This letter has been sent by a BT customer in Vidler Square, Rye to the corporation’s chief executive. Her complaint follows a long battle for landline and broadband connections by residents there. See “Connected – but still a farce” and “Where BT infinity takes an eternity”
Dear Gavin Patterson
I am absolutely sick to the back teeth of your company’s total inability to deal with its customers in an acceptable manner. I have received one excuse after another about the failure of my customer journey and now to add insult to injury, after taking two days to finally acknowledge that I have a working phone line, you tell me it can take a further five working days to connect me to broadband. This is inexcusable poor service. You have known about my move to this address since January 16.
Your customer service team are a waste of time. They do not seem to be able to appreciate that these delays are unacceptable. They blame everyone but yourselves but it is you that are responsible for this shambolic mess. They tell me what is not going to happen, they can’t explain why it should take yet another five days to put the broadband infrastructure into place or what that infrastructure even is. It’s like dealing with a trained parrot!
You are holding us to ransom by refusing to discuss compensation until you have got us a connection and refusing us a right to compensation if we change provider.
You state that you have applied for 21 permits from East Sussex County Council. ESCC refute this, they say you have applied for only five and on two occasions failed to do the work. You state that the developer caused delays. The developer categorically denies this.
The delay was caused by failure to clear blockages in ducts. This work should have been months ago when the work to develop the site started.
I have repeatedly asked you to provide me with a timetable of events since I first contacted you and you have categorically refused to do this. Your organisation is just a complete joke and you can only be this inefficient because you hold the monopoly. No one would elect to deal with a company who show such little regard for their customer needs.
All of the residents of Vidler Square have incurred considerable costs, all have gone through considerable stress and distress, some for coming up to six months now. You have lied, misled us and fed us misinformation. You have consistently failed to honour promised call backs. I remain disgusted by this yet further delay and frustrated that nobody in your company appears to acknowledge that this level of service is just unacceptable. It is pointless apologising, you just need to get it sorted now.
Yours sincerely
Anne Grainger
Rye
Photo: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg