I rent a house in a fairly remote area of Scotland. I wanted to have a phone line and broadband put in so after assessing the very few options I placed an order online with BT. I paid for a years line rental upfront and chose my installation date of Monday 23rd and booked the day off work.

Got an email confirming it all and saying I would receive the router etc in the post. Got nothing so called them on the 21st. They told me the order was on hold due to needing a credit check. They had never called me.

Did the credit check no problem, then went through to the installations department. The 23rd was no longer available, the next date available was the 27th, so booked that although I told them I wasn’t sure if I would be available. Was told that was no problem as long as I called to change it no later than the 25th. I then got 3 emails confirming the order, the direct debit and my new phone number.

Called on the 25th to reschedule as I couldn’t get the time off work and was told they had cancelled the order. Apparently they tried to call me several times to confirm the order and as I didn’t answer the phone they cancelled it. I asked which number they called and they said the landline number. I said, “what, the number you haven’t connected for me yet?” “Erm, yes”…

So to go ahead I would have to start the whole order from scratch again. I told them to stuff it.

Then today they send me a bill for £155.27 for their costs incurred in cancelling my order. I’m tempted to send them a bill for my time in dealing with this bunch of total incompetent morons.

Sorry for the lack of swearing/puntuation etc. Poor rant I know but I didn’t want to distract from the message!

Yes oh yes they are, I have also experienced the trying to call on unconnected number. MrsH called them, asked for manager in the uk and complained bigstyle and got free connection, money off line rental etc
So keep your good karma, call and complain…

They really are a bunch of cockwombles. Tied with Scottish Power IME

Tied with Scottish Power

You took the words right out of my mouth

Yes!! Even worse than the DVLA by a country mile.

Southern Scottish Electric must be the most useless.

Always found them to be very good.

Oh and of course whenever you try and phone them, you have to enter the phone number you are enquiring about. Except I don’t have one. So they just repeat “enter the phone number you are calling about” over again…

ARRRGGGHHHHHH

******s

Or BP domestic lpg, based in Stirling.
There seems to be a theme here…

I have mixed results with bt. On the phone they’re useless. I get the best results by dealing with them through Twitter. Not ranting and raving. Just send them a polite tweet and they reply via pm and usually within a pretty short time the problem is solved. Their sales teams are useless. They seem to be in a world of their own with absolutely no connection to any other part of the business. As the op found there is one part of the company trying their hardest to get your money and another part of the company that are hell bent on making you demand it back.

Are BT the most useless bunch of muppets ever?

No. Npower are. Talk Talk are tied for second with British Gas, followed closely by BT in third.

All the above are on my ‘never, ever again’ list, along with Superstar components and the chap I bought my first car off.

Yes.

They tried to install my second phone line by running two numbers down the first line. Result: Neither phone worked, nor did the one broadband account. And they tried to bill me for not only two phone lines which didn’t work but a second broadband account as well.

Complete muppets.

No. Npower are.

Npower really are a shower of shit. For the best part of a year they failed to bill for my gas even though they were contacted and made aware on several occasions.

We are at the midway point of a ‘bit of fun’ with npower. I fancy doing small claims with them, just for the craic and the fact that a sherrif will treat them with the contempt needed.

they make nice fat profits with shite customer service that gets worse all the time.

they are very efficient muppets.

Get on Twitter about it…. You’ll soon get a result

Neilsonwheels SSE has failed to bill me for over 12 months for electric even though i’ve tried endlessly to try to pay it. They say it’s a computer problem, a manager has failed twice now to call me back to try to resolve the problem.

Thinking now of reporting them to the Ombudsman Services.

BT were adamant the house I was living in and calling them from didn’t exist, total muppets. Not as bad as british gas though

After all the phone calls and customer satisfaction surveys (ha!) I can’t be arsed to go through the whole sorry saga again but yes, BT are beyond rubbish.

They are all shit.

Try TalkTalk for a laugh, go on, speak to someone in Delhi who you can’t understand. Spent half my 30 minute conversation saying, ‘pardon, can you repeat that’, finishing with, ‘listen you plumbrain, cancel my direct debit as from now, I’ll get someone else!
Went with Plusnet & after a year have had no problems at all or the need to call them. Which is just as well, ‘ey up lad, ast thee got a problem’

My company is moving office. BT has been distinguished by its utter uselessness. We’re weeks behind schedule solely because of BT. And that’s even with building in extra time to account for BT’s muppetry.

I worked at BT for almost two years to pay my way through uni. You become so desensitised to the stuff that goes on but dear god there was some proper bad misselling, terrible culture of ‘us’ vs ‘the fing customers’, NO accountability for wrongdoing.

I can assure you that you will never know the real reason your order messed up because it’s easier for the person on the phone to spin you some guff than to explain the wrongdoing

I used to know a BT engineer, he was worried that when his generation retired there would be nobody who knew how the exchanges and lines worked.

he started as an apprentice at 16 and knew pretty much everything.

the guy who was replacing him was working out of folders and troubleshooting guides and didn’t have the depth of knowledge.

last I heard he was earning a fortune in consultancy fees.

