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The BBC carries an article about call centres returning to the UK. It seems that there has been a consumer backlash against outsourced support centres, with a mere 4% of those surveyed having had a positive experience of one of these.

Quite right too. I have cancelled all my contracts with BT over their abysmal customer service, exacerbated by hours on a call begging that a fault be escalated with them (and not with Microsoft as they stupidly suggested I do - see my letter to BT here for the gruesome details). These call centre staff are on a script, which perhaps works fine when the problem you have is something the script resolves. They are like Microsoft help. Sometimes it does help, but usually you go through trying suggestion after suggestion until you get “Microsoft help was unable to resolve this problem”.

And then, if you are lucky, they will finally escalate your fault. But don’t hold your breath - my experience is that they unstead just forget about you, and when you phone again, the cycle starts over again.

It is not just BT. Wanadoo, Tiscali, and various other companies have put me through this kind of telephone tennis. But we fool ourselves if we think the problem is resolved simply by bringing call centres back to the UK.

The problem is the whole concept of outsourced support and centres. Whether they are in Bombay or Birmingham makes little difference. If the call centre is not in a position to actually resolve your problem then they are just in the way.

Pipex Homecall has UK based customer support, but a look at Their gripe sites shows that people are not enamoured with their customer support either. The company seems to have a policy of deliberately preventing customers from speaking with people who can make real decisions, and the response is stories of people standing in the rain to get a mobile signal whilst they beg, scream and cry for the company to send an engineer to fix their fault!

So I am not holding my breath for great improvements in customer service. My best tip is to patronise smaller comapnies, where customers are important to the service providers. Small is beautiful, so they say.

A few weeks ago I wrote a warning about Pipex Homecall. I received comments here, but I don’t want to turn this blog into a Pipex gripe site. It turns out that there is just such a site I can send potential and existing Pipex Homecall customers to. It is poopex.co.uk.

I am often asked what ADSL provider I would recommend. I usually reply that I have not researched all providers and cannot offer a recommendation, but one service provider is causing such a stir that I felt I need to warn people away from it. That is Pipex Homecall (which is actually not Pipex at all, but Tiscali).

Their deal sounds attractive. £30 per month but with free phone calls and your telephone line rental thrown in. That makes it sound amazingly cheap. Unfortunately the typical length of time before people seem to try and escape the service is about two to three months. Pipex, however, insist on a £300 payment for early contract termination from these disaffected customers.

They claim in their advertising that this is an uncapped service, but the truth of the matter is it is capped at about 1GB per week. If you exceed that amount you are put onto a “naughty pipe” which throttles your speed to about 50Kbps (yes, modem speeds) and you will be denied access to technical support.

This review is typical:

If you ever think of going with this company do some research on its heritage this will lead you to evaluate whether (so-called) cheapest is always best.

I ,and many others have realised that the stick-and-carrot of a cheap deal that gets you locked into a 12 month contract is fine so long as when there IS a problem it can be sorted out, and it can be sorted out easily and cheaply.Then you realise just WHY they have needed to lock you into the contract-there is no way to keep you otherwise,because of their notorious Customer Service.

The company was owned by John Caudwell, who previously owned Singlepoint. Research on Singlepoint ALONE will be enough to put you off them,because he took his same business core values to Homecall when he set it up,as the BBC Watchdog report depressingly tells.

History repeats itself with Home Call.-.It on average takes 3-4 months and repeated calls (0870 numbers which cost you money) to get any issue sorted out,with an average phone call length being half an hour, and 12 phone calls about average. They make it impossible to speak to a Supervisor Manager,or escalate a complaint,despite what their own complaints procedure says.

Typical low point in our relationship- was after having reported a fault, and several phone calls later having to stand outside in the cold to be kept hanging on for 45 minutes on my mobile, ( NO signal indoors) insisting,politely as usual that i speak to a Supervisor.

The CS assistant tried their best (constantly going off the line) to get the Supervisor to speak to me,then told me she was in a meeting,then finally that she had gone home.

www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/watchdog/ reports/services/services_20060404.shtml. Is the Watchdog article.

Search other review sites and read the comments.Will they improve now owned by Pipex?No, its too massive a task.Their Customer service has been no different.The call takers are stillPolite-but then so was Sweeney Todd.

As for the stick and carrot-they beat you with the stick until you become a vegetable.

I thought their deal seemed good-cant wait till I am out of the contract.I will leave others to comment on the “value for money ” and the efficiency of the broadband.

Just report any unresolved issues to BBC watchdog via their email facility

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Homecall__Review_5575773

So if you are looking for broadband service, don’t go with Pipex Homecall.

On 23rd August, Euro1Net shed thousands of its customers when BT wholesale unilaterally withdrew ADSL services to everyone with a euro1net.com domain. Coincidentally we had moved from Euro1Net.com to Euro1Net.broadband just a month earlier following a contention issue on our line, so thus far we were okay.

