Email: Your latest bill is here... or there... or nowhere...

[roxburd]

That's what the email from BT says:

Your latest bill is here
It's just a click away

And then, in the email, it admits that's untrue - the system has scheduled the generation of your bill but it has NOT been made available yet. "We'll be adding your bill to your account in the next few hours," it says.

How embarrassing. Competent operations would simply generate a bill and then let you know. Not BT - it lets you know that it's going to generate your bill and actually sets a subject for the email that makes an untrue claim - that it is "is here" and "just a click away."

I received my most recent such email yesterday. I was aware of BT's deep, deep incompetence, so I left it a day. I went to look at my bill today and it's still not available. After a whole day.

I worked for BT for 30 years as a software engineer and it's just so sad to see that the company can't even get this right. It's such a very, very simple sequencing issue. If they can't get that right then they really can't be expected to get anything right at all.

When I joined the company, in 1993, the engineer was king. Engineering excellence was what it was all about. The heroes were those who knew how stuff worked. Then, around the year 2000, the announcement went out - BT was "a people company." I was naïve enough to imagine that this was a good thing. It was not. It was the non-technical management's way of undermining the technical staff. And slowly the belief grew that we didn't need excellent engineering if we could just get customer service right, we could fix any problems after the fact. Quite astounding. And entirely wrong, obviously.

Anyway, here we are - the company can't even sequence the generation of a bill and the comms to the customer telling them that it's available. Tragic. Really tragic. The people company that continually fails people.

[Kimberlin]

@roxburd  Sadly all you’ve accomplished is wasting several paragraphs of your own time. As you’re undoubtedly aware, this is a customer to customer platform. Whinging here about the way BT conducts its everyday operations is actually pointless because they won’t read it anyway. Agreed, there are Moderators who do work for BT here, but I highly suspect that whatever they feed up the food chain doesn’t really have much gravitas. Besides,  they also have two forums to moderate at the same time and if you’ve bothered to read the EE forum, it’s as whingey as this one.

Honestly, if you’ve got a genuine complaint, you’re probably better directing it through the Exec Complaints Team.

[roxburd]

Hi  @Kimberlin ,

Oh, how beautifully poetic. I complain that BT can't handle simple temporal sequencing and a reply informs me that BT now measures time in paragraphs. When I was at school, we measured time in seconds - as I recall, it seemed to work quite well.

Ah! I see, when BT informed me that my bill was 'ready', they meant that it had been made available in minus 10 paragraphs' time! That makes complete sense now. Sorry, my mistake.

Yes, I was fully aware that this was customer-to-customer. Customers can be intelligent people with opinions of their own, though; not always, granted. I think what really would have been a waste of my time (in minutes) would have been to complain to BT. I wouldn't waste my time on that - I know it would fall on entirely deaf people-centric ears. At least here my 'whingeing' did actually engage someone - you! And 72 other people read it, too! If I wanted to get BT to take me seriously, I would probably need to express my 'concerns' in interpretive dance or some such. Anyhoo...

Vent achieved.