Yes, yes they are!

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg1CLskFIKQ[/video]

I once had a letter from BT arrive with my address on, but somebody else’s name. It thanked me for setting up my account, and told me that somebody would be along soon to install the line.

I phoned them to tell them that they had made some mistake with the address, and (if they checked their own records) they would see that there was another account/line at this address…. which was me.

“Sorry sir, you are not the account holder so you can’t just cancel it”
“I don’t want to cancel it – I am just letting you know that there has been a mistake”
“Sorry sir, but for data protection, I cannot discuss another customers account with you”
“I have no interest in discussing this with you – I am just telling you that there has been a mistake”
“I will just call my supervisor, I can’t just close somebody else’s account”
“do whatever you like – I’m hanging up now”

Yes – have you tried to navigate their website?

Stickers all over the phone cabinets in my area – ‘Superfast Broadband is available here!’

Go to BT website

‘Enter your postcode to find out if BT Infinity is available in your area..’
‘Good news, BT Infinity is available’
Spend 20 minutes assembling phone, tv and broadband package, go to payment page.
‘BT Infinity is not yet available in your area, here is a range of our standard broadband packages…’

Make mental note never to bother with BT again.

IME there is precisely one person in customer services at each big utility company who has the slightest idea what they’re doing.

Total lottery whether or not you’ll ever be able to contact them.

Moved offices.
Chose BT for eases of simultaneous install of phones & broadband.
8 weeks without phone or internet.
Costs to business c8k
Final compensation offered for their complete incompetence £175
There’s a thread on here about it.

Had a phone call from them about 2 weeks ago, “we notice from our records that you have BT Infinity, would you like to add our TV package to your service ?” or words to that effect. “Neat trick !, will you be throttling back that service too after I’ve watch half a gig of programming ?” I says…. “eh?” he replies “Check your records, we’ve got “normal” broadband here, I’m lucky if I can watch iplayer for more than 5 mins”.

Went with Plusnet & after a year have had no problems at all or the need to call them. Which is just as well, ‘ey up lad, ast thee got a problem’

Calling plusnet is a pleasure, mainly as they sort things out, but also for the Sheffield accent. It is up there with calling the (mental image in my head) Nicole from Patagonia professional accounts in Paris. ‘Aaah, Mattheew, ‘ow can I ‘elp you today?’

Oh and of course whenever you try and phone them, you have to enter the phone number you are enquiring about. Except I don’t have one. So they just repeat “enter the phone number you are calling about” over again…

the system recognizes the words “I want to complain” and will put you through to a real person relatively quickly. You can guess how I discovered this

But their system doesn’t recognise the words “**** off you bunch of ******ng ********s and go **** yourselves sideways”, as I discovered when recently enjoying dealing with them.

The distribution pole in our street broke allowing all the lines to sag into the road and it took BT almost a month to discover that: it was an old hollow fibreglass model, they no longer had any old fibreglass models, they needed a proper wooden one, you need a special lorry to erect a proper wooden one. Each of these leaps in their knowledge took several days of phone calls to a variety of departments and I’m still not sure if our calls made the delay any longer or shorter. We still have dropouts on our broadband after about six years of complaining and visits from engineers.

Why don’t you share this entire thread with BT on twitter, and keep adding to it. Might be benefitial to all parties.

BT are complete and utter crap. Crap on the phone with crap lying so called engineers that talk utter bollocks to you while at your house. BT are a pathetic useless set of s..ts who deserve to go bust.

I think describing them as “useless bunch of muppets” is unfair to useless muppets that are BT Openreach. Calm Calm Calm breath breath mmmmmmmmmm.

Are BT the most useless bunch of muppets ever?

The most ever? I’m not sure.

But certainly a more useless bunch I have yet to meet.

They caused us huge grief in the shop. Thanks to the people on here I found the right person to moan to.
The nice lady sorted our problems and gave us 6 months free service til our contract was up.
14 months later we are still enjoying free line rental,phone and internet!
So yes they are shit but we like them at the moment.
Ps thanks STW people.

Definitely recommend using Twitter. I had no end of problems with Virgin Media over a c0cked-up phone line installation. Calling their customer service was just getting me nowhere other than raising my blood pressure. Within a few hours of a polite and to the facts post on Twitter, we had a response from VM, and even better a named contact who took ownership of the problem.

What is it with these big companies though? With a few exceptions, the level of customer is appalling at all of them!

As a slide aside, on chatting with a BT engineer recently, he had similar sentiments to those posted by bigrich –all he old boys retiring into their final salary pension schemes were leaving a big knowledge gap.

He mentioned that if there was a line fault, he’d be able to trace it all the way from the customer’s house back to the exchange and fix it. The younger lads though would only be able to do one part of the trace, and if fault elsewhere probably have to pass it back to someone else to sort out.