"Phone order is in progress" after almost one year!

[#1]

My parents had a nightmare of a home move last year which, though their Plusnet transferred on moving day without problems, it then stopped working a few days later. This required hours on the phone which eventually resulted in them being given a "repair" (second) account from the one they had at the previous address and so, after a time, everything was good.

However, they have now (almost a year later, with their 12 month contract ending) been asked to review new offers.

But on logging in there is a message:

"An error has occurred

You cannot make any changes to your account while there is a phone order in progress."

This also means they are unable to access the offers page.

Is there any way this issue can be cleared so that they can look at the offers and decide whether to stay with Plusnet or move to another provider?

[#2]

Moderator’s Note

This topic has been moved from Hime Phone to My Account/Billing

[#3]

@corbinfamily1 You will need a staff member to sort this - the (supposedly) automatic method of clearing this message on completion of account changes is totally broken - or it could be BT's B2B system at fault.

[#4]

Aside from the Plusnet 'offers' problem,

given that you are going to compare whatever 'offer' Plusnet have against other suppliers,

  1)  What Plusnet services do your parent currently have ?,

  2)  How much do they currently pay at the 'in contract' rate ?

  3)  Do you know how much they will start to pay when they go 'out of contract' ?

to get some idea of what price any Plusnet offer needs to beat ?

[#5]

Hey there @corbinfamily1 It's in the process of being fixed. It should be done within an hour. 

[#6]

@willcutforth Can you explain why almost every time a customer goes to their Members Centre to attempt a re-contract, they hit this 'update in progress' banner? I could understand the odd one, but not the number of times I see it - something is broken, and needs fixing.

[#7]

@jab1  this is where something has got stuck in the background of the account. However, we don't know this has happened until the customer lets us know. 

[#8]

@ClaudiaG23 I understand that perfectly well, but I assumed (obviously wrongly) that there should be some form of monitoring of the accounts platform to alert you (Plusnet) of such occurrences. If not, IMHO, the platform is not doing a very good job.

[#9]

I absolutely understand that @jab1, if there was a platform created that could work in that manner 100% of the time plus the staff to monitor it, we'd be on it. Having said that we're looking to improve all the time so I've passed this information on. We do automated scripts to make changes, to fix accounts moving forward for problems raised. 

So while we would like to pick these up automatically we need to find out the cause and how many customers it is affected to create the script to get this resolved. As there could be many causes for the same issue the customer is experiencing. 

[#10]

No computer system is perfect all of the time, @ClaudiaG23 , but the number of times this happens - and I probably see it reported more than you, personally do, suggests there is a fundamental flaw somewhere. This has been going on since before you joined the Help Team, so understand I'm not getting at you personally.

From my observations, and I've been around here for a long time, this started following the implementation of your current accounts platform, and points, to me as a basic flaw. In medical terms, what currently happens is that Plusnet treat the symptoms, not the cause, of the illness.

[#11]

Like Claudia said we can completely understand and I agree it's not perfect. If you have a large number of customers with the same outcome but different symptoms, it's hard to apply  the same resolution as it may not fix it for that customer's account. 

When we report these to the relevant team they would gather how many of each type of causes there are and raise them as incidents. These are then worked depending on the amount of customer's over the whole of our customer base that is affected or the type and impact it has to the customer's service. 

 It's not perfect and we will always try improve and this is an area we are always working.  I do appreciate you guys tagging us in things like this as sometimes we can get it fixed faster and also make sure your feedback is passed

[#12]

@SammyM I was closely involved with system management for about 25 years in my original employment, so I kind of know how computer systems work.

As this 'lock' on your customers ability to make changes to their accounts is flagged to them as (if I recall correctly)'There is a change going through your account....', which is fair enough whilst the change is in progress, but not 12 months later, surely it is not beyond the capabilities of your IT department to write a script to monitor that flag, and raise a query when it reaches 'x' age?

That means no-one has to physically check, but merely examine the output from that script, and check/take appropriate action. That is what we did when monitoring production orders which appeared to get held up, anyway.

[#13]

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@ClaudiaG23 wrote:

... this is where something has got stuck in the background of the account. However, we don't know this has happened until the customer lets us know. 

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@ClaudiaG23 - Just letting you know that I'm seeing this, and don't have any changes in progress !

[#14]

Hey there @Anonymous I have checked the account and nothing seems to be the issue on that side of things. Have you tried it in incognito mode or something similar. If not, looks like it might be a call to our COT god who can be the saviour for you.

[#15]

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@ClaudiaG23 wrote:

... this is where something has got stuck in the background of the account. However, we don't know this has happened until the customer lets us know. 

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@ClaudiaG23 - Just letting you know I've found another broken web page at  https://www.plus.net/