2012-01-24

No such thing as 7 hours fix

Our favourite telco offer a service that is a 7 hour fix for broadband. It costs extra money, as you would expect. We have not yet used that service.

Now, for some time we have said that any fault, even if on the normal 40 hour fix, or 20 hour enhanced care level, if they fail to meet that, should be treated as a 7 hour fix expensive fault. After all they are already in breach of the agreement and they have the resources (the engineers for the 7 hour fix) to fix things...

Tonight I had an interesting echat - a simple matter of a faulty line still not fixed. The engineer was booked for today but no-show. Engineer lied saying he contacted the end user to confirm it would not be tomorrow... Lying for any sort of gain being a criminal offence under the Fraud Act. They committed a crime, as I see it. They knowing lied for their own gain. The police should be involved.

Now, on an extensive echat with our favourite telco, Alok confirmed that there was absolutely no way an engineer could come out to fix this in the next 7 hours. No way at all...

Adrian Kennard (19:07:17):
None,. so the 7 hour fix service you offer is a lie, yes?
Adrian Kennard (19:07:25):
You could not meet that under any circumstances?

Alok xxxxx (19:09:34):
I am afraid so, at this time we cannot deploy an engineer, Adrian.

What can I say - that means the service for 7 hour fix is a lie, a fraud, criminal.

I await their explanation on this matter.

And (as I said in the echat), good luck to Alok in his next job.

Just to clarify - they offer a 40 hour fix service. They offer a 7 hour fix service. But surely, 33 hours in to the 40 hour fix service it is then a 7 hour fix service? That is the very definition, is it not?

3 comments:

  1. Do they not have some small print in the terms that allows them to wriggle out of it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Always - they have an SLA which means paying some small amount if they do not meet it.

    TBH this is me pushing them. They have 40 hour fix, 20 hour fix for more money, and 7 hour fix for lots of money.

    However, I am trying to get them to put as much effort in to a 40 hour fix fault, 33 hours in, as they do for a 7 hour fix fault. After all, at that point, they are the same target.

    Hence my asking them if they will deploy an engineer, and then asking specifically if even on 7 hour fix service would they.

    I was expecting them to say yes, so I could say "well, this fault only has 7 hours until the agreed SLA, so deploy the engineer", and was surprised when they said no!

    ReplyDelete
  3. As you say Adrian, the real issue [for BT] is the amount of compensation they have to pay for not fixing within the SLA.

    I worked at a now tax payer owned bank and BT would offer SLA's with 2 and 4 hours guaranteed fix - didn't make sense but if you looked at the compensation it was probably cheaper to pay this than throw the effort req'd to really fix the fault within the time periods.

    They would obviously try but on certain faults I suspect they realised that the amount they'd spend trying to fix it within 2/4 hours would not make commercial sense (why am I reminded of the A x B x C line from Fight Club when I write these things)

    ReplyDelete

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