RaptorX
0
Review: BT could be very good, but let down by terrible customer support
This is the full version of my review that I posted here: www.ispreview.co.uk/review/reviews/6271.html
As the incumbent and the biggest telecoms company in the UK, BT has the potential to be an excellent ISP, but it’s seriously marred by the worst customer service I’ve ever seen (including outright dishonesty and possible fraud) from their outsourced call centres and I’m glad to have left them for the second time.
They have a good range of extra services including nationwide BT Wi-Fi hotspots and BT Sport and prices are competitive with different deals every month, albeit with 12 or 18 month contracts attached.
Being a large ISP, one does have to put up with site blocking / censorship that’s been imposed by the media industry via the British courts, unfortunately. This is something that the smaller ISPs don’t have to do and should be kept in mind when choosing an ISP.
I can only get an ADSL connection and I’m glad to say that in my latest 18 months with them the reliability was excellent and speed was generally quite fast, so I didn’t need to call their tech support very much.
I had previously been with BT for years and didn’t want to return to them, but I reluctantly left AAISP (see my previous review) for BT since I had to save money at the time and AAISP’s tight bandwidth limitations were an issue.
I recently saw that the excellent Zen Internet had started offering competitive packages for us ADSL users instead of their old bandwidth limited and expensive services, so jumping to them for phone and internet service was a no-brainer and it’s working fine now.
So, what’s wrong with BT’s customer service and tech support? Well, they’re a standing joke nowadays, with a deservedly terrible reputation.
Interleaving is on by default on an ADSL line to improve reliability. However, it adds significant latency, so I called BT’s tech support and asked them to set it to Fast Path (interleaving off). They never achieved this simple little thing, every time promising that it would finally be done “this time”. I gave up in frustration in the end and lived with it like this for the 18 months I was in contract with them. There are more issues, however.
Around a decade ago, I was out of contract with them and on a one month rolling contract, but had no intention of leaving, when out of the blue I received an email congratulating me on my new 12 month contract. Say whut?! To cut a long story short, BT had slammed me onto a new 12 month contract for no good reason and when I tried to cancel it, I was passed from pillar to post. I eventually got through to someone who promised a very cheap discounted rate per month (I can’t remember the exact figure now) if I accepted the new contract. I did, but all I got was a lousy fiver off my bill instead.
Again, I tried calling and emailing them many times to get the promised discount applied or the 12 month contract reverted back to the one month rolling contract I was on before, but surprise surprise it was all futile. The outsourced customer services were absolutely hopeless in fixing this BT-made problem and they just went round in infuriating circles, all the time maintaining a veneer of politeness, which just felt like an insult after a while of this.
I really hated BT after that and wanted to leave, but couldn’t see any decent and affordable alternatives to go to at the time, so stuck with them and then lapsed into just staying with them since the service did work reliably overall.
Then, in 2011, I had a minor technical problem where the ADSL BRAS was stuck, capping downloads at 12Mb/s when the line sync supported 18Mb/s downloads that I’d been getting previously without issue. Note that the line sync remained at around 21Mb/s, so I knew there was no physical problem with the line.
I contacted tech support to fix it, but they just went round in circles for around 6 weeks instead, driving me nuts. In the end, the engineer (who had been called out a second time by BT and knew he wasn’t required) took it upon himself to contact Openreach while he was round my house. In 5 minutes flat the nice Welsh lady he spoke to had logged on to the server and reset the BRAS rate. Download speed instantly jumped to around 18Mb/s, without even a resync and continued to work fast and reliably after that. Now, why couldn’t BT’s outsourced tech support do this simple thing with Openreach in the first place?!
This was the final straw and I found another ISP, AAISP, which were excellent (see previous review). Before I left however, BT’s retentions department had promised me a year of free UK support service, something which normally cost £10 / month. However, when I called that service to double check, they said that this isn’t true and that retentions often made this false promise. So what is this now, deception? One doesn’t expect this from the UK’s biggest ISP.
On top of this, my parents got mucked about recently when they suddenly found themselves with a false YouView subscription added to their budget 10MB / month service, which they didn’t even have the necessary set top box for and that significant bandwidth had been stolen off them.
When they called BT’s tech support line, they actually had to stay offline with the router switched off for two whole days while BT monitored the line for suspicious activity, plus got a barrage of excuses from BT trying to blame them for this issue. It took repeated phone calls and around two weeks to resolve it to remove the fake YouView subscription and bandwidth used. This isn’t good customer service.
When I left BT for the second time, I’m glad to say that they played fair with me this time. There was no funny business, I got my MAC in a timely manner and a small final bill which looked correct. This was all handled by a UK call centre, by the way. They also explained that their tech support centre is coming back to the UK and that the support is much better there. Well we’ll see, but it was too late to keep me by now.
With their huge size and bottomless resources, BT could be a leading player in the ISP market with an all-round quality product. Unfortunately, while their services work well, their abysmal customer service make them an ISP to avoid, especially as there are so many other decent alternatives around nowadays with infrastructure which works just as well, have more technical features and don’t insult their customers’ intelligence with second-rate call centres.
The situation may change significantly once they migrate all their call centres back to the UK, but it’s for them to prove to us that they can improve not us to have faith in them, so because of their current awful customer service, they only rate 3/10.
