I can safely say, BT are not alone in this, seen it many times before and no doubt will continue to see it....

SLA's are for the monkeys up top. Doesn't matter how shit a service is, provided it's answered in 10 seconds....

Can it get any worse?

I think if the news came out that the BT board members raped and ate small children during board meetings it would not make much of a difference in the public perception of this company.

I am sure this "faking of performance figures" is happening a lot in the Call Centre industry. It is the only way I could understand how we get such AWFUL call centre support from the bigger companies.

I have swapped Banks, Credit Cards and ISPs all based on the call centres. It is noticeable how good some centres are. The good ones are quick and easy to deal with. A happy experience. The bad ones leave you in a queue for ages, typing through endless menus, and have accents impossible to understand with totally inflexible scripts.

So the only explanation of the bad ones are the companies don't ever need to deal with their own call centres. And the bosses just get to see positive responses in a faked performance report.

"certain BT staff involved in the activities of Kettering call centre have been released"

I have this image of herds of ape-like call centre workers scampering off into the suburbs of Kettering, screeching to one another as they communiate across streets.

They will be rounded up by the end of the day and retrained to sell timeshares. To each other.

They've just sacked their most intelligent and resourceful workers, how stupid is that?

Yeah but the MoD have missles..... lots of missles

Call centres play these games all the time, and we're not just talking about subcontracted/outsourced work. Internal call centres and indeed ordinary office staff do it when they have SLAs to meet.

by BT. When are people going to stop giving this company their money. I left because of teh Phorm bull. You people have to vote with your feet and your money. What point is it to keep rewarding these multi billion dollar companies with you money when all they do is lie, cheat, steal, stall for time, bully people into staying, pay off officials? STOP giving them money is the wway to get them to behave nicely. Phuck Phorn and Phuck BT.

Targets are created by management who know nothing about the process involved, know nothing about the reality of system, and know nothing about how the real world works. They create these artificial targets and reward people based on these targets. Then they don't provide enough resources for people to achieve these targets no matter what they do.

It's a pity they didn't "release" the idiot senior managers who made the target decisions in the first place. I'm betting they "released" the people on the front lines who got stuck with a "improve your call times or be fired", then weren't given the tools necessary to do that ethically.