aah ... the wonders of BT customer "service" ...
The less of your life that has a dependency on BT, the better your life will be !
You have to bear in mind that 99% of providers out there are merely reselling BT on a wholesale basis, albeit often doing so with better customer service (and allowing you to leave them to shout at BT on your behalf).
If you are in an area only covered by BT, I'd suggest looking at :
- ZEN (I actually still use them as a customer for multiple connections, their support is great)
- Andrews & Arnold (Have heard heresy from third parties that their support is good, and their Managing Director runs a blog where he regularly vents his anger at BT...
)
If you are fortunate enough to be in an LLU area :
- Easynet (either direct via their EasynetConnect brand or with a Sky LLU line since Sky (should) use the Easynet LLU network given they bought Easynet a couple of years ago). I don't know about Sky support as I've only ever contracted with Easynet.... but Easynet support is the Rolls Royce gold standard ... they really are very, very good (I deal with a
lot of support desks, ranging from the scum at BT upwards.... so when I say they're very,very,good, I really mean it ... for example they'll login to your local exchange and do diagnostics live whilst you are on the phone ... manual diagnostics by a knowledgeable individual, no automated scripts, no bull, just a genuine hard-working attempt to resolve your problem !). An Easynet contract, whilst not the cheapest, is worth every penny.
-TalkTalk... unfortunatley they have a bit of a hit&miss reputation on the support side. But their LLU network is decent and stability of their lines is generally pretty good. So still worth a punt.
Personally my preference ranking would probably be as follows :
- Easynet
- Sky or TalkTalk
- Virgin Cable
- Satellite
- Old-school 56k dial-up
- Carrier pigeon
- Smoke Signals
- Coded letters in the newspaper
- Hand delivery
- Anything with BT's sticky hands
Seriously, I imagine that even community service must be better than dealing with BT's god-awful customer support ! I've dealt with all three branches of BT (Retail, Wholesale, Openreach)... they're all as ghastly as each other.
I was most amused to read the following quote from the new Openreach CEO today :
He said there were still too many situations where it got something badly wrong and then proceeded to compound its failure through poor customer service. “If that happens there is a possibility of leaving the customer in some real distress,” explained Garner.
(source: ComputerWeekly)
I've lost count the number of times BT have left me in distress !
He didn't present much of an insight into his answer other than spouting a bunch of management-speak :
“I believe the whole customer service model has changed. The customer is in much greater control and we need to respond to that. We need to put the customer increasingly in control of the experience.”
Which probably roughly translates as .... "nope, the leopard aint' going to change its spots.... so just let me go pick up my first pay packet".
The only thing he actually said he plans to implement is "live-tracking of frontline engineers".
In all my years of dealing with BT ... the ability to track an engineer live has been the very least of my concerns !
BT .... plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose