I wouldnt take on the advice from the BT man at all.

Contacting the CEO is a waste of time.

They will ignore you.

I would issue a County Court Summons and let the law rule against this horrible nasty company!!!

Nonsense, and irrational...taking BT to court is stupid.

The Chairmans office is a good way to resolve things.

oh yes the chairman personally responds to every single letter email and fax it is such a wonderful way of dealing with things.

why didnt i think of this before.

BT is such a wonderful organisation I will tell all my friends and associates that self abuse is the way.

Thank you BT man I enjoy abusing myself by having a BT line!!!!

When Ben Verwaayen was the CEO he did indeed respond to emails sent personally to him. He then asked his team to deal with it.

Fine, take BT to court if you wish, but you will be wasting your time and money and its not necessary to do that to achive results and resolution of a problem.

This is a useful thread. I am with Tiscali and was going to change to BT as I'm sick of Tiscali's useless overseas call centre. Thinking that BT is BRITISH Telecom right? So it's not Indian Telecom, Asian Telecom so presumably would have UK call centres where peoples first language is english? Clearly this is not the case, so I'll keep looking. I don't care about the nationality of the call centre staff for it's own sake, but it seems plain to everyone you speak to that overseas call centres just do not work for the consumer. Sure, they keep operating costs down so CEOs can get bigger bonuses & shareholders can too - but they means some poor devil in this country has lost thier job! .We should all think about not giving our money to these firms - remember jobs sent abroad means people in this country losing thiers! .. Thats going to be pretty important soon if the financial forecasters are right....

So I guess I'll have to keep looking for an ISP that actualy gives two hoots for it's own country!

Hi Numenus I agree with you 100% outsourcing customer service as in this case Bangalore oops British Telecom has done means that you can completely write off customer service.

You are unable to communicate with the people over there in India and you get more and more frustrated.

I agree with you its the fault of all the greedy shareholders and CEOs who are getting fatter pay cheques while we customers suffer.

Look for a provider that has UK based call centres indeed.

I am currently in litigation with Bangalore Telecom and its been over a year now and I am waiting for an outcome.

I will never use BT ever again!!!!

More nonsense. Yes BT do outsource their CS, but that has nothing to do with the issues people have experienced.

Maybe if you people stopped ranting at the outsourced CS and instead contacted BT UK your issues would be resolved.

For the most part, BT offers a very reliable and fast broadband service which is why many Talk Talk and Tiscali customers end up coming back to BT!!!!

Oh yes contact BT UK BTman may work for BT but he wont even tell you what telephone number that isnt routed to Bangalore you can use to contact BT.

You are so helpful BT man and you are just like the thousands who work for such a dismal organisation such as BT.

BTW BTman the phone number is top secret please provide the secret access code to get the BT UK non routed telephone number..... shhhh i wont tell anyone promise....

As a BT worker myself we do have alot of call centres across the uk and have been recognised for our good customer service. The thing with forums like this is people always come on to complain but never to praise. Unfortunatley as with everything the bad always gets heard.

I stand with the BTman.

And the thousands that work for BT?? We help our customers when they call and do our upmost to get any issues resolved asap for them.

There are far worser companies out there.

Hi, I'd like to add a different topic of discussion to the thread on BT customer service - customer web space provided with BT broadband.

All of the ISPs provide web space for their customers as part of the broadband package. You can use this pace to set up your own website or publish family photos etc. The ISPs don't normally add adverts as you are paying for this service as part of your broadband package. In the past, BT provided it's customers with space on btinternet.com (with no adverts). However, since they joined with Yahoo, they only provide new customers with a link to geocities (which does put adverts on your web pages). Even if I was not a BT customer, I could go to geocities and sign up for their free web space! What service are BT providing here?!?

I think that it is shocking that BT do not provide advert free web space for BT customers, especially from a company who claim to provide good a customer service, and especially when all of their competitors provide this to their customers.

After talking this through to the people at BT (BT staff in both the UK and India) I am left feeling very disapointed with BT's level of customer service. The outcome - I (like many others I expect) will vote with their feet and move away from BT to the likes of Virgin Media etc.

Ha, three months, you were lucky. I have had eight months with an unusable phone and unreliable broadband. I have had the engineer a couple times and he gets so far in fixing the line problem then it goes away and comes back.

