Tag Archives: BT

And the winner of the dumbest password reset award 2013 is…

Posted by alanduncan1980 on

BT!

I decided to log into my BT account earlier today to check on a slight discrepancy on my bill however as I rarely log into my BT account I couldn’t remember the password for my account. I knew my username as it’s my BT email log in so I was able to go through the password reset process where I had to answer a random security question. This time it was place of birth. Success! I remembered where I was born. And ‘Congratulations’ say BT. ‘Your password reset instructions have been emailed to your BT account’.

Hang on…

They’ve sent my password to the account that I can’t access, which is why I was going through the password reset process in the first place? This is, without doubt, the dumbest password reset ever! Why not send a text message? Or a voice message to my landline? Or a tweet? I don’t really care how you do it but surely it’s not that difficult to figure out another way to give a customer their password? What actually baffles me more is that this flaw hasn’t been spotted already. I mean BT, they’re pretty big. Millions of customers etc. And I’m sure there are a fair few who fall into the category of ‘enraged of Billericay’ or ‘disgruntled of Dudley’ who complain about pretty much everything that’s wrong with the world. Why haven’t they noticed this fatal flaw and gone all Mike Skinner* over BT?

I’m going to write to BT right now. And I’m going to sign it off as ‘apathetic of North London’.

*BT’s social media response policy was effectively formed on the hop one night, when Mike Skinner was having problems with his BT Vision and was tweeting his grievance to his many followers, who responded and re-tweeted as the Twitterverse inevitably does. Cue much panic and meltdown in the BT engine room however they were able to get hold of Mr Skinner, rectify the problem as fast as possible and subsequently were praised to the heavens by one satisfied customer. 

Twitter as customer service…

Posted by alanduncan1980 on

Surfing the net while having my breakfast on Tuesday, I spotted a banner ad advertising a pre-sale link for BT customers for the Olympic closing concert featuring Blur, The Specials and New Order. ‘Brilliant’ I thought. I’m a BT customer so I’ll just log into my BT account, get my promo code and log in at 9.am on Wednesday morning and claim my tickets.

Except of course I had forgotten my password. Now, I have no need to do anything with my BT account. I could remember the username but not the password. So, I went through the forgotten password journey. The prompt asked me for the city of my birth, which I obviously could remember. Then a window popped up, thanking me for completing the form and that a link to reset my password had been sent to my account. Hang on… the same account that I’m unable to get access for?

As I’m sure you can appreciate, I was rather frustrated by this turn of events so I completed a complaints form which informed me that BT would get back to me in 24 hours however it could take as long as 72 hours for them to get back to me. By which time I’m sure I’d be able to get tickets for the concert… on resell sites at vastly inflated prices.

Now, rather than exorcising my frustrations in a fit of post millennial rage on social media, I recalled the origins of how BT’s social media customer service strategy came into effect. If you’re not familiar with the story, BT noticed that a certain Mike Skinner of The Streets fame was complaining on Twitter about how BT offered him such poor service, which was naturally trending and being retweeted across Twitter. BT basically had to decide to respond which actually prompted Mr Skinner to later praise BT for their response. I thought I’d put it to the test:

So, I tweeted the following…

And 4 hours later I received this response…

I clicked the link and was directed  through to a specific Twitter customer service landing page, which asked me to fill out my details, and they’d give me a call back.

I received a call back within the hour, my account was restored on the phone and I was able to get hold of my promo code for tickets, which I was able to purchase this morning.

Now, that should be the end of the story. Happy customer, problem solved. Right? I received a call from a slightly confused customer service rep later on in the afternoon who had finally got round to my original submitted complaint. They could see that some activity had been logged on my account and that there had been a password reset however rather than check internally to see if someone else had followed up on my issue, they chose to call me and have a slightly awkward conversation where I explained that everything was ok.

Lessons to learn: If you’ve got the people to respond on Twitter, it’s a great way of not just responding but publicly demonstrating how responsive you are. However, you’ve got to have synergy across the company to ensure that more than one individual does not pick up the job. Otherwise you end up with a slightly embarrassing conversation with your customers.