For the last year or more our telephone line has been deteriorating and unfortunately I came home on Wednesday last week and the telephone line was dead.  The house alarm system was telling me there was line trouble, there was no broadband and when I could get a dial tone I would make a call it would just drop the line mid sentence.

A quick check with BT and the automated system said we had a problem. so did the engineer when we got through to a human.  We got the usual line of "if we come out and it's not outside the house then we'll have to charge you a £200 call out fee" - but we knew it was outside the house as we had checked the master socket with 3 working telephones and it was dead.

BT Line Engineer

The engineer turned up on time on Friday and within minutes said the fault was at the pole, and it was; the line had been rubbing on trees and some critters had been eating at the cable for some strange reason.

It took 3hrs, 4 people, 2 vans and a crane to completely change the line but they did it all on the day and with no fuss what so ever.  Well done BT, best customer service I've experianced in ages.

The upshot of the new line is that it's crystal clear for voice and the ADSL max I have also boosted up to 3-4Mb from 1.5-2Mb on average.

Incompetance or just following process I don't know but I clearly but I'm still having trouble with the whole customer service thing.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about I recently ordered some items from a large online business, that all went swimingly as your would expect with todays mature online procurement systems.  The hickup came with the delivery.

The delivery turned up whilst I was out - no problem however the depot is 30 miles away so I need to get it re-delivered when i'm in.  A quick call to the delivery people that day to get it re-delivered met with a level of confusion as the delivery number was not recognised - again no problem, name and address resolved the situation and it's scheduled for delivery when i'm next in.  Perfect!

Arrived home today, and guess what they tried to deliver it again when I'm not in.  You only get 1 re-delivery, so it's anyones guess if the package will actually get to me when I asked for it.  Time will tell but I'm expecting further dissapointment.

My frustration here is not so much the lack of my delivery but the time, effort and money wasted on both sides.  In a world when businesses need to be innovative, listen to their customers and be mindfull of wasted resources you'd think this would'nt happen.

- SC -