Spare me the cheesy tunes!

HOWeVeR, after receiving an email saying her case was closed and the hub would be switched off, she was clueless as to what was going on.

after waiting nearly an hour to speak to someone at the BT customer services centre, they confirmed that the engineer had been cancelled without her being notified.

Sophie says: ‘ The call handler gave me a rearranged date, but couldn’t confirm that the engineer would definitely turn up then. She told me that if they didn’t, I should just call BT back.

‘I said, “You’ve got to be joking.

OH BT. When Money Mail launched its Pick Up Or Pay Up campaign earlier this year, we spent hours calling major firms at all times of the day to show just how long customers were being forced to wait to speak to a human being.

At the time, BT was furious it had been included in our table, claiming its average wait time was just two minutes. And, to be fair to the telecoms giant, it was by no means the worst offender — until now, it seems. Take my own experience. I’m moving abroad and have had to call more than a dozen financial firms over the past week.

Call wait times have ranged from mere seconds (thank you, Admiral) to upwards of half an hour (Esure among others).

But BT really took the biscuit.

I first tried to call its cancellation number on a Tuesday at around 6.30pm. I was warned of a 20-minute wait, at which point I gave up. The next evening, I tried again. This time the estimated wait was 30 minutes. In reality, it was almost an hour. This is unacceptable for any business — but for a communications company, it’s laughable. The customer service representative couldn’t tell me why the firm’s phone lines were so overwhelmed.

But it’s obvious something has gone wrong. BT needs to get a grip, and fast. And until it does, might I suggest it at the very least rethinks its hold music? Listening to songs with lyrics such as ‘Give me your lovin’ all through the night’ for around an hour-and-a-half over two days really did nothing to improve my mood.