Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

[#1]

Doing you proud, what a laugh.
We are moving home, originally at the end of this month, but due to delays in the process, this has now turned into next month. We had originally arranged to move our services to our new home today, but informed home moves of the change in date and got this confirmed via email and ticket.
Just after 5PM today, all our services went dead. After waiting on hold for 30 minutes on my mobile phone, I find out that you have moved our activation at our new address to the end of next month, but somebody has forgotten to move the deactivation at our current address, so everything has been terminated. As it is Friday, we are not getting our phone line back till Monday and our internet has to be reordered, which can't be started till we get our phone back on Monday, so heaven knows when we will have that back.
After being without internet for 4 days last month, also because of an error on your side of things, this is our limit. We will be cancelling all our services with you and moving elsewhere and you can expect a hearty complaints letter.
Some of the worst customer service I've ever received and one hell of a joke to boot.
Good luck with your customers, we won't be among them much longer.

[#2]

Hi michaeldendulk,
I'm very sorry to hear of the issues you've experiencing regarding your house move.
I've had a look into this and can see that the re-provide of your services was initiated on Friday the 25/04/2014 and your phone order has now completed so you should be able to your phone service in your current property. We will be placing your Fibre order in the next 24 hours once the systems update to reflect Fibre as available on your line (after a line is re-started it can take up to 24 hours for the systems to update to show that we can go ahead with a Fibre order). As you previously had the Fibre service installed you should not require an engineers visit to the property as the engineer should only have to complete external work without visiting the property. We can only do this if you have kept the BT OpenReach modem, can you confirm that you have this? If you don't then we would have to book an engineer to attend the property which means that someone will need to be in the property to allow the engineer access for this.
I can only apologise that the agent that you spoke to to delay the orders for your new property did not delay the order to cease your services in your current property as well. I completely understand that you wish to cancel your services all together and I can confirm that we've received your complaint on Ticket: 84776971
Please confirm if you've still got the BT OpenReach modem on either this thread or on Ticket: 84774070 and we can arrange for the appropriate order to be placed.

[#3]

I can confirm we DO still have all the BT equipment in place, but as I type this our phone line IS NOT working correctly yet, we can call out, but incoming calls are not getting through.

[#4]

What do you get?
Ringing tone but no ring?
No tone, just silence?
Unobtainable tone?
Or something else?

[#5]

Other, like the engaged tone, but then longer 'beeps' with a higher tone with the length of the beep and the silence between the next beep being the same. Gives 3 of these beeps and then goes completely silent. Both handsets are ready to receive calls, they are not off the hook and as we can call out, I would assume that means there are no problems with the wires etc.

[#6]

Michael,
Possibly a dumb question - has call divert been setup on the line?

[#7]

Have you tried calling the test number 17070 to verify the number?

[#8]

Seems HP has hit the nail on the head, they have changed our phone number, brilliant, just brilliant. Only told them on the phone we didn't want to keep the phone number WHEN WE MOVED, as we are moving away from BT to Virgin.
So nice when people don't bother to listen to what they're being told...
Better start making sure everybody has our mobile numbers...

[#9]

Could be miswired, you need to check what number has been allocated according to PlusNet.  

[#10]

Hi michaeldendulk,
I've just had a further look into this and yes, it seems the agent you spoke to on Friday didn't re-start your phone line with your old number and allocated a new number instead. This is because your old number was still being processed on the order for your house move. Now that the order is cancelled I have requested that we renumber your line back to your old number. This should complete in the next 24 hours and once it's complete we'll place your Fibre order. I'm very sorry for the issues caused by this.

[#11]

Linn,
Clearly the priority is to get the user back on air again, however I suggest there needs to be a process drains-up on this one in order to limit the possibility of it happening again.  Granted it is an odd-ball situation, but a few balls have been dropped here.
1. Customer requested deferral of the house move date - target services got deferred but current service termination did not - why?
2. In seeking to sort matters out, re-instatement sort to provision a new line rather than deal with (reverse out) the cessation of the old line - why and why was the user not informed of the challenges / alternative course of action taken?

