Someone remind me why

I'm supposed to give a f### what BT are doing?

Frankly since all the past changes they made were supposed to *increase* customer service, I don't even want to consider what a change that is not supposed to touch it will do, can they really get any worse?

I personally wish BT would remove the B from their name - I work for a global company and it's embarassing that other countries might associate BT with general British cluelessness

At a corporate level BT proactive line monitoring seems to consist of "call us and we'll tell you if the line is down", and at a home broadband level their support consists of "you can't get the 1Mbs speed you pay for as it is an out of date service - to get the speed you pay for you need to upgrade to 8Mbs and sign an 18month contract, at which point we'll be able to give you 3Mbs"

My customer and I both left BT a long time ago and since then my life has been a lot easier

Smiley cos now I get to speak to someone who speaks the same language, understands how routers actually work and just fixes the issue instead of looking for reasons it's not his problem or coming up with some random bullshit

re: accents

I think you're onto something with the idea of hiring us Aussies. We're an easy bunch to get along with.

"G'day, this is Bruce, owsitgoinmateorrite?"

"This is Reginald Fotherington-Smythe. I seem to be having somewhat of a problem with my internet connection"

"Strewth cobber, that's a bit rough. But don't worry, we'll have yer fixed up before you can say Gulargambone*"

(* small town in the middle of nowhere, NSW. Most famous for being closeish to Coonabarrabran).

"hidden agenda of managing people out of the business"

To me, this is the real BT story in the last year or two, but although I'm hearing about it from very reliable sources, I'm not reading about it in the usual places. Am I just looking in the wrong places?

Redundancies cost BT money, sometimes a lot of money depending on the deal and the individual. So they look for a cheaper alternative.

Dismissals for non-performance don't cost much at all. BT have got enough managers sufficiently worried about their own personal futures that they will do the immoral (and illegal?) bidding of the next level up, ie managers will lie about the performance of their workforce. If they give their team members sufficient bad reviews, then HR will be able to show team members the door, without compensation.

Job's a good un. Not.

Policy and behaviour like that must start very close to the top of an organisation.

Meanwhile, outsourcing or offshoring something doesn't absolve the relevant management from monitoring the quality of the delivered service. One outfit I know offshored its "routine business operations processing" (trivia like orders, ledgers, etc). Six months after the contract started, a disk failure meant there was need to restore from backup. That in itself was a bad sign - disk failure and no RAID? Turns out that the operation had been following the backup script but no one had checked it had worked. Ever. Six months of sales orders had to be re-entered. Should management have checked? Of course.

Offshoring mostly started when Motorola discovered that for various reasons they could get close to "zero defect" code for mobile handsets if they recruited India's very best engineers to develop their handset code. These folks also happened to be cheap compared with US engineers, but that wasn't the main point - the point was that they were willing to aim for and achieve "zero defects". Seems like a fine idea.

Offshoring today is a world away from what Motorola started, but as is all too often the case, the managers higher up the food chain have no comprehension of what is needed and what is appropriate for the business and its stakeholders.