BT are possibly the most annoying company when it comes to the deluge of junk mail which they inflict on me. Today’s offering is a letter suggesting one might like to “Supercharge your broadband speed with BT Infinity”, which gets just about everything wrong that it possibly could.
As it happens shortly before today’s post arrived I was on the phone to my ISP talking about moving to a fibre connection for my Internet access, so I’m interested although I definitely won’t be using BT now that I’ve received their marketing.
The letter tells me that I can “Simply go online at bt.com/infinityspeed” and they’ll tell me what my estimated Infinity speed is compared to my current broadband speed.
Firstly they only ever quote “an indication of the speed that other similar lines across the UK have achieved for their broadband service” – They tell me my current speed is between 11.0Mb and 13.0Mb. My actual speed is 6.33Mb so they got that wrong for starters. It’s a shame because I know I’ll probably get 40Mb or more on Fibre so I should be even more interested as my current connection is slow, but why should I trust BT’s figures?
Much worse than the inflated speed predictions, when I go to bt.com/infinityspeed I get a 302 error telling me that the document has moved temporarily. Sending out marketing to a URL which then instructs customers to manually type the following URL into their browser isn’t a great user experience:
https://www.productsandservices.bt.com:80https://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=29017&s_cid=con_FURL_infinityspeed
However it’s even worse as that URL is also wrong and should be 40 characters shorter:
https://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=29017&s_cid=con_FURL_infinityspeed
Would it really be too much trouble to get the URL correct, to hot link it so that it doesn’t have to be typed in, or maybe simply to automatically redirect users to the correct page?
I’m sorry BT but you can’t provide the features that my current ISP can give me (e.g. I have 8 static IP addresses which you can’t give me), your document has moved and the long URL you tell me to type in is also wrong. I won’t be signing up with you for broadband services so please stop writing to me.
Somewhat ironically on the back of the letter is the message “Recycle: Together we can reduce paper consumption”. I have a better idea, why not reduce paper consumption by not sending me junk mail with errors that simply make you look bad?
One Response
Probably written by the same people who cannot understand a simple question on the phone and answer a question you didn’t ask!
Asked for a form to change the direct debit details and got a letter today saying “thank you for setting up a direct debit” – Good luck with that one as you don’t have the new bank details!