Hi,

Not sure if anyone else is had the same thing, but I called BT on Fridat evening to add BT's Call Minder service onto my line only to be told that the system was playing up and if it would be ok for somebody to call me back tomorrow (Saturday), after not receiving this call and being unable to activate this service online I call BT customer services again, I spoke to guy who ask me my first two letters of my account number, I replied with GB and he told me that the GB billing system is currently down, I explained to him that I was promised a call back on Saturday for Call Minder and he advised me that the GB billing system had been down since early hours Saturday!!

Not a very good billing system considering they are transferring all customers onto this in the next couple of years, don't get me wrong, new systems have teething problems as to be expected, however, these are the problems I have faced since having a GB account number.

* Unable to add calling features/change calling plan online.

* Unable to monitor my call spend due to billing system no refreshing my account.

* Being charged for cals I made five months ago, as the system did not pick the calls up I had made.

* Not having four bills last year, payments not being taken from my bank due to direct debit and my services being restricted as a result of the system error.

* Spending upto 2 hours in a queue to speak to a customer service advisor (last year)

I think BT should have tried their new system first instead of putting it live for new customers from last year.

Their are a few reasons for the quick implementation of Oneview. One of them is Ofcom!

I have had problems with BT regarding my GB account. It seems that the name on the account had been changed and this account also cancelled at some point.

I had order rebuilt on old system so I got a WN account number at the moment but been told it will be moved back to the GB one.

I have have a problem with my BT bill and i have a GB account number BT India have told me that the system will be down for at least other 24hrs.

And why cannot BT India transfer my call back to the UK so i can speak somebody who understands and can speak english.

Been trying to get a new line set up for my new house and their systems are still down. They must be losing incredible amounts of money.

Twice I've got through and they've said the system has just come back up and they can take orders - then I get cut off!

Surprised this isn't a major news story.

GB account nightmare, spent hours going from department to department in BT, before somebody told me there was a problem with GB accounts. Mine is starting to work bit by bit, still cannot download my bills that facilty is still missing, also recent calls is still not updating, anbody got an update?

Hey hey...

Moving into a new property on Monday, and BT systems down.

I know we have a BT line in there, waiting to be activated - is there any way I can activate it through Sky, or am I at BTs's mercy??

I've been calling BT for the last 3 days! Each time I'm told the system is down and to try 'tomorrow' (Tomorrow never comes though, does it....).

Anyway, just called them again I was told it would still be down for another 5 hours.... We'll see....

The upshot of all this is that I haven't been able to dial out since the weekend, they haven't been able to look in to the problem, and I'm now thinking I would be better off with another provider. Not a very good way of running a business, a large international business at that, is it....?! Have they not heard of back up systems.....??

BT ought to think themselves lucky 'Watchdog' is taking a Summer break, otherwise I'm sure they would be featured on the programme. Who knows, Nicky Campbell may start the new series off with a story about this mess....

...Oh and to add insult to injury, I paid my bill last Friday, and then yesterday I got a letter to say their 'records show that we have not yet received payment of your recent telephone bill. As payment is now overdue a late payment charge will be shown on your next bill'!!! They can go take a long walk....

No, BT could have continued to use the systems previously developed, making tweeks to it to ensure compliance and equivalence of input. Instead they decided to implement a system all the different departments could use.

BT has known about the requirement for EOI and compliance for a long time. BT faffed about for too long and then made a piece of software live a long, long time before it was ready.

OFCOM are not to blame on this one.

BT Senior managers have been doing their headless chicken impressions while that system was off the air, with conference calls every 15 minutes from dawn to dusk, while flatly denying that the current industrial action (working only the hours they're actually paid for) by BT junior managers (many of whom work on such systems) is having any effect whatsoever on the time taken to fix the PoS.

The system was down due to an upgrade been implemeted to improve the experience of the advisors and the customers calling in, mainly to make the process quicker when placing orders for new lines.

Oneview (the GB system) is very new and has not had many new releases but since it's launch which Im sure you can all remember the problems which then became featured on watchdog the system has massivly improved.

It was a requirement that a new system put into place by OFCOM for regulation reasons including the booking of engineers as BT could book better time slots and quicker time slots than other companies. Another reason was the fact that customers could if they wanted choose from a selection of telephone numbers when other companies could not offer their customers this option.

Unfortunatly BT did not have a great deal of time to get this change into place and experienced major problems at the start which became resolved. BT continues to improve the system based on feedback by customers and their advisors and the latest major improvement resulted in the system been down whilst they were put in place.

The recent changes that caused the outage for 1 week have a severe impact on customers as well as advisors attempting to do there job.

However in scenarios such as the outage a fallback comes into place where customers orders are taken and processed in a form and later processed when the systems are back online.

It's not that the systems are down, the advisors are simply not allowed the log in whilst the changes, or upgrades in this case were implemented as this will cause further problems.

The upgrade has been completed, everything is working fine and it's again a massive improvement overall.