BT... grrrrrr

I've been spending quite a lot of time helping my mum sort out her finances. A lot of this work involves the sad but necessary step of changing account names from my dad's name or joint names, to just her. Doing this has been an exercise in discovering how companies really feel about their customers. The good news is that almost every company I have dealt with has been efficient and sympathetic. If my mum had been left to do this on her own she might just have managed (she's in her mid eighties and doesn't have a lot of expereince with form filling and voicemail options).

The exception, by quite a long way, is BT. Actually getting a human being to answer the helpline has been an ongoing effort of mine for over a week now. After numerous diversions I often end up in a cue, which never ends. They have a call back service, but no one has yet ever called me back.

So, I Googled their head office addres and wrote the follwoing letter. I'll post the reply, if and when it arrives. Let's look on this as an experiment...

"Dear BT,

 

I am writing in order to raise two points.

Firstly, after the death of my father at the end of last year I took over my mum’s finances. I have been calling all the companies (water, gas, etc.) to get account names changed and to generally update her details. In every case I got through to a person who was sympathetic and efficient. Except with BT. I have now been attempting, for over a week, to get a human being on the telephone and have got precisely nowhere. Even the service that is supposed to call me back within an hour to save me cueing hasn’t worked. If my mum (in her 80s) had had to deal with this on her own I can imagine it would have left her feeling even more frustrated than I have been.

Secondly, does anyone at BT understand how annoying it is to watch countless adverts offering deals to new customers while current customers are ignored?  The impression this gives is ‘once we’ve got you, we no longer care about you.’

I do want to stay with BT and have been with BT Internet (now broadband) since the very early days of the net. But when your help lines and your non-available special offers both give off a sense of rejection, where’s the incentive?

I hope someone does actually read my letter and replies to it without recourse to a form letter. This, BT, is your chance to come across like a company who cares about your customers."