Customer Care - you've got to be joking!

For 19 days now, my Mum’s been without a phone. As she’s house-bound, it’s her only real means of connecting with neighbours, friends and family. She depends on her neighbours for any number of little jobs – an outside door needs jammed shut, a light bulb needs changed. She talks to her sister every day on the phone, and spends lots of time chatting to friends about all the things one chats to friends about. Mum lives in Scotland. My brother and I live in Wales. The phone’s our regular means of keeping in touch. My Dad died just over a year ago. He was my Mum’s carer. Since his death, she’s had surgery on her spine and gets about the house using a rolling trolley. She has stairlift. The bathroom is upstairs. In all of this, her main aim has been to stay in her own home, and remain independent. She has carers who call twice a day. To keep her safe, and feeling secure she wears a pendant alarm round her neck, night and day. One press of the button and a box in the living room calls a social services care line. If the person can’t hear Mum, they immediately send someone out to investigate. Without the phone, this doesn’t work. Mum’s phone contract is with Plusnet. The line is owned by BT and maintained by Openreach. All three of these organisations are part of the same company, BT. Since this distressing saga began, I’ve had dealings with people in all three organisations who could barely be bothered. I’ve also had dealings with people who were keen to help, and clearly doing what they could to shift an enormous weight of inter-organisational inertia. After more than two weeks of emails thanking me for my patience, and earnest tweets assuring me that people were ‘chasing the problem’, I crumbled and called a good friend who works at a senior level for BT. As a result of this call I was able to contact the Director of BT Scotland directly. He passed our complaint on to a small team of people charged with resolving ‘high level complaints’. We muttered darkly about what it would be like if we didn’t know ‘people who know people’. Steve, who was now charged with resolving the matter, was horrified that it had taken so long, to achieve so little. Forty-eight hours after he first got in touch, he called again to say, that he was still waiting for a reply to his email stressing the urgent need to put some sort of temporary line in place, in order that Mum’s alarm could be reinstated. He’d put the information about Mum’s health in red capital letters, he assured me. He sounded defeated. I’d just had a call from Mum, sounding slightly giddy, it has to be said, telling me that at eleven in the morning, her stair-lift had stopped working while she was at the top of the stairs. Her new mobile was downstairs. She’d somehow manoeuvred herself onto the top step and gone down the stairs on her bottom. Later that afternoon, the stair-lift company had called to repair the lift and she was once again able to get about her home. It feels like the closest of shaves. As I write, the situation remains unresolved. Even the highest level of internal complaint resolution has failed to produce prompt and appropriate action. This suggests that something is very wrong indeed within BT/Openreach/Plusnet. As ever, it is the most vulnerable who are placed at risk. I’ll keep you posted.