The phone and broadband company, TalkTalk said its customers are being let down hundreds of times a week by Openreach engineers who fail to turn up for allocated appointments. Openreach, owned by BT, maintains the phone lines and broadband connections for several companies, including BT Retail, Sky, TalkTalk, PlusNet and EE.
BT Openreach says it does not recognise TalkTalk’s figures. It says it does not publish its own
.
Since 2014, the regulator Ofcom has been setting Openreach targets to improve services, which Openreach claims to be meeting. However, Ofcom does not insist that Openreach publishes figures for the number of missed appointments it makes.
BT customer Richard Palmer, from Cumbria, says his records show that over the past 12 months he has had 15 missed Openreach appointments.He said “For each appointment I’m expected to stay at home between 8am and 1pm. People say they’ll call you back with more information and they rarely do, and I never received a phone call with an apology. It almost seems that customers are an inconvenience to them.”
Mr Palmer is a self-employed gardener, and says each appointment costs his business at least £90. BT allows customer to apply for £10 compensation for each missed appointment.
Kim Mears, Openreach’s managing director, told the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that “multiple missed appointments” are one of the company’s greatest failings. “When we get it wrong we repeat the problem.”
Figures from Openreach suggest it makes 345 “multiple misses” every week. That is when an engineer fails to turn up for an appointment with a customer who has already been failed once before. Openreach refuses to disclose the total number of missed appointments, but TalkTalk revealed the number of appointments it misses with its customers.
From the start of this year to 18 March, 9,110 customer appointments were “missed” by Openreach engineers. That is about 3% of the total volume of appointments.
Openreach pays TalkTalk £56 per missed appointment, however none of that is passed on to the customer. TalkTalk claims not to be profiting from missed appointments, saying the compensation only helps it cover its “‘logistical costs”.