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BT Want to Borrow £8.97

Posted by on 24 May 2010, 12:45 am

In a strange twist in my ongoing battles with BT it seems that they have decided they would like to borrow £8.97 from me for the next three months.

The situation is that a year ago I changed my package and the new package includes a discount of £2.99 a month if you agree to be bound by a rolling one year contract. To date everything has been fine and they have deducted the discount from each quarterly bill.

In April they wrote to say that the first year was nearly up and that if I didn’t contact them they would assume I wanted to continue for a further year.  I was happy to continue so did nothing.

I was slightly surprised therefore when the latest bill showed no discount beyond 21st May when the first year ended. So I contacted them to ask what going on, and this is what I was told in response.

I can confirm that the reason the discount has not been applied to your recent bill is because BT wanted to make sure that you where happy to keep the service, therefore this will all be rectified on your next bill in August 19th 2010 and on this bill you will be able to see the adjustments, which will cover the billing period for the 20th May 2010 also.

So basically they are saying that they’re going to take bill me the full price now then refund me on the next bill – essentially they want to borrow £8.97 from me for the next three months so they can earn the interest on it instead of me.

The bit about wanting to make sure I was happy to continue is, of course, complete nonsense. As soon as I allowed it roll over into the second year I was contractually bound to continue with it for that year and I’m sure they would have been very quick to bill me for the rest of the year if I had tried to cancel.

I guess maybe I should consider what interest rate I should apply to my loan to them…

Filed under BT, Fail.
1 Comment

Well Done New Holland Pubishers

Posted by on 21 May 2010, 7:46 pm

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the use of OpenStreetMap in The London Cycling Guide and specifically about the lack of proper credit for the project and its contibutors.

Well I’m delighted to say that today a representative of the publishers posted a comment on that piece apologising and explaining what they’re doing to correct things and to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.

So I think that’s a belated “Well Done” to New Holland Publishers.

http://compton.nu/2010/05/how-not-to-credit-openstreetmap/comment-page-1/#comment-407
Filed under Geo, OpenStreetMap, Win.
2 Comments

User Generated Negativity

Posted by on 21 May 2010, 10:33 am

I was trying to use BT‘s web site to contact them about an issue with my bill and the first page of the contact section includes a little box called “From the forums” which shows recent discussion topics. The titles of those are, of course, chosen by the users that start them which in this case probably didn’t produce the kind of impression BT would like to be giving:

Possibly not the impression BT would want to give

Possibly not the impression BT would want to give

Yes, that’s right, the first discussion listed is titled “Am I really Unlucky or is BT Customer Services really this abysmal?”. From my experience I’d say the answer is yes, it really is that abysmal…

Filed under BT, Fail.
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Crowdsourcing Audit Trail Monitoring (Part 2)

Posted by on 21 May 2010, 10:13 am

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece, inspired by the NHS Summary Care Record system, about the idea of crowdsourcing the monitoring of audit trails.

Today the Open Rights Group has an article about electronic medical records which, talking about the well known case when Gordon Brown’s medical record was accessed improperly, notes an interesting feature of the Scottish system:

Bizarrely enough, I’m slightly reassured by this story: we know about incidents in Scotland only because their Emergency Care Record system is set up to notify patients when their record has been accessed.

Of course it then goes on to say how poorly the English system compares:

In England, you have no idea if your Summary Care Record (SCR) has been accessed or not.

So it turns out that not only can my idea work in theory – it’s actually been tried and has worked in practice.

Filed under Uncategorized.
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A Most Surprising Email

Posted by on 15 May 2010, 6:13 pm

Yesterday I received a most surprising email from Thames Water. The relevant part reads as follows:

As a result of a recent data checking exercise that we have carried out, we have discovered that there was an occasion during the year 2007/08 when we did not respond to an email that you had sent to us. We are really sorry about this.

Under the terms of our Customer Guarantee Scheme, you are entitled to a payment of £30.00 plus an additional goodwill gesture of £10.00 for not making the payment at the time. If you are a Thames Water customer, the payment will be made as a credit to your water services account. If you are not billed for water and wastewater services by us, then we will make the payment by way of a cheque.

Needless to say I was more than a little astonished. I think I have now managed to work out which email they are referring to…

Filed under Win.
1 Comment

How not to credit OpenStreetMap

Posted by on 13 May 2010, 1:02 am

I recently received my copy of The London Cycling Guide by Tom Bogdanowicz, which I bought both because I was interested in the routes it shows and because it uses OpenStreetMap maps throughout. As an example, here’s a part of one of the maps, showing the Isle of Dogs:

The Isle of Dogs from The London Cycling Guide

The Isle of Dogs from The London Cycling Guide

Continue reading ‘How not to credit OpenStreetMap’ »

Filed under Fail, Geo, OpenStreetMap.
6 Comments

Closed With My Agreement?

Posted by on 26 April 2010, 2:54 pm

I think the following quotes from my email exchange with BT speaks for itself. First my email to BT last Thursday:

Whilst this clearly addresses the question of how the second call came to be made after I had been placed on the opt out list, and I am quite happy to accept that explanation, it appears to say nothing about how the first (or indeed the second) call came to be made when my number was registered with the Telephone Preference Service.

Equally it says nothing about why the Complaints Management team were failing to manage my complaint by not replying to my earlier letters.

and in reply from BT I get this:

Following your email, I am now pleased to confirm your complaint has been closed as fully resolved with your agreement.

Strangely enough I don’t remember agreeing to any such thing. I guess I was wrong when I said I was getting somewhere with them…

Filed under BT, Fail.
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Fix Everything Three Ways

Posted by on 23 April 2010, 6:28 pm

Three years ago Joel Spolsky wrote an article on customer service. His first point he called “Fix everything two ways” and it revolved around the idea that when a customer complains you should not only fix their immediate problem but you should also look at how that problem arose and what you can change to stop, or at least reduce the chances of, other people being affected by that type of problem in the future.

I would actually go one step further and say that if a customer complains and you fix their problem, and you then find the underlying cause and fix it for the future, then you should also consider whether that problem has already affected any other customers and whether there is anything you can do to proactively fix it for those customers. Call it “Fixing everything three ways” if you like.

Continue reading ‘Fix Everything Three Ways’ »

Filed under Uncategorized.
1 Comment

Crowdsourcing Audit Trail Monitoring

Posted by on 10 March 2010, 5:40 pm

The Today programme had an interesting piece on the NHS Summary Care Record issue this morning, most notable for Evan Davis’s excellent interview with a representative of Connecting for Health which he opened with the deceptively simple question “Can you tell me how many people will have access to my Summary Care Record”. After a number of attempts not to answer the question the interviewee was eventually skewered when he was forced to admit that there was nothing to stop any member of NHS staff with access to care records anywhere in the country from accessing it.

In fact, he admitted, the only real constraint was the existence of an audit trail that could catch people out. Of course audit trails only work if people are actually reviewing them and are in a position to spot discrepancies and investigate them – in a system the size of the NHS care records system I imagine this will be a task of mammoth proportions and the actual risk of any individual being caught will be negligible.

Continue reading ‘Crowdsourcing Audit Trail Monitoring’ »

Filed under Uncategorized.
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Response to OS Consultation

Posted by on 3 March 2010, 5:42 pm

I finally got around to writing my response to the government consultation on releasing Ordnance Survey data – you can read my formal response but the summary is basically that yes I would like them to release some data but there are serious issues around some of the details such as the proposed license.

Filed under Geo, OpenStreetMap.
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