BT - It's a Wind-Up

Rant time!

Took me 47 minutes (I was cut off once at 10 minutes) to get through to BT Broadband last night - ending up with a chap in India who had to repeat everything twice as I couldn't understand a bloody word he was saying - and I told him so. Problem finally solved (faulty Wi-Fi) after 1 hour on the phone at £0.14 per minute.

I'd gladly pay £1 a minute for the entire call if I could be guaranteed of speaking to an intelligible human within 1 minute. I was at the end of my tether by the time I got to speak to the poor bugger and it's entirely unreasonable of BT to expect their help-desk personnel to have to deal with customers who have been transformed into homicidal maniacs after being kept waiting for over half an hour.

Not so sure I like the rich mix of regional accents used on the BT call handling system - you know, the one where you press 1 to 4 a dozen times before you end up in the wrong queue or are cut off. Every set of 1 to 4 questions is posed by a different regional accent. I'd rather have one person leading me up the garden path, and preferably using received pronunciation; it's far easier to understand, sounds more professional and doesn't make me think I'm about to speak to someone without a clue and is a moonlighting fish gutter from Fleetwood.

During my numerical meanderings around the BT call handling system I pressed the number indicating I'd be willing to participate in a customer feedback session - gave them a piece of my mind! Without fail, the BT voice-over says they're experiencing high call volume and it will be a long wait. That means either, a) they always have a large number of customer faults, or b) they just don't have enough call centre staff. Either way, it's not a good advert for BT.

By the way, according to Feedjit, I'm in Luton today.

Now for the report on the wind-up shaver - took delivery of it yesterday and am pleased to report it works a treat. Perfectly smooth shave on the basis of a couple of minutes of winding. This is going to be invaluable on my business travels.