I phone BT "customer service", stops laughing, dries eyes, who do a line check, they tell me the line is OK, I say I cant hear you, they say it is very noisy but the line check is OK. I point out the flaw in there logic.

I must have been through this twenty times. They have reduced my pregnant wife to tears of frustration. A lady on the broadband help thing eventually agreed just to cancel if we were not happy.

Called again to cancel it, no notes taken, hold on we will do a line check and if we can fix it.....It's like dealing with Vogons except they have less charm and a Mumbai accent.

If you have a problem with BT basically you have no chance. You are dealing with people highly trained in making sure that nothing happens except you go round in circles from an operator in Mumbai to one in Europe and back again.

Just to add to the fun you have ten minutes of hold music between each operator and about one in every three calls just going dead requiring a repeat performance.

Just to add to the levity they then threaten you with a £100 plus pound an hour charge if the problem is with you equipment. Imagine if that was some old dear on the other end getting threats like that.

I must easily have spoken to over a hundred people and logged something like twenty - twenty five hours. Yes we have been keeping notes.

Not only that they are expensive. I am just cancelling the lot. If I have to pay it then so be it. I would rather saw my own testicles off with rusty barbed wire than go through any more of this.

Don't waste you're time speaking to them for any more than is required to prove you have made an effort. Note down the names, times taken, dead calls and so on and then put some claims in via the small claims court.

PS Called Utility Warehouse, they said they could change the line and set up broadband within two days. Not only that the person on the other end of the line was based in the UK. BT said two weeks, if they could be bothered, they would see what they had on that week.

No there are not. I have never dealt with a worse company. Ever. Period. You are expensive and you're customer service is diabolical. You made my pregnant wife cry for gods sake. She used to sell double glazing over the phone. She looks back on those as happy times when compared to dealing with you lot.

i wonder what the delusional bt man will say to you in reply.

I am sure he will say BT has the best customer service in the world.

And that we are all making it up.

I say to BT man keep taking the tablets.....

MOVED IN 1 DECEMBER 2007 AFTER SIX MONTHS RYING TO GET A WORKING PHONE OR BROADBAND 24th JUNE 2008 ......

20:41 Called Faults/Billing call was answered by Rashiv. I asked to speak to someone who could answer questions regarding.....
21:01 Chethan transferred me to Mohammed on the technical helpdesk (despite repeated stating I did not want this)....We went around this a few more times and after insisting again and again....
21:17 On hold (Vivaldi)
21:24 Mohammed came back on the line and told me the Customer complaints manager would not speak to me until the broadband fault was resolved.....
21:26 On hold again (still Vivaldi)
21:32 Mohammed came back on the line again, and again stated that until the broadband speed issue was resolved the Customer Service Manager would be unable to assist me......
21:45 Margyia put me on hold while she spoke to Customer Options Team...... they would call me back between 24 - 48 hours later to further this.

CONTINUES FOR THREEMORE MONTHS 22 SEPTEMBER....

17:10 I spoke to Anith who I told I was not supposed to come through to her....
17:22 Anith called back to transfer me back to Customer Options who picked up the call and hung up....
17:25 I called back on the normal number again....
17:31 Call was answered by Robin. I asked to speak to the Complaints Manager, he asked that the problem was I explained again. He said he could see from the naotes th Resolution Team had now looked at the issue and he put me on hold.....

I at this point became extremely distressed and was unable to speak from crying, Robin asked if I was ok. I said no, I did not want to have to go back to technical help i didn't really care what the line speed was or if they could fix it the situation was just beyond that. Robin said it would speak to someone. At this point my husband realised that I was extremely distressed and unable to stop crying and refused to allow me to continue with the phone call. When someone came back on the line he told them to forget the whole thing and we seek legal advice and ended the call.

Sadly that tale could come straight out of Tiscali too! - I recognise it as pretty much identical in fact to my own experience of Tiscali! Disgusting. I suggest you cut and paste that and send it to as many boards and sites across the internet that you can. The CEO's of these companies must be laughing all the way to the bank, as these are not isolated incidents clearly. - I guess they rely on the great British public's lemming factor (you've got to admit, we keep using these companies, voting in self-servers to govern us and queue up to buy flimsily built box houses etc).