BT Group reviews

* Home and Flexible working: - Over the past two years BT has changed people from home workers to office based workers as they say it improves communication from the staff. I do work from home some days, but I'm still based from an office. * T&S: - BT's policy on travel is now pretty much non-existent. Cheapest hotel, cheapest way of getting there, small allowance that doesn't even cover the cost of the night time meal. When I travel I'm basically paying for part of it, however I do have a few beers when I do. * Free broadband but no free line rental: You just feel that although you get free broadband there making money out of you as you have to buy the telephone line from them. * Work conditions: Where I work there are 6 desks, but there can be up to 12 people wanting one. H&S goes out the window with boxes and equipment left on the floor in this un-airconditioned office that sometimes reaches 31 degrees. * BT Vans: You either get one without air conditioning or a restricted vehicle. BT still buys vehicles today without air conditioning, which means those hard working engineers have to boil. * Career Progression: - This can be good if you know Juniper or Cisco as BT is a telecommunication company, but even though my skills are sort after outside, progression for me has been very difficult. * APR's and 1-2-1: The very worst thing about working for BT is the APR, DPR, & 1-2-1 process. You basically have to write war a piece to get an Achieving Standards grade to get your bonus. It is the most long winded, pointless thing I. Even if I have saved or made BT loads of money or done something special for your customer you are very hard pushed to be recognised and most times you get a graded depending on internal politics or internal budgets.

We were given 4 weeks of training which was useless, a lot of time was spent learning on how to use the software which was pretty basic rather than actually letting us know what we should expect. The example calls were hand picked which were the most simple ones and it made it look like that life will be great and jobs really easy. Even when we sat next to advisors to listen to calls they were from a different campaign that doesnt deal with usual calls. After training we entered in the "Grad Bay" stage where we were spoon fed sales calls and as soon as grad bay stage was over we were in the standard call queue. Customer care was non existent, they selected options to speak to faults, billing etc were passed through to sales which we werent able to deal with. Most managers arent willing to take escalations or answer questions which arent defined in the standard "toolkit". A lot of people have been recruited who have no clue about what speed and allowance mean (GB, MB, Mbytes) and they are the "Experts" guiding the customers on broadband. You get penalized for helping customers as it takes precious call time where you could be selling. The worst of all everyone in sales get penalized for selling BT sports as a standalone product because customers didnt transfer line and broadband over to BT. HR is always looking for reasons to put people on coaching plans in view of pressurizing people so they leave the job. Marketing team is out of touch with sales, every couple of months flyers are sent out to customers offering deals which sales cant honour. If not the bonus not a single person would willingly want to work on the sales floor. No acknowledgement of hard work. You start the job thinking you will make a difference and you will not treat customers like other people do but eventually you will succumb to the stat driven environment and stop caring if its a not a sales call.