I was sitting at my desk at work this morning, doing something probably very important when the phone rang. I answered it, and a nice lady began by telling me she was calling from British Telecom, and was updating customer information. She asked if it was OK to do this. I replied that we’d been trying for ages to get all our customer info updated (we have various company names, and errors in invoices and bills – trivial stuff, but it’s messy). She then started asking really basic questions, like company name, and address. I didn’t answer anything, and asked her to prove she was looking at our account. She reeled off some really basic facts you could find off the website (including the URL of the University website). I wasn’t convinced she may have been from BT, so asked her to confirm an account number or something, but she waffled on about asking about line useage, and products we wanted. I told her I wasn’t interested and hung up.
The thing about the call which intrigued me the most was that BT are notoriously bad at acting on changes of information. Indeed, somebody from BT told me that a lot of their billing hangs off company names and addresses, so changing it causes all sorts of headaches for the billing department – hence why they don’t!
I can’t help but feel my friend on the phone was cold calling from some random agency, basically looking to find info about us and what we do and needed, which they’d then cold call us about and try to sell to us. Maybe I was being over-cautious, and she was legit. I don’t know, and don’t care. Frankly BT, there’s much better ways of doing this!
