If you receive a letter from BT saying you should switch your BT Virus Protect product from McAfee to Norton, don’t even try at the moment. Earlier today (25th January 2022) I tried to carry out the switchover for a client of mine and pre-emptively removed the McAfee-based protection software before downloading and installing the new Norton-based equivalent. Unfortunately the new software proved to be impossible to download because of a ‘Server Error’.
Some other BT customers suggested on a BT-administered forum that the problem might be that within the ‘My BT’ account, we were an ‘Account Manager’ rather than an ‘Account Holder’, so we logged in to ‘My BT’ and checked our status. Sure enough, we were shown as ‘Account Manager’ rather than ‘Account Holder’ so we tried to switch to being the ‘Account Holder’. However, the switch just didn’t work and simply threw us back to the ‘My BT’ home page.
The next thing we did was start an online chat with BT’s so-called customer support. The man we contacted said that we were already the ‘Account Holder’, even though our ‘My BT’ account said that we were only an ‘Account Manager’, and suggested that we should keep trying the non-working status-switching procedure again and again. We told him that it just didn’t work, and then he just ‘hung up’ on us by ending the chat without so much as a ‘by your leave’.
We ended up installing ‘Avast One Essential’ then making a complaint to BT who were going to call us back within a few days. I’m certainly not holding my breath. Not only is BT going to put up its charges by 9.3% very soon, which is a hard-to-justify increase, but it’s providing awful support after advising customers to attempt a currently impossible upgrade (apparently this ‘Server Error’ nonsense has been going on for more than a month). Simply terrible service.