The Trusty Servant

All three of my phone lines have been down for about 40 hours. The BT fault and help lines have no information except that there has been a major incident in East London. A search on Google News brings up:

Tens of thousands of phone lines remain disconnected after underground cables were damaged in east London, BT has said the problem was caused by a tunnel accident during maintenance work on Sunday night. The service to more than 30,000 customers in Stratford and Ilford has since been restored, but many are still cut off. A spokesman said the emergency services had been reconnected using “alternative methods”. He added: “It’s a very complex problem because of the nature of the tunnel. “It’s a deep underground tunnel. The work needed to restore those customers is very complex. “BT’s engineers are working around the clock to restore service as quickly as possible. BT would like to apologies to all impacted customers. “Given the complexity of the damage suffered, it is not yet possible to accurately predict when all services will be restored.” Broadband was also disrupted but BT predicted fewer than 500 customers remain affected. The damage was caused by a third-party contractor.

That sort of fits, except that my phones went dead on Saturday afternoon, not Sunday evening. But it is certainly correct that the broadband works fine on one of the same lines that is dead for phone calls. So presumably the damaged cable was a voice trunk line to the exchange. I am still slightly puzzled because I thought everything was being moved across to packet-switching, so that there would be no distinction between voice cables and internet cables. But maybe it is a slow change-over that has not reached the Canary Wharf area yet.

But the strange part is how utterly clueless BT is about providing information. The BT engineers are fairly good. Whenever I stop in the street to chat to one of the relatively lowly engineers who fiddle with roadside boxes, they seem fairly alert, sensible and hardworking. But the call-centre staff are clueless. They appear to recruit minimum wage staff and give them almost no training except a few simple scripts.

Of course, utilities like BT have to deal with all sorts and conditions of men, including the illiterate and extremely stupid. They want to deal with silly queries with the minimum cost. So infuriating call centres are here to stay. What is odd is that they do not do a range of other things which would be cheap, but welcome to infuriated consumers.

For example, why can’t they put something like the Worthing Herald article quoted above onto the BT site?

Or, getting slightly more advanced in terms of set-up, but still extremely low cost, why cannot they provide an email list service so that they email anyone who has subscribed to the list with news of major problems (rather like the Transport for London email lists). Getting slightly more sophisticated, why not email those whose phones are directly affected (or likely to be so) by a disaster?

Similarly with text messages instead of emails.

The basic problem seems to be that there is more focus on reducing cost than on improving service.