3 months ago, my 97 year old mother who is virtually blind and has dementia, accepted that a care home would provide her with the best around the clock support. Up until then she lived alone, but depended heavily on her (PSTN) landline phone and the emergency assist necklace that uses the phone line. As an account manager for her account, I phoned BT and worked through their moving home process. I asked for the (copper cable) landline that was already in her room to be enabled. Disconnect the landline at her previous bungalow and, because she was only moving less than a mile in distance, I asked them to transfer her existing phone number.
It took BT, 4 weeks to connect a pre-existing line for an existing customer of 30+ years, who they ought to treat as vulnerable (but Christmas/NewYear probably exaggerated the delay). And I was surprised towards the end of this wait, to learn they were converting her to Digital Voice, closing her prior account and treating her like a new customer and they were sending a Smart Hub2 to a near blind 97 year old with dementia!.
So I installed The Smart Hub 2 in accordance with the instructions, and plugged the DECT analogue answer phone in to the back of the Smart Hub 2 again as per their instructions. (at 97 she has zero understanding or use for this “’new fangled internet” stuff – she is a digital voice only user.)
That was 2 months ago – the good news is it has worked for nearly all of the last 2 months for outbound phone calls. But for pretty much all of that 2 months, other people phoning her from their landlines get number unobtainable or the call just goes dead after dialling. Strangely most people are able to phone her OK if they phone via their UK mobile phone.
Fault reporting , escalating and diagnostics has recently been more challenging because I have had to be abroad (in Canada) for a few months. To further compound the failings, if I use a landline from here in Canada via a low cost VOIP transatlantic phone call provider all I get is a Canadian message saying that the (UK) number I have dialled “is not assigned”. Similarly, when my brother who lives in Italy tried to phone his mother from his Italian landline he gets a similar “number not assigned” message in Italian.
To date, I have done 3 online chat sessions with BT technical support; first 2 chats took over 1 hour each – the last chat 3 days ago took 2 hours. I have now concluded that online chats with BT technical support are pointless. They are clearly locked in to a set of diagnostics scripts and they seem incapable of getting past the step that involves them interrogating their Smart Hub 2 to confirm that there is a device (my Mums analogue phone) plugged in to it. All 3 chat sessions get stuck with them asking me to unplug the phone, leave it for X seconds then plug it in again. And or they suggest rebooting the smart Hub 2. Doing any of these things from 3000 miles away in Canada is challenging, fortunately the care home have been an amazing help – and very patient.
Status after the 3rd chat (and after 4 hours on their chat) – they again asked me to unplug it and replug it. At that point I remembered the definition of insanity “doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result”, I am not going to yet again ask the care home to unplug and replug the phone in to the hub and/or reboot it. Hasn’t provided a miracle cure the last 3 times – not likely to in future. I gave suggested some options: A. BT send an engineer, B. They revert her to PSTN or C. I close the account and get a loud, big button dumb cell phone instead (whilst seemingly attractive, with my mother’s lack of eyesight and dementia the ideal is she continue to use the analogue handset she is familiar with (anything new such as a digital voice handset or a new big cell phone who cause panic).
The above options were because after 3 chat sessions and repeated unplugging and rebooting that :
I concluded either The Smart Hub is faulty or The “plug your analogue phone in to the smart hub” is a myth, it feels like perhaps her analogue phone is not compatible with Digital Voice –( but BT have never suggested this possibility) or Digital Voice as a technology product is still just too buggy, too bleeding edge. In other words Digital Voice is not fit for purpose.
I’ve read somewhere that there might be a policy that BT will not force vulnerable customers over 70 years old (who use phone based emergency alert necklaces etc) to transfer to Digital Voice. Instead my call was escalated to the Tech support manager who said that they would send an engineer to visit to try to get the bottom of the issue, and having classified her as “urgent welfare” they assured me that the engineer would visit within the next 30 hours. Well 3 days later and no sign of the engineer, and they haven’t phoned the care home to make an appointment – so their promised action is looking unlikely.
To me these problems seem to be more about configuration and call routing – but I’m no expert – it is certainly hard to imagine how replugging the phone in to the smart hub is going to resolve “number not assigned” international calls. But incoming international calls are a nice to have – I just need UK landlines to be able to reliably call her.
During the 2nd chat session, they informed me that they had raised a compliant for this issue on my behalf. I wrongly thought that this would be some form of issue escalation, someone would pick it up, investigate, find the issue and get it working. Sadly it appears that a complaint is just a note on the account, it triggers zero action – BT is stuck on they can not “see” her phone plugged in to the Smart Hub when they interrogate the Smart Hub remotely.
I dread that I have to spend another hour on a chat session querying why they have failed to send out an engineer when they said they would, and more importantly get them to send the engineer. Perhaps if their own engineer visits then they will dig deeper that unplugging it.
I’ll be back in UK in a few weeks, then I will be able to phone them whilst standing beside the phone and jumping through the pointless hoops they request. But that will be the last chance because after that I’ll close the account and get a simple elderly cell phone for her because it feels like with BT dropping PSTN and transferring everyone to Digital Voice they are abandoning the elderly/vulnerable.
