Dominic Bareham A BT customer believes he would not have been compensated by the business had it not been for the Mercury's intervention.Martyn Thompson, of Walpole Road, Great Yarmouth was informed he would receive a £25 refund on his deposit for setting up a landline back in May and six months line rental free, after delays in the setting up of his new line.

Dominic Bareham

A BT customer believes he would not have been compensated by the business had it not been for the Mercury's intervention.

Martyn Thompson, of Walpole Road, Great Yarmouth was informed he would receive a £25 refund on his deposit for setting up a landline back in May and six months line rental free, after delays in the setting up of his new line.

But the company only informed him he would receive the apologetic gift after the Mercury intervened.

“The service was terrible. I think if you had not contacted them I do not think anything would have happened. Even after I contacted the BBC's Watchdog programme about it no action was taken.

“Literally, when you ring up with an issue and nobody wants to deal with it they just pass you to and fro, but if you have got a set up order they respond straight away,” Mr Thompson said.

His problems began when he called the supplier to get the BT line to his property activated and was told an engineer would visit his home within three weeks to check that a line was installed.

But no engineer appeared so he phoned BT again and was eventually given a new installation date after being kept on hold for two hours, but this and a third installation date came and went with no engineer arriving to check the line.

Fed up Mr Thompson decided to rely on internet from his NTL cable broadband until November when he contacted Watchdog and a BT engineer promptly arrived to set up the line.

But the drama was not over for Mr Thompson because he could not make any calls from or to his telephone number on December 11 and discovered an error had caused the line to be disconnected the previous day, so he would have to have a new number!

Finally, his present of a fully operational phone line arrived just in time for Christmas on December 24- seven months after he had placed his order.

BT spokesman Jason Mann said: “Clearly, it does appear that this case has not been dealt with thoroughly.

“We have clearly made errors in this case and we apologise for that. With any case like this we always look at what the cause was and with any incident where the customer has not had the level of service we would expect them to have then we are looking to deal with that.”