BT.com online orders fall off a cliff

For a variety of reasons I made a decision to switch our home phone service back to BT from Bulldog, now owned by Pipex. Having looked on BT.com, the reconnection process appeared painless and so I placed my order online with BT and immediately received an order confirmation with a reference number.

Having heard nothing 5 days later, I was curious as to when the cutover might take place and so began an unexpected phone tour of BT call centres. Sadly, there was no trace of any order or even recognition of the order reference on the email, so each department passed me onto another team who may recognise the order/ref. Now, you may think this a one-off glitch but as it happens I placed a separate order for my parents phone and there was no trace of their order either.

I was astonished that a major sales channel for BT [online] with considerable prominence on their web site simply failed to operate and wonder whether Jillian G Lewis, Customer Services Director in whose name order acknowledgements are issued, is curious as to why online sales figures are so poor. You'd certainly imagine that basic testing of such processes takes place and regression testing is also undertaken. Evidently not.

As a consequence of this, I had to place a new order via phone, but it did leave me with a sinking feeling about what I am signing up to.