Findings should be input into the new provisioning system design.  I would have expected intrinsic links between existing service and new service planning / management.  Sure under the covers there might be separate activities, but within the CMS they should have been joined up to ensure continuity of service.

Cheers,
Kevin

[#12]

HI Kevin,
I agree that the priority is to get the OP back online.
I'll quote your questions and my answers will be below:

Quote

1. Customer requested deferral of the house move date - target services got deferred but current service termination did not - why?

The new Provisioning system should stop things like this from happening in the future, however, in this particular instance it was down to human error as the advisor that the OP spoke to made a mistake and didn't change the date on the cease order. This is manually changed on the order and unfortunately they didn't change the cease date when they changed the provide date for the new property. This has been fed back internally to ensure this advisor doesn't make the same mistake in the future.

Quote

2. In seeking to sort matters out, re-instatement sort to provision a new line rather than deal with (reverse out) the cessation of the old line - why and why was the user not informed of the challenges / alternative course of action taken?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this? When the OP called up on the 25th the advisor they spoke to placed the order to re-activate the stopped line at their current property and this takes 24 working hours to complete. As the 25th was a Friday this didn't complete until Monday the 28th. Unfortunately the number that was assigned to the line was not the OP's previous number so I placed the order to re-number the line back to their old number. Re-activating the stopped line was the fastest way to get the OP's phone service activated. If we would've opted for a new line to be installed this would've delayed the service becoming active as it would depend on engineer availability.

[#13]

Linn,
Thank you for taking the time to give a comprehensive reply - which was more than I expected - "lessons have been learnt and the new provisioning system will prevent this happening" would have been enough.  Given the detailed response, I note...
1. If one agent can make this mistake, any agent could make this mistake, so feed back should go to all agents - when going X please do not forget to do Y at the same time
2. May be it is semantics, but surely the process which "re-activates the stopped line" should by default use the same number?  If not then is there is an additional activity to be performed which got missed?  Getting a new number seems like the consequence of a "new provision" rather than a "re-activate" process.  I suspect that dealing with BTOR's back end systems is akin to putting your hand in a nest of vipers at times?
It is really good to learn that the new provisioning system will have logic interlocks which will prevent this process issue happening again.
Cheers,
Kevin

[#14]

I shall do the same with your response:

Quote

1. If one agent can make this mistake, any agent could make this mistake, so feed back should go to all agents - when going X please do not forget to do Y at the same time

The feedback process is there to feedback on specific advisors when they've not followed protocol/processes correctly. In this instance the advisor made a mistake which resulted in a negative outcome hence why we've fed back on this. Everyone is aware what the correct process is, it just so happens that in this instance the advisor forgot. I'm sure we can all appreciate that sometimes mistakes happen and we can all be a bit forgetful at times, I am in no way excusing what the advisor did, I am merely stating that in this instance there wouldn't be a necessity to feedback on all agents.

Quote

2. May be it is semantics, but surely the process which "re-activates the stopped line" should by default use the same number?  If not then is there is an additional activity to be performed which got missed?  Getting a new number seems like the consequence of a "new provision" rather than a "re-activate" process.  I suspect that dealing with BTOR's back end systems is akin to putting your hand in a nest of vipers at times?

As I stated in my original post to the OP regarding the re-number -

Quote

the agent you spoke to on Friday didn't re-start your phone line with your old number and allocated a new number instead. This is because your old number was still being processed on the order for your house move.

Basically, their old number was allocated to the new provision order for their new property and the order was still open at the time that the advisor placed the order to re-activate the line at their current property so they had no option but to re-start the line with a random number.
Once the new Provisioning system is in place it should eradicate many of the issues we're seeing at the moment.

[#15]

If the customer was going to have a new number temporarily they should be informed of that, it doesnt look like they were.