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I appreciate it must be really difficult to run a company as massive as BT. But I can’t help feeling, after many bad experiences with them, that there’s a lot of room for improvement with the telecoms giant.

This rant comes as a result of my most recent experience with getting them to install a new BT line into our new offices at 1000 Lakside, North Harbour in Portsmouth. The building is IBM’s previous headquarters which was recently sold to Highcross who spent £13M refurbishing it. The purpose-built building was completed in the late 1970’s, so it’s a well established building, and with a footprint of 72,000 square foot it’s not a small building either.

However, BT, in their infinite wisdom, sent out an engineer on four, yes four separate occasions - the first three attempts of which they either “couldn’t find the building” or ended up going to the wrong building.

The sad thing about this is that I was so desperate that BT got this right the first time round that when I initially ordered the line installation, I said to the guy at BT Local Business that I would actually “pick up the engineer and drive him to the site if there was any doubt about where the line was to be installed”. Maybe I was just asking for it by saying that!

Just to add insult to injury, throughout the course of us waiting for BT to install the line (and fail) we saw no less than about half a dozen different BT engineers attend our office building in the meantime that were servicing other companies needs. Having talked to the engineers that were in, it was evident that there was simply no communication or organisation between the people at BT arranging and instructing the engineers, and the actual engineers themselves. I found it mad, not to mention totally inefficient… And I’m not exactly an eco-warrior either but there could’ve been some serious savings on van emissions.

Nonetheless, we did eventually get BT in after about three weeks of faffing and a lot of my time wasted on the phone asking them where their engineers are. I look forward to giving them a fight over the invoice =)