And the winner of our annual Wooden Spoon Award is ... BT (again)
But the chief executive sends this poor customer care boss to collect it in his place
IT’S A Thursday evening in late January in the Alps.
The great and good have descended on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum and spent all day debating Brexit and Donald Trump’s astonishing election triumph.
Tonight they’re letting their hair down at a Hawaiianthemed party in a nightclub along the town’s main promenade.
Hosted by tech firm Salesforce and its billionaire founder Marc Benioff, guests are garlanded with floral wreaths as they enter.
Pop group Black Eyed Peas are performing on stage with The X Factor’s Nicole Scherzinger, as staff in Hawaiian shirts serve exotic cocktails and Bollinger champagne.
At the bar, mingling with the celebrity crowd, is 49yearold Gavin Patterson, group chief executive of BT.
Unfortunately he couldn’t have picked a worse time to be hobnobbing with the superrich and superfamous.
Just the day before, at BT’s London headquarters, a more junior member of staff had to collect an award on his behalf for the rotten customer service his firm has provided over the past 12 months.
Once again, BT has been crowned the winner of Money Mail’s annual Wooden Spoon award and we were meeting the firm’s bosses to find out what had gone wrong.
It is the second year in a row the telecoms giant has scooped the crown for shoddy service — and it has now won three out of our last four Wooden Spoon awards.
Yet despite being a clear winner with 27 pc of the votes (runnerup Southern Rail got 16 pc and thirdplaced Vodafone 15 pc), BT refused to find any time in Mr Patterson’s diary, in the twoweek window we gave them, to answer customers’ concerns.
Instead, it put forward Libby Barr, managing director of customer care.
At BT’s skyscraper HQ, we explained to her that thousands of you wrote in to nominate the firm with the worst customer service in Britain.
In previous years, complaints against BT centred on billing errors and unhelpful staff.
But what stood out this year was that, as well as poor everyday service, vast numbers of your complaints could be traced back to the firm’s Openreach arm that’s responsible for sending engineers to fix faults with phone lines and switch on broadband.
In the worst cases, customers were left without a landline or internet for months —and then passed from pillar to post by BT call centres.
Every year we present the Wooden Spoon to the chief executive of the firm voted worst by our readers. And this year it mattered more than most because just one man — Mr Patterson — is responsible for BT’s entire operation, as group chief executive.
He took over as top boss in 2013 and oversees all the areas about which you complained, pocketing £5.6 million in pay and perks last year.
But for a reason that BT could not fully explain, it decided he was the wrong person for us to meet.
On accepting the trophy, Ms Barr tried to explain what went wrong.
‘We are very sorry and would like to apologise to Daily Mail readers who have had a poor experience,’ she said. ‘We can see we are making progress but that’s clearly taking time to come through to customers. We are determined to get things right.’
As we walked through the office she requested Money Mail’s reporter hide the award up a coat sleeve so staff wouldn’t see it. ‘They [the staff] take this very personally,’ she said. ‘If they see the award they’ll know why you’re here and I want to have a chance to tell them first myself.’
Every year our Wooden Spoon award exposes the terrible treatment dished out by some of Britain’s biggest companies. In December we compiled a shortlist of ten firms that popped up most often in our postbag last year.
They were: Barclays, British Airways, BT, Extra Energy, Legal & General, HM Revenue & Customs, Scottish Power, Southern Rail, Thomson and Vodafone.
We then asked you to choose who you thought was worst.
Many of you attached detailed letters to your voting slips about the problems you’ve encountered.
Barry and Pauline Saunders were left without a working telephone or internet for 41 days after BT failed to fix their broken phone line. It meant the couple, who live in a rural village in Kent where they struggle to get a mobile phone signal, had no means of contacting their family. Barry, 70, a retired sales manager, says: ‘If one of us had needed an ambulance or the fire brigade, we’d have had to run down the road shouting for help.’
The Saunders’ complaint wastypical. You told us engineers repeatedly failed to turn up as promised; and when they did, often couldn’t fix the problem. Many of you say you were then wrongly charged for the repair work.
It took Joyce and Leonard Gardner, 85 and 89 respectively, six months to get their landline fixed. BT even tried to charge the couple £129.99 when the fault was at the company’s end. Three months later the couple from Merseyside are still waiting for their promised £60 compensation.
On top of technical faults, BT appeared unable to deal with simple problems.
Gary Cooksley, 64, from WestonsuperMare, Somerset, ended up with four different telephone numbers when he moved house because BT repeatedly failed to pass on requests to keep his existing one.
Many of you say you struggle even to get through to someone on the phone. In the worst cases customers have been left waiting for more than an hour and then passed around different departments because no one knows how to help. And despite promises to bring back thousands of jobs from overseas call centres to the UK, many of you still complain of difficulties being understood by staff.
When we presented John Petter, chief executive of BT’s Consumer division, with last year’s award in January 2016, he promised an £80 million revamp of the firm’s customer service.
