BT Shoots Itself In The Foot

A tale of a giant telecommunications company which is not moving as fast with the times as their advertising would have you believe. A relative of mine orders a broadband package from BT in the middle of August, this duly arrived but her PC (10 years old) lacked a USB port to connect it.

So a visit to the local high street stores produced a shiny new HP desktop with flat screen monitor running Windows, no prizes for guessing which version of Windows, yes it was Vista. First problem is that the ethernet cable supplied with the BT broadband hub was not long enough and would have required a hole to be drilled in a wall to provide a connection.

Relative and lil' bro' (who was visiting at the time) look at literature supplied with the hub where the BT Voyager 1055 Wireless USB Adapter is identified as being the best thing to buy to create a wireless connection. Relative rings them up, tells them that she has just bought a new computer and wants to connect it via wireless, adapter gets purchased and is delivered on Friday of last week.

Now, I had told her that installing this would be very easy and that she could do it herself, but as a non technical person she delayed for a week until her brother could attend to assist. They insert CD and nothing happens apart from an error message, they look at box for adapter where Windows 2000 and XP are mentioned but not Vista and then ring me.

I check out the sales page for the product and there in the small print at the end is OS Required Windows 2000/XP. Hmm, this is over 18 months since Vista escaped/was released into the wild so I click on the Description down arrow and find a link to Click Here For Vista Drivers.

I explain to them where to go to find the file and what to do with it when they get it, this will require her brother to do it from his functioning internet connection. Up the stakes by telling them this must happen all the time and that they will probably ship the drivers on a CD if you ring up customer services – big mistake.

Not only did they guy she was put through to tell her that this product would never work with Vista he also said that because she had not said that her PC was running Vista she was not eligible for a refund. He went on to dispute her claim that any new PC bought this year would come with Vista installed , claiming that Vista was only for high end machines. He may have been operating out of an Indian call centre, it is the only explanation that I can think of to support his claim.

He did supply the number of the product technical support people but they had knocked off for the weekend by this time. He became flummoxed when she told him that it was possible to download the Vista drivers from their web site if you had a working connection.

I explained to her that the adapter was old stock and that what BT should be doing was removing the shrink wrap, throwing in a Vista drivers CD and a small piece of paper telling customers with a Vista PC to use it.

Not rocket science and I would be very surprised if my relative was the first person to fall down this micro black hole in BT's retail sales “plan” for 2008. It will be interesting to hear what sort of response she gets from the product technical support group.

UPDATE

Tech Support sorted her out with no problems, and even as I write a CD with drivers is on it's way in the post.