BT Tech Support Nightmare

Just had the most frustrating call to the BT (British Telecommunications) Tech Support people in India.A customer had phoned me because he was experiencing difficulty setting up his new BT Home Hub. He estimated that over the past 2 days he'd spent more than 4 1/2 hours on the phone trying to resolve the problem. As usual he was paying for the premium calls, was refused a free-phone number and still had no solution. Each time that he called he'd give them his reference number and although his record was showing that he'd called previously and which steps he'd completed in search of a solution, he'd be taken back to the start.
When I arrived, I uninstalled the BT software, unplugged the Hub and started over. The instruction sheet you receive with the Hub is really well set out. Large, lots of pictures and little room for error. I went through the steps as shown:

• Unpack and check the contents
• Connect the power cable Hub
• Connect the ADSL cable to the Hub
• Plug the ADSL cable in to the microfilter and connect to the phone socket
  
• Plug the mains adapter in to a socket and switch on

Now that's straight forward, but it's as far as I got. The next step tells you to wait for 4 lights to illuminate (Power, Broadband, Internet & Wireless). After 2 minutes it's obvious that there is a problem because we only have the power and wireless lights on. You know straight away there is a phone line problem and the best course of action is to check the filters and cables inside the house. After replacing these the Hub is still only showing the two lights so I figure the line is not digital and ask the customer if BT have checked his line. No.

So he gets on the phone to BT again, we're on hold for 10+ minutes and are finally through to an operator. The customer tells the BT woman that he wants her to talk to me about the problem. I don't think at this point he could go through with the conversation and keep his cool. I explain the problem we're having and ask if they could check the line? No. She wants to go back to the start so I humor her. Again we get two lights illuminated.

Now this is the part that gets ridiculous. Up to now the instructions have not told us to switch the computer on, not even told us to connect the router to the computer. The operator asks me to switch the PC on. Apparently I have to click START->RUN and type CMD then press ENTER. As I'm being told to type in P... I... N... G... I stop and ask the operator what it is I am going to PING? Ignoring me she continues to give me the IP address of the router. I type it in and happily watch the No Response messages come back on screen.

Finally I get a chance to tell her that we've not got the ethernet cable plugged in and I am scolded and promptly connect the computer to the Hub. Of course this time, we get a response from the routers IP address and we move on to ping the microsoft.com IP address. No response.

Now to cut a long and frustrating story short, we spend a further 20 minutes going around in circles trying to connect to the internet. Finally the operator says that I'm going to be put on hold whilst she does a line check! Finally... another 5 minutes on hold and she comes back to inform me that there IS a fault on the line and it's been raised with the engineers.

Within 24 hours the customer is happy, the fault has been resolved and he's browsing away to his hearts content.

What I don't understand is:

• Why can't operators review customers records when several calls are required to find a solution? Why do they like to treat each call as if it's the first?
• When you have a problem and there's even the remotest possibility of a line fault can't they simply check your line?
• Why can't they give you a free-phone number at the end of the first call? Or is this where they make some of their massive profits?
• Why can't the operators be trained to have some manners and listen to customers? Sometimes you may as well be listening to a recorded message.
• When a customer has been off-line for 2 days and made multiple calls to get a resolution, can't it be flagged up as urgent and BT take the initiative to contact the customer?

The good news is that BT have promised to refund the cost of the calls although I imagine this will not be a straightforward process. I wish I could run a business were my customers paid for me to resolve my mistakes.