Around 10,000 of its call centre staff were to be given an extra 100 hours of training so they could help more customers and more than 1,000 more
Staff hired. Mr P etter also pledged hat by the end of 2016, 80 pc of all alls would be answered in the UK — p from 55 pc. Ms Barr, 50, said: ‘The ustomer service transformation is aking longer to implement across he business than we’d hoped. ‘By May, when the transformation ill be complete, customers ill start to see a real difference. Where the new system is up and unning, we’re already seeing 50 pc ewer complaints.’ When Ms Barr was asked if BT had met its target of answering 80 pc of alls in the UK, she couldn ’t say. nstead she told us BT has a new taret — that by spring , UK call centre taff would be answering 90pc of calls n this country. Surprisingly, Ms Barr , who is esponsible for BT call centre perations, also didn’t know what the verage call waiting time is at the firm. T later sent a statement saying the verage call is answered in 106 sec - nds, but that it is aiming to reduce his to 60 seconds. It also told us it ill start offering compensation to ustomers later this year if it fails to meet its customer service promises.
It has set up a specially trained team to deal with calls from vulnerable customers, and launched a new service to help block nuisance phone calls.
Ms Barr also tried to speak on behalf of Openreach, despite it being over - seen by Gavin P atterson and having its own chief executive, Clive Selley, to whom she does not report directly.
Mr Selley started at BT as an engineer and stepped up to the helm in February last year.
Ms Barr said: ‘Openreach is really making progress. Clive has got a real grip on that side of the business now — it’s remarkable. He really under - stands the networks and the engineers have great respect for him.’
The number of appointments completed on time by engineers is also creeping up. This time last year it was 93 pc. Today it is 94 pc. In 2014 it was just 68 pc.
Engineers also now text customers to update them on their arrival time so they don’t wait in unnecessarily.
BT does not release the total number of complaints it receives each year. But official complaints statistics published by telecoms regula - tor Ofcom reveal the firm is currently the most complained about broad - band and TV provider. BT received 36 broadband complaints for every 100,000 of its customers between July and September.
The next worst was Plusnet with 30 and EE with 26.
For TV it received 19 complaints per 100,000 customers, ahead of Virgin Media with seven and TalkTalk with six.
Ms Barr did not want to comment on why the firm received so many complaints from TV customers.
BT later told Money Mail it is because its TV service is reliant on a working internet connection. So if your broadband breaks you won’t be able to watch TV.
This is the same for Talk Talk but not for Sky as its TV service is largely provided via satellites.
Throughout our discussion Mr Patterson’s absence has been the elephant in the room.
As the interview drew to a close, Ms Barr leaned forward, clenched her fists and said: ‘I feel like I can speak on Gavin’s behalf.
‘I really felt it is right that I collect this award as it is my name that goes on the end of the letters to customers and I am the one responsible for transforming our service.
‘Customer expectations are rising all the time and we are taking this very seriously. I care deeply about the improvements we’re making.’
In an email statement from his media representative, Mr Patterson says: ‘As CEO of BT, customer service is my number one priority . I’m therefore very disappointed that we have received this award. I’d also like to apologise to any customers we’ve let down.
‘There is a lot more to do but I believe we are on the right course.’
RUNNER-UP: SOUTHERN RAIL
IT WAS the first time a train company made it on to our annual W ooden Spoon shortlist.
But its 16 pc share of the votes will come as no surprise to the thousands of passengers who have suffered months of delays and cancellations due to strikes.
Around 83,000 trains have been cancelled by Govia, which runs Southern Rail, over the past year , according to official figures.
On Monday this week staff walked out yet again over Govia’s plan to give drivers the responsibility of closing the doors instead of guards.
You told us how cancellations left you stranded miles from home and routinely having to pay expensive taxi fares to get to and from work . Some commuters even lost their jobs because the delays made them late so often. On the few trains that have run, passengers have been squashed in like sardines.
Then, to add insult to injury, you tell us you are also struggling for months to get the refund you are entitled to when your train is cancelled or delayed.
A Southern Rail spokesman says: ‘We’re truly sorry for what passengers have been experiencing and are determined to restore the service they rightly expect.
‘The industrial action on Southern is utterly unnecessary and causing misery to our passengers.
‘The changes we have made will modernise our railway and improve the passenger experience.
‘With control of the doors moving to the driver, staff will be more visible on trains and focused entirely on providing customer service.
‘This method of operation is nothing new — trains across the country have been operating this way for decades.’
THIRD PLACE: VODAFONE
VODAFONE suffered a massive customer service meltdown last year after a computer system upgrade went wrong.
With 15 pc of the votes this year , it is clear the firm is still struggling with a huge backlog of complaints.
In your letters you say V odafone seems unable to fix basic administrative errors and that you are routinely being charged too much.
You’ve also told us how the mobile phones you’ve ordered regularly fail to turn up on the promised delivery date. In some cases you ’ re still waiting months later.
Many of you also can’t seem to get through to the call centre. And when staff promise to ring you back , the call never arrives.
A spokesman for V odafone says: ‘We continue to offer our profound apologies to customers affected by the aftermath of the IT system changes we made in 2015.
‘ Last year we made a huge investment in identifying and fixing the issues which were impacting customers, hiring an additional 1,000 new UK-based call centre personnel and giving more than 190,000 hours of training to improve how we identify and resolve individ - ual customer problems.
‘This has led to a 50pc reduction in complaints over the year.
‘Our highest priority in 2017 is to build on that positive momentum and make our customer services best in class.’