To disconnect the phone of the head of BT customer services...

[squeezed]

...for no reason just like they have done to me. DH requested upgrading our broadband to unlimited so that I can watch Netflix. I'm 29 weeks pregnant and having a tough time of it. Instead, BT took this to mean, please disconnect our phone line, then reconnect it with a new number, then send the original number back to sky, then tell DH to contact sky to sort out retrieving it himself.
I would scream but it might make me vomit (HG) or pace around but I have SPD and I can't move fast on crutches. Therefore disconnecting their phone line appears to be my only option.

I hate BT. I was with them for only a short time, but it was long enough for me to realise that they are pretty useless, and when things go wrong it's impossible to get through to them to talk to anyone (unless things have changed).

I'm with Sky now. I'm paying less with Sky, for broadband, phone and TV, than I was paying BT for just phone and broadband. Rarely does anything go wrong, but if it does their customer service is first class.

You don't sit on the phone pressing buttons and listening to horrible music because you are answered by a person who puts you through to the relevant department, if they're busy, they will call you back.

Every person I've ever spoken to at Sky has been incredibly helpful - maybe I've just been lucky, but I think it's just the way it is.

A few months ago my Broadband disappeared - nothing to do with Sky, someone tried to fix the problems with my laptop after I installed windows 10 (that's a whole thread by itself) and lost everything.

Got onto their technical department and a very patient, helpful man got it sorted out for me. It took some time as everything had to be more or less reinstalled so we were on the phone for some time but we got there in the end. All it took was one telephone call.

bt are the worst! We recently phoned them to switch our service to a new house...then had to call back because sale fell through. Specifically clarified 'So you are definitely not going to cancel the service at our old property now, because we are still living there.' 'Yes we understand, definitely won't cancel it, wait to hear from you about house move, all services same until you contact us again...' Day of original move comes...guess what happened! Took 3 weeks and being passed to what felt like every person in India before we got phone and internet back up, and that was only when we contacted the Chief exec in desperation.

We also got letters addressed to our house, e.g. Dear Mr Honeysuckle Cottage (?!?!)

There's a reason they've won the worse customer service award twice in three years:

www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-3396333/The-winner-wooden-spoon-BT-voted-telecom-giant-having-worst-customer-service-Britain.html

Also won worse call centre awards...

BT are a fucking nightmare please someone link this thread to their Twitter or Facebook page!

I can't believe the extent of their poor customer service. We've not been a customer for a year yet and this will be the third complaint. Firstly they messed up our order so we're chasing cashback still. Also they said we'd used nearly one month of broadband use in a day, when we were away on holiday! No wonder they get awards for poor customer service.
BT said today that we'll have our number back by midnight, but they said that earlier in the week so I'm not holding my breath!

I'm still waiting for my £500+ refund from BT for the money they took from my bank account after I had switched to Sky. I honestly doubt that I will ever get it back.

Long ago I contemplated targeting the fat cats of BT, and making them suffer not being able to use the phone lines and internet(No idea what we are paying for half the time), and I realised none of them would ever rely on a phone line, they will all have satellite link and/or cable.

Living rurally you get ripped off everyday by BT.

And no they haven't sorted it out FFS.

Yadnbu

I have to say it's bloody annoying if people complain straight to the chief exec BUT if you've tried to complain to customer services and getting no joy then go for it. I work in customer service for a company that actually deals well with complaints but have experienced the shit of by openreach and Sky myself so feel your pain and know how difficult it is to get through to someone who has the power to fix anything (where I work we're pretty empowered to fix things that we've messed up... Because, yknow, it's the companies fault not the customers)

Email Libby Barr

Twitter is shit and useless. Customer service is a joke - it's like the blind leading the mad.

I emailed Libby Barr here - after googling her email address

I then got my own dedicated person to sort out the total horlicks. She had her own email address/mobile number and landline. It was bliss and she sorted everything out in two days. They also sent me two extra remote controls when I said I thought my two toddlers had hidden one of ours

Before that, it was a Kafka-esque nightmare. It felt like I was being gas-lighted by their customer service team

Currently drafting complaints to Libby Barr and Gavin Patterson. I've now been told that the initial order "failed". This means that every bit of information we've been told in the last week has been false.
Totally unacceptable.

Email is [email protected]

BT are genuinely awful, they billed me for 6 months after I had closed my account. Everymonth they promised they would stop and refund me, every month they took the direct debit again. I had to get the bank to sort it through direct debit guarantee.

Then they came after me as I "owed" them the money I had stopped. Emailing ceo was only thing to finally stop it.

