I am emailing to express my complete disgust in bt's business broadband service. The company seems to have no idea how businesses work. We were encouraged to upgrade to business super fast broadband and run 2 computers, a printer., cameras and critically our card terminal through broadband.
Twice a year we send out 5000 letters to our customers informing of them about our new workshop schedule - over 30 workshops for 8 people.
These workshops are very popular and we expect to take at least £8000.00 during the week. We arranged with Royal Mail to send these letters and franked them to be collected today, Friday 15 July. These will arrive on Saturday but mostly on Monday and the shop will be like a call centre.
All would be well but on Tuesday evening, 12 July but engineers managed to connect our broadband to another customer cutting our broadband service completely. Most importantly our card terminal wouldn't work on Wednesday. I was in London having a serious eye operation but my staff manager reported the fault. Despite explaining that everything runs through our broadband and that we can't take money without it, we were designated an engineer for a weeks time (a priority booking!!)
I was told on Thursday and I spent an hour on my mobile in London first of all trying to get a response from bt and then trying to make the call centre understand the critical nature of this week. We would lose at least 3000 pounds on Monday alone if we can't make card payments.
The solution offered was to purchase an EE dongol. Speaking to my technical engineer, he explained that this wouldn't make the card terminal work.
He came again to the shop today and managed to install his own wireless system as a temporary solution.
We're keeping our fingers crossed that this keeps working until Tuesday when hopefully the engineer will be able to cure the fault.
We are unable to download because the broadband speed is very slow. I actually had to go home today to use my home but broadband to log the 4700 letters to Royal Mail online account otherwise we would lose our hard worked discount of a couple of hundred pounds.
I will obviously making a large claim to bt after we are hopefully back online. I just find the whole lack of urgency unbelievable and will be informing Oftcom about this matter. Our cash flow depends on this week and such disruption to business is what causes businesses to fail.
As a BT shareholder as well as a customer I am a very happy customer.
