BT and Openreach, appalling customer service.

[Scott1989_]

I was going to save this post until Monday, but recent events have brought it forward.

3 weeks ago today, somebody crashed their car into the FTTC cabinet that connects multiple homes in my area. Obviously, this meant we would be without internet for some time. A day under a week later, a full team of Openreach engineers replaced the destroyed cabinet. Internet was expected to be up for everybody that night.....oh how wrong that turned out to be.

For reasons I still don't know because Openreach and BT refuse to tell me exactly what is going on, multiple homes in our area are still not back online. The Wednesday after they fixed the cabinet, some homes were turned back on, but a lot from what I can gather were not. At least half of the homes in my cul-de-sac I know for a fact aren't back online and I know of many others outside of my cul-de-sac that are having the same problem. This isn't a BT problem, because it's affecting people on multiple different providers. An Openreach engineer has messed something up with the wiring, that much is obvious at this point.

We have had tens of engineer call outs at this point and we get nowhere. People book their appointment, the engineer comes out, does nothing, and leaves. They don't communicate with the customer, we are completely left in the dark until we phone our provider who just books another engineer visit. 

Now, where does BT come in to play in all of this? I can't speak for others where I live, but BT in my experience have been nothing short of abysmal in handling my case and my brothers case who lives in the same cul-de-sac as me and is also with BT. 

I have had a fault open from May 22nd, it should have been earlier but I let it slide. I phoned BT to explain the whole situation and I had an engineer booked for May 29th. Unsurprisingly, that got cancelled, because of course it did. I had to book another appointment which will be for June 3rd, I hope. 

Now onto the reason why I have brought this post forward. As I said, I have had a fault open since May 22nd, I have been keeping track of it daily and today I was met with an infuriating update saying that I had reported the fault as fixed. This is a complete and utter lie by BT, I never did any such thing. I have come across many threads on here complaining about this, which makes me believe this is deliberate by BT as a way to avoid compensation. They did the exact same thing to my brother a few days ago.

So, I got in contact with BT again through the Message Us part of their contacts on their site. I raised a complaint about why my fault tracker is showing that I informed them the fault was fixed when I never did such a thing. She replied telling me that an engineer had visited (not my engineer by the way, somebody elses) did some troubleshooting and told BT it was fixed. Instead of verifying this by contacting me, BT instead just marked my fault as fixed. I told the person I was speaking to to undo this piece of misinformation and reinstate my fault to the way it was. She agreed to do that and said it would be done.

I kept refreshing the fault tracker page for an hour......nothing. Still saying fixed. I decided to leave it for a bit and thought that maybe it needs time to update. 6 hours later and instead of being reinstated to the way it was, BT has decided to remove the fault from my account entirely! I check the fault tracking page and all I see is "There are no faults to display for this account".......which just feels insulting to my intelligence after I literally spoke to one of your employees about this hours earlier. The fault is not fixed and you have now removed the fault entirely from the tracker. I have no way of knowing if my engineer that I booked for June 3rd is even still booked and not cancelled by your incompetence!

This is completely unacceptable from BT. The shocking treatment they have shown me these passed few weeks is disgraceful. If this is not fixed within the next week and I am not compensated, I will leave. I'm am not tied down to any contracts and I will make it known to every person I know to never get involved with BT. I have had many providers in the past, but only BT has treated me so appallingly. It's bad enough that we have been without internet for 3 weeks, chasing up daily on what is going on, but now you have taken it upon yourselves to remove my fault from your account entirely. Like the title of my post says, appalling customer service!

I have attached an image of my fault before BT said it was fixed and before they removed it

[Keith_Beddoe]

This is just a customer to customer help forum, everyone here, including myself, are just customers.

The only BT Employees are the forum moderators.

[iniltous]

If , as you suspect, the damage from the vehicle crashing into the cabinet hasn’t been repaired correctly , leaving you still without service, then a visit to your home ( which is effectively what you are arranging ) is completely unnecessary, what’s the point of you waiting in , a tech turning up , simply to tell you that there is nothing they can do , a suitably skilled engineer is required ( or a team of techs more likely) to effect the proper repair ….cancelling an individual appointment seems reasonable, obviously it’s not good that the algorithm is asking you to make an appointment then cancelling the appointment it asked you to make , without any explanation , no one can defend that , but as far as compensation, it has little effect on the amount due , which can’t be calculated until the fix is in place.

