BT.com online orders fall off a cliff Monday, June 16, 2008
For a variety of reasons I made a decision to switch our home phone service back to BT from Bulldog, now owned by Pipex. Having looked on BT.com, the reconnection process appeared painless and so I placed my order online with BT and immediately received an order confirmation with a reference number.
Having heard nothing 5 days later, I was curious as to when the cutover might take place and so began an unexpected phone tour of BT call centres. Sadly, there was no trace of any order or even recognition of the order reference on the email, so each department passed me onto another team who may recognise the order/ref. Now, you may think this a one-off glitch but as it happens I placed a separate order for my parents phone and there was no trace of their order either.
I was astonished that a major sales channel for BT [online] with considerable prominence on their web site simply failed to operate and wonder whether Jillian G Lewis, Customer Services Director in whose name order acknowledgements are issued, is curious as to why online sales figures are so poor. You'd certainly imagine that basic testing of such processes takes place and regression testing is also undertaken. Evidently not.
As a consequence of this, I had to place a new order via phone, but it did leave me with a sinking feeling about what I am signing up to.
posted by John Wilson @ 11:49 AM Permanent Link
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1 Comments:
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At 4:09 PM,
Hawkeye said...
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What a curiously antiquated concept of British business you have. You expect to place an order with a large organisation and you expect them a) To care? b)To do something about fulfilling your request? c)Not to send you a bill when they have not done either a) or b)? After all what better way to maximise return than to sign people up for a service, start charging them and not provide it? On top of that they have had you using the phone service because "It's good to talk". Oh wait, that was when they still cared about customers. Still be thankful they are not like your bank?
