EE Failures – the Saga Continues

EE, having promised to phone between 12 and 3 today, failed to do so, wasting yet another half day of the DeliveryDemon’s time. This company is demonstrating quite unashamedly that it has no intention of providing the service being paid for, or any other form of customer service.

Telecomms is part of any country’s national infrastructure these days, and an essential utility for everyday living. People deprived of an effective telecomms service are being cut off from some of life’s essentials. The DeliveryDemon has decided to see if those paid to represent the interests of the public are actually prepared to take action when an infrastructure provider is in such blatant breach of its responsibilities. She has emailed those whose roles claim some responsibility in this area. It will be interesting to see whether any of them are prepared to take action.

The local MP, Tom Pursglove seems to be an obvious contact to start with. The email has received an automated reply.

David Cameron is far too grand to accept normal email, and restricts communications to a form limited to a measly 1000 characters. On top of this he requires an email confirmation.

Sajid Javid has responsibility for business innovation, and should be interested in the way infrastructure failure affects small businesses. The email has received an automated reply.

Greg Clark is another minister with responsibilities for local businesses. He doesn’t seem to have an automated acknowledgement set up.

John Whittingdale has responsibilities for next generation mobile communications, so might be expected to understand that you can’t build a next generation on the foundations of the failing current generation. No automated acknowledgement from him either.

Sharon White heads Ofcom, so should have an interest in the fact that their dispute resolution arrangements are worse than useless. No automated acknowledgement yet.

Elizabeth Truss has responsibility for rural affairs so should be interested in broadband failure outside the M25. No acknowledgement so far.

Matthew Hancock, with Cabinet Office responsibility, should have an interest in the gross deficiencies in provision of national infrastructure. Another automated acknowledgement.

Cabinet Minsters have a lazy habit of not providing ministerial contact details until you email them, then announcing that you have to use a completely different email address – hardly a commitment to serving the public who pay them. So that means another bout of emailing to get past that barrier. Open government anyone??

