Letter of the week

Having been with Onetel/Talktalk for more than 20 trouble-free years, they were, unfortunately, unable to provide me with faster broadband now that fibre is in our village. BT wouldn’t let them have access to the exchange, I believe. A telephone call to BT on July 31 resulted in an (initially) helpful conversation. They would do all the necessary paperwork and transfers, a BT Openreach engineer would pitch up in two weeks’ time to do the necessary and, yes, we could keep our existing telephone number.

An appointment confirmation pinged almost immediately to my inbox. Two days before the engineer was due to arrive, another email arrived saying that they had had to cancel and rearrange. It was then, quite by accident, that I discovered that they had unilaterally changed our phone number. The situation since then has been truly appalling – rearranged appointments (four of them), all cancelled a couple of days before the supposed visit. Calls to the call centre in India were simply futile with staff there merely reading from prepared scripts and having no power to actually do anything. Calls back to the original sales office simply resulted in being transferred back to India.

I did notice, however, that all the emails/letters were signed by a “Libby Barr”, managing director, Consumer Customer Care. I was rather suspicious that this was a creation of an over-imaginative marketing department but, after a happy hour searching, found an email address for her (or it). To my amazement, I got a reply from her and was put in contact with the Executive Level Complaints team who are based in England. They arranged to send someone within a few days but it was cancelled again. I now have a date of September 24 which means that, if they turn up, it will be more than seven weeks since we lost our telephone number.

I have yet to meet anyone (they must exist, surely?) who has a good word to say about BT – my experience of them is that they are massively incompetent at best, or proficient liars at worst. They abuse their monopoly position and have an aloof arrogance and insouciance that would make even Marie Antoinette blush. If I could rerun the clock, I would definitely not have switched my supplier and remain baffled why anyone would want to work for or be associated with such a company. They are a national disgrace.

DR MARTIN HAMER, Marlboroug,h Road Burbage