Needless to say - our favourite telco yet again! This time I would like this chance to publically apologise to our customer for the inconvenience. I know the fact it was not our fault is not much consolation and I understand the frustration of having an office off line like that. It is appalling.
What I find particularly annoying is when problems like this are quite so unnecessary. It is not like something broke, even!
It all started when an engineer went to install FTTC and refused to proceed because the customer did not have a "business hub".
We have seen this before, occasionally, and usually they either refuse and go away or they continue reluctantly. This time the engineer left the job half done with no ADSL or FTTC.
This really looks to me like a case of favouring their retail arm over other communications providers, and is just not on. It is very clear to me that has this been their retail arm, this would not have happened, and I challenge them to deny that.
What is worse is that they they took 8 days to fix it. In a long series of emails, marked confidential, that blamed system problems and claimed that delays where their suppliers fault (AKA their own). Madness.
I have to praise my escalations manager, Shaun, for staying on top of this. At one point he was working around the clock chasing them from shift change to shift change to get things progressed.
Finally, they seem to have refused to provide any sensible explanation that we are allowed to publish and are not even waiving the install cost to compensate for the problems.
I would stress to customers reading this that things normally go very smoothly, and this is the first time the job has been aborted half way through...
[Reposted as blogspot lost it. Thanks to Simon for finding a copy]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Fencing
Bit of fun... We usually put up some Christmas lights on the house - some fairy lights on the metal fencing at the front, but a pain as mean...
-
Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency bands (hence the name) to carry signals over wires (us... -
For many years I used a small stand-alone air-conditioning unit in my study (the box room in the house) and I even had a hole in the wall fo... -
It seems there is something of a standard test string for anti virus ( wikipedia has more on this). The idea is that systems that look fo...
Comments I received elsewhere is the retail arm get just as much crap...
ReplyDeleteI am sure in a case like this it would not happen because of the nature of the engineer's mistake, but maybe they get other types of crap.
Ofcom really need to look into this - Openreach engineers are clearly being trained to do the work specifically for BT Retail and there is none of the separation there is supposed to be. This is anticompetitive - any ISP that wasn't so prepared to go a far with escalation as you are would have lost the customer to BT Retail by now.
ReplyDeleteAnother advert for Openreach to be hived off completely from BT - perhaps made in to a mutual organisation that's not allowed to make a profit, only to invest any profits into it's infrastructure - there is simply no other way to ensure that there is equity of access to all providers.
ReplyDeleteHowever much BT group claim that Openreach is ringfenced from the other arms of the business, I expect that they are willing to make losses on business for BT Group businesses (knowing that the losses will be recovered for BT Group as a whole) but they won't do this for the other licensed operators.