Don't you just hate these greedy grasping bast*rd corporations where no member of staff is capable of making a decision - let alone able to do the morally right thing???
I've got a phone/broadband account with BT, which I've had at this address for 20 years.
My 22-year old son who lives upstairs in the attic, has his own BT Vision account - just in case he might one day want to rent a film, which he never has at anytime.
So what has some clueless goon decided to do at BT?
Yep, despite being in separate names, merge the accounts.
Did they check whose account paid for the phone line?
Why no - why bother, who cares anyway.
So they merged 2 separate accounts - and in their wisdom charged my entire phone & broadband bill to my son's account, under the direct debit they made him set up to rent a film which, remember - he's never even used.
Now BT have emptied his bank account leaving him in the red, and subject to bank charges.
I've just spent 45 minutes on the phone haranguing some poor 19 year old, to return the wrongfully taken direct debit.
"Oh no, we can't do that; your son will have to sort it out with his own bank himself", she tells me.
What now about being Charlie being overdrawn and having to pay bank charges?
"Sorry, nothing I can do about that. A customer's bank charges are not BT's responsibility."
1) Total mal-administration in the first place.
2) Then taking money from the wrong person's account.
3) Then they won't give it back.
I'll call Trading Standards in the morning.
Bast*rd BT.
Grrrrrrrr!!!
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I've heard they don't like that kind of (bad) publicity much.
I've brought him up on my own as a single parent, since he was 8 years old.
What am I supposed to do, shoot him ....?
From day one after the move the circuit was crap - unreliable, videoconferencing and VOIP was almost unusable, data rates fluctuated wildly on the transmit side etc etc. It took me and my staff about an hour to eliminate everything else (firewall, LAN, switch, router, excess local broadcast traffic etc etc) as being responsible and point the finger squarely at the BT line. They sent three engineers, over a total of two months to both ends of the line to try and fix it. Each time they f***ed up the access request at the far end (the data centre), and each time it took a whole half-day instead of the promised one hour to sort out. In the end I went nuts at them down the phone and told them if they didn't get a PROPER network engineer out to look at it that weekend, I was cancelling the line on Monday and we would go with NTL. Saturday morning, a PROPER engineer turns up, pulls the card out of the NTU and instantly spots that a dip switch on the service card has been flicked, on the transmit side, to half duplex.
None of that will mean anything to most of you, but suffice it to say that a misconfigured duplex setting is probably thr second thing you look at when diagnosing a layer 2 networking issue (after making sure the cable is plugged in correctly), should be diagnosable by a 16 year old kid straight out of school with a C in GCSE IT, was instantly spottable from the traffic graphs I had sent them on numerous occasions (annotated with 'LOOKS LIKE A DUPLEX MISMATCH') and would show up on any line test (which they inisisted they had done on at least five previous occasions). Oh, and the three engineers that had come out previously all pulled the service card as well - and failed to spot the problem.
Absolute, utter, unadulterated muppets.
Oggy well done mate for doing the Dad bit on your jack .
PS mate does your Dad ever hear from Bill MacEwen at all ?
...partly because we had a half-duplex issue at one of our sites recently!
No need Oggy, I'll save you the you call. If you aren't getting anywhere on the phone, and try to get through to the High Level Complaints team, your local TSD won't be able to offer too much advice on this other than to put everything in writing to the highest level in the company you can. Email's fine these days but I also advise recorded delivery too (read receipts are good though).
Legally your son should of course not be out of pocket because of BT's ineptitude therefore they are liable for his 'consequential loss' i.e. the bank charges, etc (use that exact phrase). Make sure you include copies of bank statements, etc. If you can't get it resolved by BT then you'll have to use one of the telecoms ombudsmen schemes, Otelo I would think for BT. otelo
If you write the letter put in that you are copying it to the MD and to Watchdog and/or Oftel. Even if you don't that often puts sufficient wind up them to get some action - it's worked for me in the past in a dispute with Royal Mail.
Did the same thing a few years previously when the wife had a problem - got the bill wiped out & extra credit on the account.
Always complain directly to the top if the normal customer service people are useless...
I thought that there Customers services had improved, having had the same red tape attitude 5 or so years ago when i switched to broadband on a mac....... 'The old silver speedhub' the cd they sent did not work and endless calls to there IT support did not work. Found a fix in the end and after a lenghty moan got the call charges re-imbursed. Bt by christ was it painful.
Now I am on the black hub phone and it is a lot better, enetred a new contract and got a new /phone and hub, and halved my account charge. You really have to haggle with these guys, been with them over 20 years, but cuts no ice!
Not until I said right I will go with 'sky', and cancel the service , did they start to negotiate. So I made them match the deal that sky advertised, said they could not, but did in the end.
Being a polite, firm awkward customer I moaned my way to a deal, should not have to, but that is the way it is. Go through the accounts department, that gets there attention....say you are going to leave.
However, I think you'd be well within your rights to request compensation for the time you've had to spend getting them to rectify their error.
I'll let you know how I get on.
Same happened to me when I moved from Tiscali to TalkTalk. Just had to send off a copy of my first bill from TT to Tiscali and they refunded the DD's they had taken. Apparently a very common thing amongst all BB suppliers!
Otelo is the official phone regulator - as mentioned above - contact them with complaints etc. If it's the BT Vision TV service, or broadband, contact Ofcom. The website has details of how to complain etc. and also template letters to send off to service providers.
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/complain/
I don't see the connection.
On one side a single father raises his child and allows him to live in the attic at the age of 22.
On the other, a woman abuses her child.
Really, did I miss something here?