Not much cop

This post was written in real-time, but posted this evening when I got home to find we had working broadband again…

‘BT’ and ‘customer service’: an oxymoron of gigantic proportions

At 7.28 I entered ‘office mode’, sat down with my first cup of tea of the day, fired up Firefox and began hitting the usual websites.

Nothing much happened.

One website returned a browser error that said there was a problem loading the page; the others just returned blank browser windows – as if the pages had loaded, yet they were not displaying any content.

Because my laptop was otherwise operating normally, I ran some network diagnostics.

Unsurprisingly, after testing all of the local links, the diagnostics returned a message that said, ‘There seems to be a problem with your Broadband connection. The physical connection to your line seems to be okay, but your Hub can’t connect to broadband.’

I called the BT voicemail network status number to see if there were any known issues in my area. There weren’t, and I was sure that the issues that BT did know about – in London and Stoke-on-Trent – would not adversely affect me.

The BT voicemail went on to say that if I was ‘still experiencing a problem and my telephone exchange wasn’t listed, I should visit www.bt.com to check on further status’.

Well there’s a customer service Fail straight out of the box.

Why would an ISP even put that part of the message on the voicemail that people call to find out if there is a known broadband issue in their area?

I mean, if someone is calling a phone number to see if there’s a network issue, wouldn’t it be fairly safe to assume that the customer *wouldn’t have* broadband access?

Wouldn’t it be equally safe to guess that customers don’t generally call up to check on the state of health of the entire BT network, if they are not experiencing any problems?

So then I called the BT technical support line.

The automated menu system guided me through the usual a labyrinthine maze of ‘Press 1’ for this or ‘Press 2’ for that options.

Then I got a ringing tone.

Then I was connected to a voicemail that, bluntly, told me that ‘BT technical support is available from 8am’ and then the call abruptly disconnected.

Nice.

Thanks, BT, for another helping of excellent customer service Fail. I mean, why did you guide me through all of those menus, if technical support isn’t even open?

Or is that a question of blindingly obvious proportions so large that I can’t see the answer because I’m standing too close to it?

I mean, it seems to me that once people hit the ‘tech support’ button up front, that would be a good time to tell them that tech support is shut, no?

Time now: 7.34am.

*twiddles thumbs*

*whistles tunelessly*

*contemplates having a wank but decides against it*

*decides to learn Sunday’s dressage test*

8.05am, called BT technical support.

I told the tech support guy what the problem was and also told him that I’d run BT’s own network diagnostics which told me that the WiFi connection was good, but the connection from the hub to the broadband wasn’t being made.

So with the special non-listening skills that all BT call-centre staff seem to have trained in to them, he didn’t listen to a single word I’d said.

Nope, instead of listening, he guided me through a tediously routine set of procedures that included testing I had a good WiFi connection (which, unsurprisingly, I did have), and then deleting the WiFi connection from my laptop and creating a new one (which involved me groping about for my key code).

Anyway, when we tested the newly created WiFi connection, and I connected to the hub painlessly but still couldn’t get any webpages on my browser, guess what BT tech support guy said?

Give up?

He said that I had a solid connection to the hub, but had no broadband connection from the hub to the internet.

*facepalm*

It was now 8.25am and these were clearly 20 minutes of my life I was never going to get back. All we had achieved was, via a very long, meaningless and tedious set of processes, proved a) that the information given to me by the network diagnostics just over 55 minutes ago was 100% correct, and b) what I had told the BT technical support guy 20 minutes ago was also correct.

The BT tech support guy flipped off the phone for the briefest of moments, and I mean he was gone for less than 15 seconds, and then he came back to tell me that there was a known issue in my area. He also told me that the engineers were working on it and I should try my broadband again in about 4 hours.

So why the fuck have I been wasting my time?

If the BT tech support guy had access to this piece of information, why didn’t he check it sooner?

And why wasn’t this piece of information on the first voicemail number I called an hour ago?

And why did the tech support guy make me do all of the meaningless WiFi removal/network creation stuff?

So well done BT.

Massive customer service Fail.

By now I was no further forward than I had been an hour ago. I had also wasted half an hour on the phone to the tech support guy, doing things to my laptop that plainly didn’t need doing, and switching the hub off and on again which also didn’t need doing.

And all we had established was that the message from BT’s own network diagnostic software was, after all, 100% correct.

Tossers.

So now I have four hours to kill, except I have to go out in three hours time and won’t be back until 6.30pm.