Saturday 13 August 2011

At what point did British Telecom become India Telecom?

Mmmmm..... talk about frustrated. I got an email telling me as I'd exceeded my broadband usage BT or rather IT were going to charge me £50

Telephone call to BT or rather IT customer services engaged me in a very difficult conversation with an Indian lady who due to a poor phone line (!!!!!! - she eventually had to call me back) made the passing of details very difficult. I gave up with her when she asked me to spell forward slash !!

Then a very nice well spoken Indian man came on who spoke at 100mph 20 minutes later after he had tried his best to reinterpret a clause that said I would not be charged for going over for the first time, resulting in him telling me it was for new customers only. (I have been with BT since we have had internet so I consider myself a loyal customer) In the end I asked him a question will he refund me the chage or not - if he could not then I would close the call and phone back the cancellation team. He put me on hold and other 5 minutes of Greensleeves and he came back on and said he has spoken to James (a good old Indian name) who had said to not make the charge as I was a loyal customer !

This whole episode tested my loyalty. I have no problem with the nation of India. I find their operators very polite but I struggle to understand the accent especially when speaking so quickly. But they follow a script and are tenatious in doing so, they do not understand when to stop and move the call elsewhere - in this case no doubt back to the UK to James. Companies are bringing their call centres back to the UK and so they should. I think it is a massive negative when a large company puts their customers through an experience as I have just had.

Mini rant over,

Nev

3 comments:

Adam said...

When I had a similarly frustrating call with Indian Telecom (the guy gave completely duff information -- I knew more about the product than he did), I had a feedback questionnaire by email a couple of days later. I filled it in, leaving them in no doubt what I thought. If everyone did the same, maybe they'd re-think their call centre policy.

Halfie said...

You don't think they quietly "lose" the negative feedback, Adam?

Lisa said...

I had a difficult experience when I was trying to cancel our Polish worker' mobile phone contract, he was leaving the UK for good and wanted to pay up in full before he departed for good, the first hurdle was to get a non English speaking person to give permission to an Indian lady for me to speak on his behalf.... Well talk about the computer says NO, I tried to explain that his bank account would be closed so no payments could be made after this week, I was passed on and on and at the 11th hour as I was loosing the will to live, she said yes.
The best bit was her last sentence was "Have I handled you enquiry well this morning and sorted out your problem quickly" I nearly fell off the chair laughing.