Let’s Help a Small Business Owner

August 18, 2011

2 min read

Meet Barry, Barry is the owner of Tabor-Jones Ltd a local building company in my area. Barry has slowly been building up his company from scratch over the past two years, through hard work and determination, like all good business owners. Tabor-Jones have just completed our recent kitchen renovation and I'm pleased to report, they firmly brush off the stigma attached to builders, they turned up on time, they cleaned up after themselves, and amongst the chaos, they were a joy to have in the house - they are the type of business that deserves to succeed.

The Problem.
Barry recently moved his telephone line from Utility Warehouse to Sky/BT, in the process, despite telling them how important it was that he retained his telephone number, they have assigned him a brand new one. Between Sky and BT, they are denying to claim responsibility for their actions and instead have offered an "internal investigation" as to why it occurred. An internal investigation doesn't help a small business that has a telephone number printed on banners, shop fronts, leaflets, and vans. The cost to change a telephone number, aside from lost business and time, is going to run into four figures, or Sky/BT can own up to the mistake, and get someone on the case so that a small business does not have to suffer. This attitude of not dealing with something because it's outside of a handbook, has got to stop.

Please tweet @BTcare including @taborjonesltd and help get a small business back on its feet.

Comments

Patrick Lincoln

August 18, 2011 at 2:32 pm

The problem is when these scenarios occur is that you are likely to be speaking to someone in call centre who doesn’t really have the experience or knowledge to deal with anything slightly out of the ordinary.
When someone ‘loses’ a phone number the first thing that needs to be done is to confirm the status of the line on the BT portal. Within BT terminology there are three statuses to which the line could be under. For this scenario the status is all important.

Active / Live – The line is still showing as live with the BT system. If the line is still live then it probably means that the lines have probably just been disconnected or swapped over somewhere and the issue should be able to be resolved.

Stopped – If the line has gone into ‘stopped’ then the line has just been turned off but should still be available and it just needs to be turned back on. If a new line has been connected in its place then an engineer would be required to reconnect the original line.

Ceased – if the line has been ceased then this means the number has been officially cut off. This is going to be your biggest problem. If this is the case then you need to ensure that the number hasn’t got back into the BT Bank of numbers where it is eligible to be reallocated to someone else.

As I know BT could take ages to resolve this issue if this was one of our clients I would attempt porting the number to an IPT host using the site address and see if the order was excepted or rejected. If the number got ported to the IP host it would be off the BT network and wouldn’t relate to the telephone line in question. However, at least you would control over the line and you could forward incoming calls anywhere you wanted i.e. a mobile or the new landline number.

Steve Blakeborough

August 18, 2011 at 1:28 pm

I’ve sent an email to a client in the telcom business, https://www.solutionip.co.uk
If anything can be done to get his number back they’ll know how.
Good luck

Elliot Ross

August 18, 2011 at 1:15 pm

I did something similar for my home line, trying to get set up with Sky Talk. My order somehow got lost or stuck in their system, and despite calling every week to get it sorted, still had nothing after 6 months. I had the ‘internal investigation’, spoke to various managers and engineers, and numerous other promises to have it fixed, and got no where. In the end, after 6 months without having a home phone line (or home broadband) I set up with another supplier. Their call centre and support is notorious for 1) losing orders and 2) not doing anything about it when they say they will. So I’d go straight to the governing body (OfCom?) and consumer groups.

ps. I have dontgetskytalk.co.uk if you need it 🙂

Chris Cox

August 18, 2011 at 1:13 pm

Unfortunately this sort of balls-up is all too common. I’d always advise people to use a VOIP number for incoming calls, which can be moved around without any hassle or redirected to a mobile when out of office.

Let’s Help a Small Business Owner

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