Another Day. Another 72 hours. And No Response to My 3-week old "Question"......

[#1]

Yes. Another day. Another 72 hours. And another failure by PlusNet to update me on my "question" 34608676 (which by the way, is not a "question", it's a very BIG PROBLEM).
As you can already tell, I'm not a happy camper, but I like to be positive, so on a positive note, I joined PlusNet at the end of June this year. Efficient and smooth transition from another ISP and initially a reliable and (for my location) very reasonable broadband speed of 2MB.
After about 5 weeks trouble-free broadband, things started to go wrong at the beginning of August when I noticed very low broadband speed (download averaging 128K). 1st line support advised this was caused by frequent disconnections. Tried all the support team's suggestions (changing filters, phones etc. etc.) which didn't work before raising a call on 9th August.
Nearly 3 weeks later and it has been an extremely long and frustrating 3 weeks where the problem persists and there is no end in sight to its resolution. Not only I am not getting the service I am paying for, but I have wasted 129 minutes of my life on the phone to PlusNet 1st line support, which I am paying my telephone provider for.
My "question" was apparently, eventually, escalated to PlusNet's supplier (the wonderful BT, I assume) on Thursday 26th August. I was told via phone that the supplier would try to fix the problem via remote means initially and if that didn't succeed an engineer would be sent out. Since then, more than 72 hours later, as I have come to expect, no-one from PlusNet has bothered to update me.
As with most things you only, in my opinion, find out how good a company is when it comes to helping you when things go wrong. And in this respect, PlusNet is failing as follows:
* 1st line technical support is at times of a good standard, but I have lost count of the differing advice that I have been offered by different staff, both in terms of technical guidance and how the support call process works.
* Not all support staff make notes of telephone contact with a customer in an open question. I think a note of all phone calls relating to a question should be logged.
* For some reason, someone in PlusNet decided to open a second "question" [34761019] for my problem. This just seems to have confused the issue further (with different people updating different questions).
* My question(s) have been escalated to the faults team for action several times over the past three weeks. I have not yet received an update from the faults teams within the 72 hour period for any of these escalations.
* When questions have not been responded to within 72 hours, the 1st line support staff seem to be unwilling or unable to help. They say they can't contact the fault team directly, nor can they put me through to them. All they generally do is add a comment to the question (which I could do myself, though one member of the faults team advised me that doing this could move the call back in the queue, so that has put me off doing so). One support staff member did offer to contact the faults team manager to speed things up and another said he would be a "24 hr response flag priority" on the call. Whether these made a difference I don't know, but they shouldn't be necessary anyway.
* A call is bounced around too much between different teams and/or users. Each time an action is taken on a call, I am informed that I have to wait upto 72 hrs for a response (though as above in my case it always seems to be longer than that). For issues that need to go through several stages of troubleshooting/resolution, this is not acceptable.
* After my first call to the helpline number, I received a link to a feedback questionnaire, which I completed. Since then I have received further emails asking for feedback (I would know give very different answers to the first questionnaire), yet when I go to fill it in, it won't let me because it says I have already done it.

[#2]

Hi trinworthy,
I'm sorry that your fault hasn't had much attention for a few days. August bank holiday does usually mean reduced staffing with it being a really popular holiday, this may have led to some extended response times. However its obvious some catching up needs to be done in your case so I will be reviewing your fault ticket in more detail shortly.
With regards to your feedback, thanks for going into detail there, we wanted to do the same with our responses to this:

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* 1st line technical support is at times of a good standard, but I have lost count of the differing advice that I have been offered by different staff, both in terms of technical guidance and how the support call process works.

Conflicting advice is one of the biggest problems I think any call centre can face. The reason this may have happened in your case is the fact that we are in the middle of a big recruitment drive at the moment which means lots of new staff on the phones. As time goes on we are are seeing standards improved and will give feedback to agents in every single instance of a problem being reported (including this one) as we continue with this we are noticing improvements along the way, We're just sorry that you seem to have been impacted by the negative effect of this in the meantime.

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Not all support staff make notes of telephone contact with a customer in an open question. I think a note of all phone calls relating to a question should be logged.

This is subject at the moment to agent digression but it is encouraged that if an issue can be resolved more quickly and avoid unnecessary points of contact by picking up the phone we should be doing that where we can really. So again this comes down to feedback and training so I will pass this on to the relevant people. It is imperative too that we note down every single call that we make or take, these are generally added as a contact which is a closed question on your account.

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* My question(s) have been escalated to the faults team for action several times over the past three weeks. I have not yet received an update from the faults teams within the 72 hour period for any of these escalations.

Being honest, this so far has not been dealt with as an escalation (although it is getting some extra attention from me now). the 72 hour lead time is given as a guideline but not as a precise lead time, I am aware that there is a slight backlog following on from the bank holiday weekend but we should be clearing these down over the next few days. I believe some common sense could have been applied at our side so we could have set a better expectation than 72 hours. Again thats something else that we can look at in the future. For now I'll go away and respond to your fault ticket before replying on here again.
Adam.

[#3]

Hi again,
This is just a quick update to say that I have booked your engineer for tomorrow morning between 0800 and 1300 we have given them a specific set of tasks to carry out which are relevant to your fault so hopefully we should be able to either resolve the issue tomorrow or at least make some progress in better diagnosing the issue.
I'll make sure that we keep you posted.
Adam.

