After a phone bill the size of the national debt I decided it was time to, belatedly, take action. Here in the UK BT charge a premium on most services and mugs like me pay them. Well, no longer. I’d heard good things about One.Tel so decided to try their international call package. I tried to sign up on the web but it told me that I may already have an account and to call customer services.
Oh dear.
Three and a half minutes of infuriating hold musak later I was through to a real life human being. I gave him our phone number, my name and had to tell him three times that I didn’t have a password because I didn’t have an account. I was, however, keen to sign up to their service and give them lots of money. This, I think, rather bewidered our highly paid customer service professional who had obviously never encountered this scenario with a customer before.
Which was a little puzzling.
After a couple of minutes of confused tippy tapping and muttering I was informed that there was already an account for that phone number. Sure, I said, that would have been the previous tenant because this is a rental property.
This is where they lost my money, so pay attention.
Oh, he said, in that case we will send you a form and you can fill it in and send it back to us with your last two phone bills and a covering letter. I said no, I would like you to sort it out or I will take my business elsewhere. Sorry sir, he said, its the forms for you. The call swiftly ended.
It’s not my problem that they have an existing account (which will have been inactive for nearly two years, because that’s how long we have been here). The customer experience is awful. They should have been able to open me an account and charge me for any phone calls from now on. But no, the paper work fascists had been at work and I had to do their jobs for them.
Which brings me to the purpose of this post.I still don’t want to give all of my money to BT, so does anyone have any suggestions of a decent long distance operator?
