Date: 13 December 2005 13:19:29
After mentioning last week that I'm mildly irritated that I don't get a phone line and broadband till 29th December, imagine my joy when I got home last night to find that my introductory "Welcome to BT" letters detailing my new account were addressed to a Mr [not my initial][not my name]. So I phoned up the call centre today, to get them to change it to Ms [my initial][my name]. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, seems like a rather straightforward thing to do.
Wrong!
Firstly, because I wasn't Mr [not my initial][not my name] I got passed to another department who deal with people calling who aren't the person named on the letter, whereupon I explained what had happened, to be told by the call centre operator that in all his years of working for BT he had never ever come across a case of the letter being addressed to the wrong person. Hooray, I thought, I'm making history. We established that the email address that had been generated for me ([my initial][my name][number]@....) was the obvious one to be electronically generated from my initial and name, and a totally unobvious one to be generated if the person who had originally placed the order was Mr [not my initial][not my name]. However, that wasn't enough to stop the operator telling me that as the account was now in Mr [not my initial][not my name]'s name, that the only way this could be changed would be for Mr [not my initial][not my name] to phone up BT to cancel the order himself and then they could put in a new order in my name.
Imagine my joy.
I pointed out to them that Mr [not my initial][not my name] didn't in fact live at that address and that he had not placed that order, but as I wasn't Mr [not my initial][not my name] and so wasn't the account holder I could not authorise any change to the account. In fact, the only way that that could be resolved would be for them, out of the goodness of their hearts, to close it without Mr [not my intial][not my name]'s authority and charge me £74.99 for doing it!
At this point I was just about to reach my hand down the phone and whup him upside the head, whilst the other students in this room listening to my end of the conversation were in stitches, but instead I remained calm, pointed out the utter ridiculousness of the situation and the fact that he was, in fact, calling me a liar by not accepting that BT had just made a mistake and then charging me for the privilege, and then I asked to speak to a manager. He asked me to call back to do that, I refused and demanded to speak to a manager then and there, and so then I got put on hold for 20 minutes. I felt like Phoebe in Friends, in that episode where she hangs on the phone to the bank for 24 hours thinking it's a freephone number. Cue sharing of BT horror stories and speculation as to whether they were leaving me on hold for ever to try to make me give up and guesses as to how long I would be left holding, and wondering whether they could hear what we were saying whilst I was on hold, all the time listening to the most irritating muzack I think I've ever heard. Just when I started to think that I would be found in a year's time in the same position covered in cobwebs, he returned and promised to sort it out within the hour. To give him his due, he phoned back 20 minutes later with everything resolved, apologised and had made sure that the engineer still came on the same day (I had to place a new order which would have meant delaying the engineer even longer). But really - how hard is it to admit a simple mistake and change a name on a database, when the email address and bank details all pointed to me being who I said I was? Whatever happened to the customer even occasionally being right?