Today was supposed to be the day that BT released the ADSL lines from that purge to allow customers to reconnect with new ISPs, but Euro1Net continued trading with its other providers, and continued to sign up customers, claiming that the issue with BT concerned a dispute and not an inability to pay.

Well last night, shortly before 5.30pm, our home ADSL line went dead. This morning the support line are simply picking up and hanging up the phone, they are not answering emails, and there is no information about the fault on their network monitoring page.

We can only presume that this fault is related to the last (although we note that when BT cut off service, BT provided a message to indicate what they had done. This loss of service is different).

But because of the concerns over dates, and the other troubles of Euro1Net, we called Ofcom. Ofcom have no information about this current loss of service but will investigate. When we hear more from Ofcom, I’ll post it on this site.

When we signed up for Euro1Net following this debacle with BT, we knew there was a risk of a small ISP going under (and paid on credit card for that very reason!) but it was worth it for the excellent knowledgeable in-houes and UK based technical support. What a pity that our fears about solvency may have been realised.

I would still go to any ISP that offered this quality of technical support, even if it was a little more expensive than the competitors. BT, Wanadoo, Tiscali etc., take note. We won’t be signing up with you.

(Actually we already have a plan B in operation, after the 23rd August announcement. Let’s hope it all works).

I sent the following letter to the BT UK Correspondence Centre 3 times. I never once got an answer. I cancelled my BT subscription, but to re-use my efforts, I offer this sorry tale for your amusement.

Dear Sir/Madam

Re. Fault with BT SMTP Service Affecting Our Account

On or about Thursday 26th January 2006, BT Internet reconfigured their SMTP server service manually or automatically in some manner that caused a loss of service from our BT Internet account (xxxxxxxx.x.xxxxxxx@btinternet.com). We use a variety of laptops, desktop PCs and PDAs to access our account, depending on where we are in the house and what we are doing, and the failure affected all of these devices.

The symptoms of the failure were we could no longer send mail, because the SMTP authentication failed. However, we had not reconfigured SMTP authentication, and the password was clearly fine as we could continue to receive mail from the POP3 service, and use web mail.

Online Support

After waiting for a day or two to see if the problem would correct itself, my wife decided to contact technical support on Sunday 29th January, as she had an email she needed to send. She spent a couple of hours with the technical support to no avail. In this time, they made some suggestions that I think, as an ICT professional, were unacceptable, and you will want to review these issues:

1. At no point did the call centre take on board that this was a fault that had simultaneously affected multiple setups on diverse operating systems. When my wife asked if anything had changed on the mail server, she was adamantly told “no”, despite clear evidence to the contrary, and the fact that the call centre were clearly not in a position to know this.
2. On discovering that my wife was using Microsoft Outlook to read email, she was told that as this was not a supported mailer, she should take the issue up with Microsoft! Now this response annoyed me because
   1. the problem was very clearly not with the mail software,
   2. my wife could easily switch to Outlook Express if that is what was necessary,
3. If you say that you only support Outlook Express, and will not help with problems on any other mailer, then you lock yourself into proprietary Microsoft technologies. You are saying that users of other operating systems, handheld devices, text only mailers and mailers used by people with disabilities cannot access technical support. This is probably in breach of your duties under the disabilities discrimination act, and is certainly bad business sense, as you are saying that there is a huge user base that you do not want as customers. You do not seem to want users of open source software, for instance - despite the fact that your SMTP service is itself the open source qmail SMTP server.
4. Your support staff did not tell my wife what she needed to tell Microsoft. Certainly Microsoft have no interest in a sudden loss of service to the BT Internet mail service, and would send the problem straight back to you. This kind of passing-the-buck is not acceptable from a service that should be attempting to help customers resolve problems.

My wife, on my instruction, transferred to Outlook Express and refused to close the support call. After a while, the call centre asked if we had a firewall enabled. Quite sensibly we do run a firewall in our ADSL router, and the support centre suggested we disable it. I immediately disabled the firewall, and in the meantime established the further information that sending mail still worked from our dial up BT Internet account. However the call centre staff would not take our assurances that the firewall was disabled for granted, and informed us that we must contact our firewall vendor!!! Repeated insistence that the firewall was disabled eventually prompted the call centre to give us a telephone number through which we could escalate the fault.

Telephone Support

I called the support centre on Sunday evening to escalate the fault, and despite my telling the operator that we had been through online support, I was asked all the same questions. Yes, I had (grudgingly) booted my Linux laptop into windows and was running Outlook Express. No, we did not have a firewall running, and so on. At this point I was asked what ADSL modem we were using. I indicated that we had an ADSL router, and your call centre staff told me that the router must have a firewall and I needed to contact my vendor!

At this point, please bear in mind that (a) I had disabled the firewall, (b) the router had been working fine to date, and (c) the problem was failure of authentication, not failure to connect to the SMTP server. Again, this is a pass-the-buck attitude to support that must be dealt with. It is quite unacceptable.