Well they did finally give us broadband as a new customer, 4 full days after disconnecting our current one. We are now on Infinity and I think the service is as slow if not a little bit slower.

And today just a week after being a new customer they've written to us to sat they're sad we're leaving and we owe them £50

glogirl They really haven't got a clue what they are doing. Also speaking to them just seems to given different, and often false information. I also haven't noticed an improvement in speed with changing to infinity.
I hope you get it sorted. I was on the phone for an hour today getting transferred between different departments.

I have dealt with various organisations in this country and abroad since the mid 1970s.

Trust me, no one has gotten close to the GPO/British Telecom (as 'twas)/BT by a long chalk. And that includes the French government !

BT took so much unauthorised money from my account I ended up having to go the Ombudsman after 4 months of arguing.

The BT queue at the Ombudsman's office must be quite long, because that was nearly 2 years ago and I have not heard back yet.

I will NEVER use BT again, but they still buggered up the line I have with someone else by digging it up to see if fibreoptic was a possibility for the area, cutting through it, filling the hole back up and pissing off for the next 3 weeks. You can never escape them < weeps >

I now also want to join OP in pulling BT's plug. Phoned them to possibly move my broadband to them - my land line is already BT and has been for fifteen years.

After 40 minutes of mostly delightful hold music, they tell me I have no phone line. They also tell me this means I can't go to any other provider either. After agreeing I do have a line as I'm speaking to them on it and they take money for it on a quarterly basis - I'm told nothing more can be done today; Goodbye.

Complaint to Libby Barr and complaint to BT are both in. Another 2 hours today and I'm assured, yet again it will be resolved in 48 hours. In the mean time I've rung around the various medical appointments I have in relation to my pregnancy to check they haven't been moved. I wish I lived closer to the Bt HQ because I would turn up as a heavily pregnant and hormonal woman on crutches.

When moving house a while back, I thought I'd be organised and tell BT in advance the date I wanted the phone turned off, 3 weeks from date of phone call. This was of course interpreted as turn off phone NOW and so was left without landline and therefore internet in the weeks just prior to moving when I needed to contact everyone and everyone needed to reach me. Long conversations with useless customer service resulted in them telling me they could restore a landline but with a different number! as in the few hours between some idiot pushing the wrong button and my realisation that something was very wrong, my phone number (that I'd had for over 20 years) had been returned to some great register in the sky and could no longer be retrieved. Will never deal with them again.

They rang me today regrading the email we sent about our email service.

4 minutes later they realised they'd called the wrong person.

Our service keeps dropping so I'm still not happy.

I agree they are just awful. We've spent hours trying to sort out problems with them. Their engineers don't turn up, they don't reply to e-mails, don't ring when they promise too, etc. We were assured last time we tried (about 2 weeks ago) that they would open a complaint as we requested and we'd hear from them

Weirdly the BT shares I hold seem to do quite well. I have no idea how?!

Only 48 hours? A friend of mine is now on week 8 of no broadband, phone or tv. Plusnet!

I had 6 months of either no broadband, slow (dial up like speed)broadband or no broadband AND no telephone line. BT insisted with all of the 5 engineer visits that the problem had been fixed. Each visit the engineer would tell me that I would notice a change within 24 hours. After 6 months I decided to cancel and wrote a strongly word complaint. BT's response was that they had kept up their end of the contract because they only guarantee one device at a time, at speeds of no lower than 3mps and that device had to be hard wired to router. I wasn't even getting 0.03mps and I needed phone and BB working as I worked from home.

I moved to Virgin and now I get excellent speeds. I've cancelled my Sky and stream Netflix, Amazon Prime and NowTV with no problem at all.

I also cancelled our BT phone line because it we kept getting an intermittent fault and BT did nothing about it. When DH called BT to cancel the phone line they tried to sell him BT infinity. He just laughed and said BT were unlikely to ever have another penny of his money.

What awful experiences. It's ridiculous how terrible the customer service is and how slow they are at getting anything sorted, if at all.
After emailing Libby Barr I'm told someone will be in touch by Monday. It seems that there are different levels of complaint with one being where it is completely disregarded, like our outstanding one that will go to ombudsman, and the one that has now been opened.
It seems that BT just hope that customers get bored and don't pursue issues rather than sort them out. We'll be leaving when the contract ends.

All of these tales are so familiar. I left my previous job largely because it involved dealing with BT customer services on behalf of our vulnerable elderly clients. I almost lost the will to live.

I also came on here to ask for positive alternatives to use at home, but at the time, no one could recommend anyone. Noting down plusnet's name for the next time I need to move.