BT: When is a fault not a fault?
Big organisations often shift blame between divisions or departments because there is a lack of ownership of a problem. I have absolutely no doubt this story will not be news to many people, but I thought it was worth writing nonetheless.
The start of the problem: BT ADP Managed Accounts
One of my companies has several BT lines in different locations. BT outsource the management of small business accounts (or ours at least) to a company called ADP whose number appears on our bill and who we would get put through to deal with new lines. We’ve been talking to them a lot lately since we have been ordering a few new lines and a conversion of a BT Business Highway ISDN line into two PSTN lines in one location.
I am conscious in writing this that some of the staff there are very helpful, but in several cases we’ve been promised callbacks which have not arrived.. We’ve sent e-mails to which we’ve never received responses. Our position now is that if we can’t speak to the person we need to get hold of, we call back later since expecting a call back from them is just too unreliable.
Converting the line..
BT are withdrawing the Business Highway ISDN services early 2008 so we were contacted by ADP a few months ago about options to convert the lines into ISDN2e or PSTN lines. Since we are in the process of looking at VoIP for future voice solutions anyway and needing better redundancy on broadband, we opted for two PSTN lines, so an appointment was made for an Openreach engineer to come and convert the BT Business Highway line into two standard analogue business phone lines. I was told this process was quite simple. The first PSTN line was ordered with TotalCare (BT’s supposed enhanced service option which guarantees a 4-hour response to faults)
At this point I ought to point out that we use these lines and made it very clear to ADP that any switch-over had to be managed to minimise the downtime. During the conversion it became apparent that there were problems finding pairs that go back to the local exchange for the second line (with the Business Highway line being capable of carrying two calls down one line). This meant that the number used for faxes was completely dead. The engineer left stating that another colleague would come back later that day to finish the work.
After 3pm, I began getting worried that the problem would not be resolved so I rang our BT managed accounts (ADP) contact (one of the few who seem to have some idea of what they are talking about) and was told they were still working on it and expected it to be fixed this afternoon. We agreed that I would call back at 5pm if the lines weren’t working and of course, inevitably I called back. Following some more discussions another staff member at ADP stated near 6pm that they would be going home and that their department would be closed until Monday morning, and that as the line wasn’t working, the only possible option would be to ring faults.
The run around..
So I rang BT faults (154).. They said that since it’s an order in progress I would need to speak to BT Business Sales (152).. so I rang them.. Their system asks for the phone number and then said something along the lines of “You have one open order on the line. Your order was placed by a third party. Please contact them” before hanging up. So I call back and play with the options to get through to someone. Now this BT employee seemed a bit better and looked at the issue but advise that the system was waiting on a software update (as it had been for the past few hours) and because the engineers who deal with manual updates had gone home, we’d have to wait until the morning. I was then put through to faults on my request to register this as a fault, but faults advised me that since the line was not active, they could not raise a fault.
So.. I have no phone lines.. BT broke them.. and it’s not a fault..
So, let’s recap. BT were supposed to convert one Business Highway line into two PSTN lines because they were withdrawing the Highway service, and as a result, they’ve now left us with both lines not working. Well actually, not quite. One PSTN line has a dialtone and a telephone number attached to it which has nothing to do with us. Go figure..
The real problem with BT..
What gets to me is we pay for a business service (and Highway isn’t the cheapest option either) and then place an order with an even higher service level (TotalCare) and different departments within BT seem to pass the buck between each other. There is absolutely no ‘ownership’ of the problem. We are without a phone service[1] which we had this morning and BT do not consider this a ‘fault’.. This is utterly ridiculous. Imagine if we turned our network routers off for a day.. We wouldn’t have any customers left the following day. My general perception of BT as a company was moving forwards, but I get the strong sense of some major internal co-ordination issues where no one is interested in solving the problem. Is this the result of artificially forcing a split of BT’s Retail and Openreach businesses even?
[1] Although this does mean our fax is down and it causes us all ends of inconvenience, we don’t actually trust BT to run our main phone system (and this is precisely why!).. but that’s besides the point.
Update 16/12/07: I can report that BT did fix the first PSTN line on Saturday morning and I had a call from their sales team at around 8.55am to tell me that. The second line was sorted at 11:35am and the engineer knocked on the door. I have to say I wasn’t expecting this to be sorted until Monday so I was pleasantly surprised, not that this makes 24 hours of no service in any way acceptable because of planned work with no contingency plans in place in case they came across a problem.