Over the past 12 months the quality of service of EE in the local area has been getting worse and worse to the point where outages for several hours are happening on a regular basis in my home area, in addition the signal at my workplace has got worse and worse over this time also. This only impacts EE, other networks don't have this issue.
I am now at the point where I am getting pretty frequent texts and emails from EE telling me there is a problem near my home address and engineers are working on it and hope to have it resolved in 8-9 hours. This has happened 3 times in the last 10 days alone and I must have had at least 30 hours now in that time with no signal at all at home. There was also a spell early this year and late last year with the same.
Today I've finally had enough and tried to call the EE customer service to complain about the fact these issues keep happening and that they are not acceptable and they need to properly fix the problem rather than just have a sticking plaster on it. So when the voice network came back up (but the data network still doesn't work) I gave them a call and what a farce it was.
First thing when I call them is they ask me if I want to speak to someone, I press 1 for yes and they send me an SMS with a web-link in it that I cannot obviously open as there is no data. Who on earth thought that idea up, did they not think that through, that someone who is calling a helpline might not have access to that? Someone calling customer service is likely to have a problem and pushing them through a flow of call -> text -> data to speak to someone is stupid, because the chances are that someone might be calling about something not working.
I then go through the menus and don't pick the speak to someone option and select the option about having trouble making calls and the automated system tells me that to check that, they need me to hang up and will send a text as I don't need to speak to someone, Obviously I don't get a text but have no option to speak to anyone. This is of course after about 7 attempts to even get that far because of the phone constantly dropping off the network
I then call them back and after picking a random option out of desperation. EE send me a text saying reply YES to verify that I am the account holder and pass security and I do so and get confirmation I have passed security. All good I thought. After a crazy amount of time I eventually got through to a rep who I thought would help me, big mistake. The rep immediately tells me that they have no record of me passing security and that I didn't get a text and reply to it, even though I got the text, replied and EE confirmed that I passed security! Something clearly broken then.
So I give them my name and address then they ask me a stupid question like to check my email address for a verification code. I explained that to do that, I would need data, which is exactly the issue I am calling about. They then asked me for my EE account number and to login to my EE to get it. Again I explained I would need data to do that. I was then told that they could not speak to me as I could not pass security! They would not budge and said due to GDPR they could not speak to me! The agent was clearly not able to use their own brain and realise that they were asking me impossible questions, I told them it was a signal issue and I cannot access WiFi or data, but proceeded to ask me questions that required data!
I have now been told that I must go to a place where I have access to Wi-Fi and call them from there with the information and it is not the fault of EE that I don't have Wi-Fi, which is causing the issue here. Of course, the fact that EE's network reliability has gone down the pan and their verification systems clearly are broken, isn't a factor at all in this (sigh). But no matter what I said to that person, they were not budging.
So now I've been on the phone to them for half an hour trying to get through with the same dreadful hold music about kissing someone till they are dizzy when I do have access to Wifi, and someone hangs up on me before I even say anything. Lovely.
So here I am now, registering my dissatisfaction with a network in the local area that consists of being held together by what seems like two cans and a piece of string and a customer service flow that makes no sense. Selecting an option saying you have a technical issue with calls, texts or data and then making you verify something with the thing you're reporting a fault with is beyond stupid, and whoever designed it should be ashamed.