Delivering Infrastructure Failure, Delivering Fraudulent Bills

To describe it politely, the EE service amounts to crap. The broadband itself is bad enough – ongoing SNR problems mean something as simple as getting a connection to common or garden websites is a hit and miss affair. Ping time can exceed 8500 ms and speed can drop as low as 0.04 Mbps for download. What EE call ‘broadband’ fails dismally to meet definitions of the term, to the extent that, in charging what they provide as if it were broadband, they are in fact defrauding customers.
In the US, broadband is now defined as 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload, a definition also being used by government body Broadband Delivery UK. These are figures which EE never reaches. It even fails to meet the old-fashioned definition of 4/1 Mbps.
And of course, speed figures are completely irrelevant when EE fails entirely to connect to websites.
For months the DeliveryDemon has been trying to get EE to sort its service, through various channels. The hell line is as dire as one would expect from an Indian call centre whose staff match their arrogance level to their total technical incompetence. Front line phone drones reading mindlessly through badly designed scripts actually claim to be ‘technical support’, totally unaware that this claim has no credibility whatsoever. And of course, it is completely impossible to get these idiots to record anything which doesn’t fit their scripts.
Time and again the DeliveryDemon has spelt out in the simplest of words that speed is not the primary issue, that the problem is EE equipment failing to make connections. Invariably the response is that the line speed is OK, a completely different issue and a stunning display of incomprehension of the fact that point measurement of line speed is no indicator of what is happening over time.
Today the DeliveryDemon has spent over an hour getting past EE’s complaints blocking processes. The phone drone whined that their account system was down so they couldn’t get off their backside to do anything. It doesn’t actually require any account information to check whether there is a problem at an exchange, but doing that would be too much like providing customer service, and that’s not the EE way.
Eventually the DeliveryDemon managed to battle through the obstructions to find someone who would listen and exert a modicum of intelligence. That person actually recognised that the problem was on their records as being longstanding – not that EE had actually done anything to deal with it, other than continue its fraudulent billing for a service it wasn’t providing.
You might expect that an ongoing problem like this could be dealt with via the regulator, Ofcom. Not so. Ofcom, with the responsibility for dealing with poor customer service from telecoms companies, outsources this tedious core activity to a bunch called CISAS. Well, that’s what they call themselves on the Ofcom website but it’s actually a company called IDRS, and they are signally unfit to deal with the most basic elements of complaint handling.
The first step is to record the complaint online, using a site designed by morons. Font size fails the most basic accessibility criteria. The site makes no mention of the word complaint, you are supposed to guess that you have to ‘make an application’. Then it’s necessary to guess the meaning of unexplained acronyms. After this, the system churns out a reference number along with the statement that, if IDRS don’t receive your supporting information within 5 days, they won’t get off their backsides. No intelligent assessment of whether any additional information is actually needed, and certainly no statement of what additional information is needed.
It gets worse from there. IDRS don’t actually process the complaint, they try to sell their paid for dispute resolution service, for a job they are already being paid public money to perform. Needless to say, the DeliveryDemon was not happy with the misuse of her data for such sleazy sales tactics, and the Information Commissioner upheld her complaint.
Eventually CISAS / IDRS agreed to do the job they are being paid to do, and actually deal with the complaint by contacting EE. From today’s conversations it seems that there has been some sort of escalation within EE, in terms of recording the problem but not of doing anything about it. CISAS / IDRS have gone 10 weeks beyond the response time they eventually promised, and have made no contact whatsoever.
So, with that total absence of action, the DeliveryDemon spent several hours on the phone again today, eventually getting acceptance that someone needs to check for problems at the exchange.
Unfortunately, that checking is done by a bit of BT calling themselves Openreach. Yes, BT, not a company known for providing the most basic levels of customer service. How responsive are they? Responsive??? You must be joking. First they want the customer to waste an entire half day so the engineer can start with the standard lie that the fault is in the customer’s home and they will charge silly money to look at it. Yes, despite the fact that earlier attempts to solve the problem have covered all the necessary tests, these shysters will do their damndest to avoid doing basic maintenance tests on their own equipment. And not only that, even when they are not providing the service they charge for, they won’t even bother checking a problem for 5 days.
And, after all these delay, although EE has admitted fault and said that the DeliveryDemon will be compensated, it will be up to the DeliveryDemon to chase that compensation through an entirely different part of the organisation.
The saga didn’t stop there. BT sent out a landline engineer, not a broadband engineer. This engineer confirmed that there was no fault within the property – not news. Once again it’s down to the DeliveryDemon to try and get EE / Orange off their backsides to do what they are being paid to do.
Next thing is a junk call to the DeliveryDemon’s mobile, the usual sort of recorded and badly pronounced trash which scam call crooks tend to generate. The DeliveryDemon tends to report these to the various regulators, so checks to see if the owner of the number can be identified – lo and behold, this is EE making classic nuisance calls. Time to find out what the hell is going on now.
After battling through EE’s deliberately unhelpful IVR, the DeliveryDemon got through to the thinking of leaving section, only to get a shyster who insisted on trying to shift the DeliveryDemon to a cheaper plan, totally and misleadingly avoiding mentioning the fact that change to a different plan usually involves a contract lockin with penalties for leaving early. He repeatedly tried to push this new plan despite the DeliveryDemon making it abundantly clear that a plan change was not the aim of the call. There was a grudging mention of a month’s charges refund as compensation for months of non-service, even more grudgingly upped to 2 months when the DeliveryDemon pointed out that this was worse than derisory. Worse still, he promised a refund of the engineer callout charge as though it was compensation. Since the person who arranged this callout had already said there would be no charge, this looks like yet another EE cockup about to manifest itself on the DeliveryDemon’s bill.
It took the best part of an hour to get bounced back to EE’s useless first line support, who do nothing but revert mindlessly to scripted diagnostics and are incapable of understanding that, after multiple repetitions, this amounts to nothing but a waste of the customer’s time. Having been cut off, the DeliveryDemon phoned back, and was connected to someone with a basic understanding of customer service. However, after another 35 minutes, the trail ended with someone who called themself ‘Technical Support’ but was actually a first line phone drone. It turned out that his job is to tell the customer that a real technical support person will ring back a day later to arrange for an engineer to do tests.
So the process to date looks something like this:
•   Multiple timewasting calls over months with no improvement
•   Multiple instances of time wasted in repeating diagnostics and router swap which exclude the existence of problems which can be blamed on, and charged to, the customer
•   Complaint to the regulator, OFCOM, results in their outsourcer misusing complainant details to try and sell their paid for services
•   After ICO intervention, the outsourcer raises the complaint with EE and promises feedback. Neither the outsourcer nor EE does anything and deadlines pass
•   Contact with EE about further problems takes hours and eventually results in an agreement to get an engineer out 6 days later to check for faults on customer property
•   Promise of compensation but customer has to guess how to follow this up
•   Engineer confirms no problems on customer property. Unable to do any broadband checks since only trained for landlines
•   No-one at EE acts on this so customer has to chase again
•   EE tries to lock customer into new contract
•   After considerable customer effort, customer is bounced to first line phone drones who again fail to understand the issue and try to repeat the first steps of their mindless process
•   First line drone arranges for 2nd line to call 24 hours later to arrange for the engineering checks which should already have happened
•   Another automated call leaves a message requesting the customer rings a particular number. Person who answers doesn’t know what’s going on, can barely speak comprehensibly, and cannot transfer call to anyone else who might be competent to deal with it
Obviously, that’s not the end of the story, and the DeliveryDemon has no faith in EE doing anything useful, never mind shelling up for the fact that it has been charging for a service and not providing it.
With this one single service we have a classic example of why Britain’s infrastructure is being designed and managed to fail:
•   The regulator takes no responsibility for dealing with problems
•   The regulator makes no check on the competence and honesty of its outsourcers
•   The regulator’s outsourcer is fundamentally incapable of doing the job it is paid to do
•   The regulator’s outsourcer is using its access to personal data in ways which are a blatant breach of data protection legislation
•   The regulator’s outsourcer is not doing the job it is paid by the taxpayer to do
•   EE is getting away with charging for services it is not providing
•   EE is wasting customer time with a call centre staffed by incompetent and dishonest operators
•   EE, when fully aware of a problem, doesn’t bother to do anything about it unless the customer puts an incredible level of effort into trying to make them act
•   EE, like so many large companies, has no effective complaints process whatsoever
•   EE has no compunction about wasting customer time as an alternative to providing the service which customers pay for

And, on top of all this, it appears likely that the proposed merger between these two telecoms companies will go through on the Competition Commission’s nod, with every prospect of vast numbers of customers being locked without option into a service so bad that it amounts to blatant fraud.