[#4]

Adam,
Thank you. I appreciate your help with this.
Catrin

[#5]

Quote from: _Adam_Walker_

....................we have given them a specific set of tasks to carry out which are relevant to your fault so hopefully we should be able to either resolve the issue tomorrow or at least make some progress in better diagnosing the issue.............

Just to warn, been there, had the engineer, and got the t-shirt (a metaphorical one), and was just told that I had a faultless line or someone at Plusnet was "having a bad day" - since then we've had pogostick results on the line, and no response after the bank holiday.........still waiting!
All the best though!
Again it seems like unless you go "public forum" with a fault, nothing gets done or things are dragged out...........   Come on Plusnet!

[#6]

Catrin,
No problem, I've set myself a reminder to check the engineer notes following today's visit.
TicnTac,
I'll take a look at your account this morning to see how we can progress things for yourself.
With regards to the specific tasks I've mentioned they are submitted by us as notes for the engineer that they should be complying with, if we come to check the notes the engineer made themselves following your visit and we see that this has not been done we will feed this back with our suppliers as it's unacceptable especially in cases like yours. On the subject of protracted faults raising issues on here is not the only way to get issues dealt with (I can fully appreciate how it seems to be from your point of view though. Our faults team (who have been dealing with your issue so far) now have a practice of each agent taking ownership of a certain number of faults so cases like yours (and including yours) have at least led to some process changes that may save other customers going through the complaint process.
I understand however you'll be more interested in the progress of your own issue so I will go and look at your account now before coming back to you.

[#7]

No sign of an engineer between 8 and 1, as agreed. As the email which confirmed the appointment said the engineer would not necessarily need to come into the house, I assumed that this is what happened.
So surprised to have a BT engineer turn up at 16:50. When I said the visit had been scheduled for this morning, he just shrugged his shoulders.
Engineer connected with his laptop with synch speed of 2.5MB, so said connection seemed fine. Shame he hadn't been able to arrive this morning to witness some frequent disconnections and varying synch speeds at reconnection.
He said he would go and check the exchange, but that his shift was due to finish soon. Depending on what he found at the exchange, said he may return tomorrow morning to make some further checks.
Catrin

[#8]

Hi Catrin,
I'm sorry I wasn't able to come back to you yesterday. I'm on the phone to our suppliers now so will reply again shortly with where we can go next.
I Would be interested to know if the engineer did come back this morning, I will be feeding back to our suppliers about them arriving late, whether its at the end of their shift or not they should still be assisting you in the manner that we have requested.
Please bear with me and I will be in touch soon.
Adam

[#9]

I'm having the same problem.
Since 29/08 my connection has gone from being a ~5mb to a 750K connection. 
At first I got a call from the Faults Team who asked me to try a bunch of stuff, most of which I'd done already.  One thing I couldn't do there and then so the guy gave me a number to call back on once I'd tried another router.  I called back expecting to get through to the Faults Team but instead I just got customer services who just said they'd update the ticket and Faults would call me back.  I had been told by the first Faults guy that someone would call me within 48 hours anyway to check on my progress, but nearly a week later and I've still not had a call.
To be honest if I don't get a call tomorrow I'm calling Virgin to install cable broadband.

[#10]

andybird123,
That is too long to wait for an update, I'm going to give the faults team a heads up now...
Adam

[#11]

Thanks Adam, I had tried calling customer services but they just said someone would call me back within (another) 72 hours!
it does seem a little bit strange that customer services aren't able to talk to the Faults Team or even give you an idea how far down "the pile" your fault is.

[#12]

No problem, I'll keep the pressure on today and make sure this gets the attention it deserves.

[#13]

So... a Plus Net engineer asked me to disconnect all my other devices and plug my router in to my master socket... this precludes me from answering my home phone.  I have clearly marked my question thread with "PLEASE CALL MY MOBILE ONLY" and added my mobile number. (I did this on the initial ticket opening form and have repeated it a couple of times since)
I've just had this message from the faults team;

Quote

Dear Mr Bird, I tried to call you today on your mobile at 11:33, but you was unavailable.

Now, glaring gramatical errors aside...  They tried to call me on my home phone.  My wife had plugged the phone back in for a few minutes to make a call and PN just happened to call when she did.  Can the Faults team really not tell that land line numbers begin 012**  and mobile numbers begin 0750****
On the plus side, they did say that they can see that my line is fault free and that it is a CAP of 1mb on my line causing the problem, which they have (or will?) ask to be lifted.
Anyone have any ideas how long THAT process can take?

[#14]

andybird123,
I'm disappointed to hear about your issue being handled in that manner. I've fed this back to the agent who did this and have also asked for another call to be made, more importantly I've added a clear note to your account (right at the top) to say ONLY call this customer on their mobile.
With regards to the cap it's a banded profile. This is normally removed once the connection has stabilised and has been up for 72 hours. Yours does appear to be much more stable at the moment and has been up for 48 hours so its a case of wait and see just for the moment. If the line is still up tomorrow we'll request the removal of the profile. From that point it may be anything up to another 48 hours.
Adam.

[#15]

FYI trinworthy, in case you are still checking back on this post. I'm just on the phone to BT now to get a copy of the notes from today's engineer visit. Once obtained I'll be in touch.
Adam.