Technology came to my rescue!

Those of you who know me will be aware of the fact that I have been helping an elderly friend of mine move house. At the age of 91 he decided to move from the house he had lived in for 51 years to a brand new Barratts apartment. He had been a customer of BT for as long as he had a phone so being loyal he wanted to stay with BT at his new address. What my friend is probably unaware of is just how much BT has changed since he first signed up, this change proved to be our undoing as you will see.

Our appointment was for Friday 5th August 8am-1pm, the day of the big move. This had been booked well in advance and my mobile number was taken in case of issue. We received confirmation on the 15th July and the letter noted that we would be keeping the number. 2 days before the big move I received a text reminder, so the engineers obviously had my mobile number correctly.

The day of the big move came and I waited at the new place from 7am, whilst my friend waited for the removal men at the old place. The morning was spent unpacking and my mobile never left my side. 1pm came and went and then began the most time consuming and soul destroying Customer Service experience I have had in years.

Between 1pm Friday and today I have:

1. Spoken to BT Customer Service, Fault reporting and Service provisioning to name but a few
2. Spoken to various Mary's, Sarah's, Linda's, Dawn's, Gwar's, Zara's, Carole's
3. Explained again and again the urgency i.e.: my friend is 90, lives on his own etc. etc.
4. Trawled the BT, Ofcom and Openreach web-sites fruitlessly
5. Used the 'Track My Order' online system - which by the way told me that we had a working phone :0(
6. Received multiple explanations; The call was completed, the call was not completed, the engineer could not gain entry, the engineer did not have a mobile number for you, its not a fault, its a provisioning problem .....
7. Waited for promised call backs ........
8. Wrestled with numerous call centre's ....

In desperation yesterday afternoon I used technology:

1. I emailed my 'network' asking for BT contacts
2. I Tweeted my problem

I have since been humbled by the support, advice and contacts that have been forwarded. I managed to track all this via my IPhone, whilst traveling to visit family. Over night things really got moving and on waking this am I think I was finally contacted by some BT folks who may actually get this resolved.

What disapoints me is the lengths that I had to go to get BT, and OpenReach,  to listen and take notice. It is obvious to me that the break-up of BT into smaller business units has been a major factor in this issue. Systems are obviously not talking to each other, system integrity seems to be an issue and dealing with multiple off shore call centres just exacerbates problems.

Hot off the press: 14:00 11/08/2011 - This has now been designated a welfare case, given my friends age, and an engineer may be visiting site this afternoon. Watch this space!

In the mean time:

• Thank you to everyone who responded to my frustrated cry for help.
• Luckily for me I had access to the Internet via my various devices, but what about people who aren't so lucky? How would they get help or even know where to start?
• OpenReach as far as Joe Public is concerned you are BT, so notices on your site redirecting calls back to BT are not helpful, particularly when the engineers are yours.
• BT please can we have a single point of contact for welfare cases?
• Mobile Phone vendors - very soon you will have millions of users with poor eye sight and hearing; when are you going to design mobile phones for this massive market. ! The few phones that are aimed at this market are very expensive and poorly manufactured.