious…so we tried to speak to the Technical people, having been conveniently passed on by the Accounts people. We waited. And we waited. And we waited a little longer. And finally, after 38 minutes of ‘BT is very busy at the moment. We will answer your call as soon as we can!” we hung up and called another provider who was both more efficient and much, much cheaper!

But the episode left a nasty taste – and some concerns about how this would sort itself out. We determined to settle the matter with BT and draw a line in the sand – after all, life is short and full of lovely things to do. But this doesn’t quite make the short list.

That was 2 months ago. I am now the master of finding concealed contact information on the BT site but sadly not a master of speaking to anyone within those ‘evil chambers’. During July and August I made 6 attempts to make contact. I spent almost 2 hours of non-contact time not talking to someone.

Yesterday was a watershed moment. I received e-mail from BT with a bill (for services NOT provided, I suppose), which prompted more furious non-talking time. During 94 minutes of listening to how, miraculously, BT are still busy, I spoke to 3 plainly less busy people – 1 Technical, 1 Accounts, 1 Acquisitions (whatever that is) – I was bounced from Newcastle to Glasgow and back again, quite painlessly I might add, and I asked 2 specific questions to each person. Why was the line cancelled and would this be the last bill I would receive from BT? And guess what? Not one of them could answer either question.

SO, now I’ve worked it out! The reason the UK’s largest telecoms company doesn’t want to give you telephone numbers is because it doesn’t want to talk to you. And when it wakes up from it’s non-talking slumber, it has nothing of any value to say to you anyway.

Time for a company name change me thinks! Any suggestions?

Posted by Simon Dover