Obviously you are at liberty to use whoever you want , but as you admit , customers of other providers are in exactly the same position, will they be making a better job of communication the problem, who knows , they  are updated  by exactly the same system messages as BT , you obviously know the difference between BT as an ISP , and Openreach as the network supplier, and presumably know BT have no more or less influence on Openreach , but FWIW , it’s not likely that OR are not aware of this and are working to restore service to their ISP customers.

[Scott1989_]

The thing that has irked me the most right now is BT removing my fault entirely from the fault tracker, just hours after I was talking to their employee about how annoyed I was about them labelling it as fixed when it wasn't. They have ignored me completely, it's disgusting treatment of a customer. Even after I make a complaint, I can't even check up on the stupid thing because their trash website says "Error - There seems to be a network issue. Please wait for few minutes and try again" when you click the check existing complaints box. You say all of this has little effect on the amount of compensation due, but when BT themselves are saying it's labelling my fault as fixed (not true) and removing the fault entirely from their system, how can I be confident that BT are even still tracking the fault?

Then you have Openreach sitting on their thumbs doing nothing. I don't expect you to understand the situation from my point of view, you need to be in this situation yourself, but when you have watched tens of engineers visit that cabinet, fix nothing, leave and repeat the same cycle over and over again, almost daily, it becomes infuriating.

Chasing this up daily because these multi billion pound companies have such dreadful communication skills doesn't deserve excuses made for them. You go up to them and ask them straight to their face what is happening and they just lie lie and lie some more. The one I talked to the other day said the she has put it down as an emergency and they will have a team working on the cabinet throughout the weekend to get it fixed, but there hasn't been a single sniff of them. Let's not pretend that any of this is a surprise, the whole country knows just how pathetic this company is. They have a shocking record for lying about turning up and claiming nobody is home, engineers just sitting in their van out of sight doing nothing, lying to their customers face. So when you say "it’s not likely that OR are not aware of this and are working to restore service to their ISP customers" I have a hard time accepting this as true. Not so much that they aren't aware, more that they are actually working to restore service.

[Colin_London]

Just my twopenneth.

BT need to log this as a fault so that you can receive automatic compensation when it is not fixed in time. So they are in the wrong for removing the fault when it is clearly not fixed as you informed them.

What they have also failed at is communicating to you, their customer, as to what the problem is, and they are wasting your time arranging house calls as the problem is obviously at the cabinet, not your property.

This should have been logged as a network fault which has removed your internet access, and BT should be liasing with Openreach and updating you on progress. And the fault should remain open until it has been fully fixed.

[iniltous]

And all that may be happening, all the OP knows for sure is that an unnecessary appointment was made and then cancelled, the rest is pure speculation.

[NeilO]

Hi @Scott1989_ I'm so sorry with how this has been managed and the lack of communication. I'll send you a private message so you can get in touch with your details if you need any help.

Thanks

Neil

[marco806]

Same thing happened to me, they would close a complaint whilst the issue was on-going...I would just continually open another complaint and reference the previous complaint that they closed.

I eventually got hundreds of pounds of compensation, but it was hard work and went on for months....BT is a bit of a monolith imo , the merger with EE and the resultant chaos where they have 2 systems that find it impossible to work in tandem...

Any normal business would transfer to one unified system.

[paulinefitzgerald271]

Hi Scott, after reading your account and others on this forum, I don't feel so alone, I am nearly 80 years old and have health issues, I have been without a landline for nearly 4 weeks now, my broadband drops out or freezes, and my T.V just goes off. Constant messages to BT has resulted to nothing, before the bank holiday 2 people from Openreach came to my home, and after some time reported that my phone cable was damaged at the cabinet, I had a text telling me that complex work was needed such as wiring, cabling and road digging, I have made constant message call to BT without any help. I have been a BT customer for many years, but all the problems seem to have started since EE became involved with BT. I have had an email from BT about my complaint with a tracker, when I try to check what is happening they are telling me I don't have an ID attached to the tracker number, they are also telling me that it should be fixed by midnight on 6/6.24 so I would have been without a landline for 4 weeks.

I checked the legal status, and BT are very quick to state that if you leave before the cooling off period you will have to pay them compensation, but very little about them paying you compensation for the lack of services, I am considering stopping my direct debit to them as I don't think they should take May account due to the fact I have had no service from them

[pippincp]

Have you replied to @NeilO ? One of the mods will then contact you in a few days and take on your case. He/she will be your sole point of contact and keep you updated. When resolved they will also arrange the compensation due to you.

They are a very small team who have an excellent record on getting problems such as your sorted out quickly.