I told your operator firmly (but quietly and politely) that the problem was with the BT SMTP server, and that he needed to escalate the fault - that the fault lay in a failure by the SMTP server to accept our fully resolved broadband IP address as a valid relay domain for our credentials. I reiterated that we had been through the online support process, and that the support centre had already been unable to help, and that the problem should be escalated to a suitable engineer. The operator refused to escalate at this point (some 10 minutes into the call) and continued to offer suggestions to fix the problem. I politely continued working with your staff to try various suggestions.

At one point your operator asked me to connect by hand to the SMTP service. This I did (I told him the port numbers as he started mentioning port 110, which is the POP service. Port 25 is SMTP). We quickly established that my communication was fine and I gave him my ADSL IP address. After many suggestions and many long periods of holding, your operator eventually agreed to escalate the fault some 50 minutes after I had place my call.

It seems to me that all companies I deal with who use outsourced support these days require me to speak to them for about an hour before they will eventually admit to pass on a fault to a technical contact. I am unhappy about this, and you really need to consider a means by which technical people can send technical queries to their peers, without this timewasting filter.

I indicated I would be going to bed at this point, and could the technical support engineer call me in the morning. The operator said he would pass on the message. No call was ever returned.

I would like a call credit for the time spent on this call - particularly as your operator refused to escalate the fault, and also because no call back was ever received.

Email Support

On the afternoon of Tuesday 31st January I used the BT web site to send an email about this fault. Prior to sending this email, on Monday night I spent some time investigating the fault, and discovered the following:

I connected by broadband and captured this SMTP session information: (I have obfuscated the base64 encoded password, but otherwise the session is exactly as seen on the SMTP server):

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP EHLO eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIMEAUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RsalcGdshabi2wLmtJJpzdG9u 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRmsqXQQ= 535 authorization failed (#5.7.0)

The WAN configuration for this connection was:

ppp0 Link encap:Point-Point Protocol inet addr:86.145.210.33 P-t-P:217.32.86.146 Mask:255.255.255.255

According to dig, the IP address 86.145.210.33 resolves as:

22.210.145.86.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host86-145-210-22.range86-145.btcentralplus.com.

I then repeated the experiment with the broadband disabled, and connected via dialup. Here is the chat, which you will note succeeds:

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP ehlo eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIME AUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RlcGsaqhlfdfbdi5wsqasLdsd672 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRdsjkXaQ= 235 ok, go ahead (#2.0.0) ...

The dialup IP/gateway info was:

213.122.53.24/32 gw 213.122.53.24

This IP address resolves to:

24.53.122.213.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host213-122-53-24.in-addr.btopenworld.com.

I sent all of this information with various suggestions in the email. I noted that the problem could be in the way that qmail is building its authsenders file (or PAM equivalent), and pointed out that the problem was that the btcentralplus.com. domain was not being listed against my credentials as a valid relay domain.

I then gave you the key information that would have allowed an engineer to resolve this problem. I wrote:

” It may be that this is because my BT Internet email address pre-existed the broadband connection”.

Other than an automated acknowledgement, no reply was ever received to this email.

Eventual Resolution

As BT were not talking to me, I continued my investigations. I noted that there was no huge outcry on Usenet about the failure of BT’s SMTP service, so I presumed that this problem only affected me or a small user group. I considered what was special about my BT account.

One thing that was special was that we have had a BT dialup account for a very long time. Long enough that we retained the five free email address service from our BT anytime account. Recently BT have extended this service to all customers, but it was a service we already had.

However it occurred to me that the automated registration system may treat my account differently from newer accounts with this service, and that you may have reconfigured your SMTP service to disallow the older accounts, or maybe my credentials were simply damaged in your database and needed refreshing.

I thus “upgraded” my account from the existing “five free email address” service to the exact same service! This will have pushed new versions of my credentials around the BT Internet network, and sure enough after a short pause, the SMTP service started authenticating from our broadband IP address once again.

Conclusion

It is now Friday 3rd February. BT have not followed up on my original fault report, nor on my email query. I have managed to resolve my own problem, but only through an in depth knowledge of how these services work. If we had followed your advice, we would now be talking with Microsoft!

I am extremely unhappy with this experience, and have noted various lessons that I believe BT must learn.

As a BT shareholder I am unhappy that you appear to be turning away a large part of your potential user base through your “outlook express only” policy. I am also unhappy that your failure to address such support issues is presumably turning away other customers. I myself am now considering looking for an alternative ISP.

I would like the following undertakings from BT:

1. To refund my call costs for my support call on Sunday Evening;
2. pass on my resolution of your fault to your call centre as soon as possible, so that others affected by this fault can be told quickly how to resolve it;
3. To address the failures in your technical support centre, to ensure that in future, genuine technical issues can be passed onto someone more knowledgeable more quickly. I would like BT to tell me how they intend to achieve this;
4. To ensure that the failure to return calls and emails is addressed;
5. To provide support for cross platform mailers - e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, and also for text mailers and those used by people with visual difficulties.

I look forward to your considered reply.

Yours faithfully