I’ve started to run into problems with BT.
At no point during the ordering process was it clearly explained how the billing system works, or how you’d be able to move the payment date of a direct debit to a day that’s more convenient for you.
BT have this thing called Whole Bill Payment and Monthly Payments. Whole Bill Payments is exactly that, but it seems that once the order has been fulfilled (the line activated/broadband goes live), the bill is generated the next day and 8 days later they collect the money. The billing date and, consequently, the Direct Debit date, cannot be moved.
With a Monthly Payment, you get your bill quarterly(!) but is paid each month in instalments. The problem with this approach is that if, like me, you’ve paid the annual line rental up front in advance, you may end up paying a little more.
God help you if you want to try and talk to somebody at BT. The 150 service is the most horrific customer service experience I have ever experienced. It’s inconsistent. Although it initially uses voice recognition, you still have to revert to pressing 1 or 2 before proceeding to the next set of options. The voice recognition is awful. And you can’t keep pressing # to get out of it either.
End up a particular set of options, you MIGHT be able to press # and the system gives you an option to speak to operator. But more often than not, you’ll go straight back to the start of the whole thing and have to suffer the voice recognition system again. And again.
I will admit that billing aside, the Home Hub 5 and the phone service are absolutely fine. But the inability to quickly get hold of a human being at a telecommunications company without first dealing with brain dead loopy automatons first just makes me want to scream.
I’ve paid BT over £200 up front for the service and I can’t even get some reassurance that going forward with future payments that I am able to rearrange the billing date and DD collection at a date that’s suitable for me.
I really dislike this convoluted billing system that BT use. Sky allows me to change the billing date and DD collection accordingly – and online too. Sky went out their way during the whole order process to explain what was happening.
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