Chester call centre plunged into ‘chaos’ as it can’t make any calls

Feb 2 2012 by Gary Porter, Chester Chronicle

A CALL centre employing 100 staff was plunged into ‘chaos’ when a faulty underground cable left it without a phone line for nearly a week.

Sykes Cottages Ltd in Hoole Lane, Chester, claims it may have lost between £50,000 and £100,000 after its BT service ‘collapsed’ last week.

The company, which rents out cottages for self-catering holidays, was forced to buy mobile phones for staff to call customers back and even spent £5,000 on setting up its own phone system from scratch.

Staff, who deal with up to 1,500 calls a day, started to experience problems on Saturday, January 21, and on Monday the phone line went down completely.

The system was eventually up and running again by Thursday.

BT says it sent out an engineer to Hoole Lane after receiving calls that the line was faulty, and as he carried out investigations he discovered a gas leak which caused a delay in repairing the cable.

But Clive Sykes, founder of Sykes Cottages which has been based in Chester since the mid-90s, says it’s ‘galling’ BT did not divert their calls quicker to limit the disruption.

He said: “I expected it to get sorted over the weekend but by Monday the system had completely collapsed.

“It’s our busiest time of the year and we suddenly had no phones. It caused utter chaos.

“We don’t expect a perfect service, things do go wrong. But it could have been sorted out straight away.

“It was something beyond our control, we were held to ransom. We had no support.

“As a business if something goes wrong we need to know it’s going to be dealt with properly.”

A BT spokeswoman said: “One of our engineers went out to the area to examine a section of our underground network.

“During the course of his routine checks, gas was detected down two different manholes.

“He notified the gas company straight away who advised him not to proceed with any repairs for at least 48 hours.

“The reason our underground cable had gone faulty was due to normal wear and tear as well as water ingress.

“Once we were able to proceed with our repairs, customers were reconnected quickly.”

She added Sykes Cottages can reclaim their line rental for the period they were without a service.