If you’d been reading my blog regularly then the chances are that you probably haven’t bothered checking back in quite a while as I hadn’t added anything or put up a new blog post since April 11th! Oops, that’s a big gap for me and looks really lame - I know! But it’s with good reason, I promise. Bit of a dull story though, but felt like moaning…

My housemate moved out and cancelled his account with his ISP, so I ordered a new connection with BT (could you believe that Virgin wouldn’t offer me a fibre optic connection in Westminster?!). After 20 days waiting for the activation, they actually installed it on the wrong line going into the house and I had to get it moved onto one of the others (requiring another 16 day wait). That brings me to today - in which they’ve managed to put it back onto the same line… FFS.

I’ve got to say, my experience with BT so far has been incredibly poor. As a new customer, I do expect some pretty good treatment if something goes wrong, after all its the start of a 12 month [contract] relationship during which I will be parting with a fair bit of cash.

Here’s a few tips for business owners hoping to learn from the mistakes of hideous, over bloated corporates like BT…

1. Things go wrong sometimes, as a customer I’m happy to accept that and move on. But do your best to make it right and apologise or at the very least acknowledge it when it happens.
2. Resolve problems quickly and efficiently, don’t leave your customer waiting.
3. If a resolution takes a long time, explain why.
4. Don’t palm your customers off onto department after department. Recognise that internal divisions are meaningless to me, your Twitter agents are the same as your Call Centre Agents and your Engineers for all I care - speak from your company as one, with one voice.
5. Take personal responsibility when something goes wrong. That means actually checking a resolution is being or has been reached at some point when you put the phone down. Don’t just assume that because you sent an email about it, or entered it into a problem log that someone has actioned it. Calling me back would be nice, whether its to tell me that the problem has been fixed, or just to update me on progress (or lack thereof).
6. I don’t care where you locate your Customer Service department, but you need to revise your recruitment policy to include a very high level of English language ability - I’d call it fluency. Especially if your business is about telephone communication, it kind of looks bad when your staff can’t communicate properly over the telephone.
7. Get some cool hold music, you only need to license one good track because…
8. Never keep someone on hold for long enough for a track to end.
9. If you need to keep someone on hold for more than 3-4 minutes, just arrange to call them back!
10. If you promise to call someone back, it’s generally a good idea to do it.
11. SMS updates can be useful, but not if they include very unexpected information - like scheduling downtime that starts within hours.
12. If you contact your customers via SMS, email, or letter and you need to track that conversation with a reference number, make sure that your CSAs understand what to do with that reference number to look up the conversation history.
13. Make sure your CSAs record a conversation history accurately and document a problem thoroughly.
14. If a problem escalates heavily and you think its unacceptable, acknowledge it, take responsibility, and offer a refund.
15. Don’t charge your customers for any amount of time that your service was not being delivered, that wouldn’t be right, would it?
16. If you process a refund and a customer is paying by Direct Debit, explain to them that DD requests are submitted to the customer’s bank about 10 days in advance of the amount being withdrawn. That can affect the time in which a refund can be processed - your customer needs to understand that. Don’t promise them that they won’t be charged if you’re not sure of it.
17. Its not always necessary to apologise profusely, or even at all, so long as you do everything under the sun possible to get the problem rectified.

Get those bits right, and a happy customer I would be.

Sorry BT but you’ve utterly failed me over the past month and if the one last remaining, sane, English speaking person I emailed there today can’t resolve this for me and take some personal responsibility for the problem, then I just have no choice but to switch supplier (which will probably be cheaper anyway).

Moral of this post - everyone knows BT have been useless throughout their history, why did I think they’d be any different today?