This is the full version of my review that I posted here: www.ispreview.co.uk/review/reviews/6271.html
As the incumbent and the biggest telecoms company in the UK, BT has the potential to be an excellent ISP, but it’s seriously marred by the worst customer service I’ve ever seen (including outright dishonesty and possible fraud) from their outsourced call centres and I’m glad to have left them for the second time.
They have a good range of extra services including nationwide BT Wi-Fi hotspots and BT Sport and prices are competitive with different deals every month, albeit with 12 or 18 month contracts attached.
Being a large ISP, one does have to put up with site blocking / censorship that’s been imposed by the media industry via the British courts, unfortunately. This is something that the smaller ISPs don’t have to do and should be kept in mind when choosing an ISP.
I can only get an ADSL connection and I’m glad to say that in my latest 18 months with them the reliability was excellent and speed was generally quite fast, so I didn’t need to call their tech support very much.
I had previously been with BT for years and didn’t want to return to them, but I reluctantly left AAISP (see my previous review) for BT since I had to save money at the time and AAISP’s tight bandwidth limitations were an issue.
I recently saw that the excellent Zen Internet had started offering competitive packages for us ADSL users instead of their old bandwidth limited and expensive services, so jumping to them for phone and internet service was a no-brainer and it’s working fine now.
So, what’s wrong with BT’s customer service and tech support? Well, they’re a standing joke nowadays, with a deservedly terrible reputation.
Interleaving is on by default on an ADSL line to improve reliability. However, it adds significant latency, so I called BT’s tech support and asked them to set it to Fast Path (interleaving off). They never achieved this simple little thing, every time promising that it would finally be done “this time”. I gave up in frustration in the end and lived with it like this for the 18 months I was in contract with them. There are more issues, however.
Around a decade ago, I was out of contract with them and on a one month rolling contract, but had no intention of leaving, when out of the blue I received an email congratulating me on my new 12 month contract. Say whut?! To cut a long story short, BT had slammed me onto a new 12 month contract for no good reason and when I tried to cancel it, I was passed from pillar to post. I eventually got through to someone who promised a very cheap discounted rate per month (I can’t remember the exact figure now) if I accepted the new contract. I did, but all I got was a lousy fiver off my bill instead.
Again, I tried calling and emailing them many times to get the promised discount applied or the 12 month contract reverted back to the one month rolling contract I was on before, but surprise surprise it was all futile. The outsourced customer services were absolutely hopeless in fixing this BT-made problem and they just went round in infuriating circles, all the time maintaining a veneer of politeness, which just felt like an insult after a while of this.
I really hated BT after that and wanted to leave, but couldn’t see any decent and affordable alternatives to go to at the time, so stuck with them and then lapsed into just staying with them since the service did work reliably overall.
Then, in 2011, I had a minor technical problem where the ADSL BRAS was stuck, capping downloads at 12Mb/s when the line sync supported 18Mb/s downloads that I’d been getting previously without issue. Note that the line sync remained at around 21Mb/s, so I knew there was no physical problem with the line.
I contacted tech support to fix it, but they just went round in circles for around 6 weeks instead, driving me nuts. In the end, the engineer (who had been called out a second time by BT and knew he wasn’t required) took it upon himself to contact Openreach while he was round my house. In 5 minutes flat the nice Welsh lady he spoke to had logged on to the server and reset the BRAS rate. Download speed instantly jumped to around 18Mb/s, without even a resync and continued to work fast and reliably after that. Now, why couldn’t BT’s outsourced tech support do this simple thing with Openreach in the first place?!
This was the final straw and I found another ISP, AAISP, which were excellent (see previous review). Before I left however, BT’s retentions department had promised me a year of free UK support service, something which normally cost £10 / month. However, when I called that service to double check, they said that this isn’t true and that retentions often made this false promise. So what is this now, deception? One doesn’t expect this from the UK’s biggest ISP.
On top of this, my parents got mucked about recently when they suddenly found themselves with a false YouView subscription added to their budget 10MB / month service, which they didn’t even have the necessary set top box for and that significant bandwidth had been stolen off them.
When they called BT’s tech support line, they actually had to stay offline with the router switched off for two whole days while BT monitored the line for suspicious activity, plus got a barrage of excuses from BT trying to blame them for this issue. It took repeated phone calls and around two weeks to resolve it to remove the fake YouView subscription and bandwidth used. This isn’t good customer service.
When I left BT for the second time, I’m glad to say that they played fair with me this time. There was no funny business, I got my MAC in a timely manner and a small final bill which looked correct. This was all handled by a UK call centre, by the way. They also explained that their tech support centre is coming back to the UK and that the support is much better there. Well we’ll see, but it was too late to keep me by now.
With their huge size and bottomless resources, BT could be a leading player in the ISP market with an all-round quality product. Unfortunately, while their services work well, their abysmal customer service make them an ISP to avoid, especially as there are so many other decent alternatives around nowadays with infrastructure which works just as well, have more technical features and don’t insult their customers’ intelligence with second-rate call centres.
The situation may change significantly once they migrate all their call centres back to the UK, but it’s for them to prove to us that they can improve not us to have faith in them, so because of their current awful customer service, they only rate 3/10.
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