Call wait times

[#1]

Enough is enough.  Over the last two months I have regularly had to wait 15 minutes before getting answered.  I have delved into Erlang B and the following is revealed.  For a call hold time of 8 minutes and 40 operators and 296.5 calls per hour (the maximum is 300) the mean waiting time is 900 secs (i.e. 15 minutes)  The probability of  having to wait is 91.4%.  Now the 8 minutes might be wrong and so may the 40 operators, but it must be in the right ball park.  Now, if the number of operators is increased by only 3 to 43, for the same offered traffic, the call wait times go down to 67seconds, and the probability of waiting reduced to 49%.  For other businesses using call centres an acceptable call wait time is 10 to 20 seconds, so the 67seconds above is not unrealistic.
Come on PlusNet, get your act together and recruit more staff.  The service you are offering today is not acceptable.
Bob.

[#2]

Any reason you care to share why you've needed to call multiple times? Anything which can be resolved through the portal or via their new webchat?

[#3]

I have had an intermittent  noisy line since mid March 2015 and to a letter degree the year before.  I call the faults team as a specific person has been signed to solving the problem.  Some times I call twice a day to check on progress, else less frequently when I know what BT has agreed to do next.  Currently I am waiting for a few hundred meters of cable to be replaced.  I know the piped music too well.
R

[#4]

Hi RobertJPreston,
I'm sorry about the waits, however I feel it best to be realistic in saying that sometimes there will be a wait of a few minutes to get through to us.
We're recruiting again currently so we hope to see things improve.
FYI in case it helps we publish our average wait times here: http://csc.plus.net
With regards to your particular issue I've chased this and there's no set timescale for the repair work as yet. However our faults team are on top of this and will keep you updated.
Hoping to see that fixed soon.

[#5]

Dear Adam,
It all depends what a "few" minutes are!
And I'm glad you are recruiting and I appreciated finding appropriately qualified staff is not going to easy.
Thanks for the pointer to Average Wait Times, today for me it was 10 minutes, yesterday it was more like a quarter of an hour.
With respect of the fault, it would be a lot better if Openreach was more organised.  This morning we had some contractors arrive who filled in the hole where the joint was made and buried it which should have been protected with a surface mounted box; and this afternoon, some different contractors arrived to do the ducting which was done last week.
Shortly, I will be escalating this issue through your management team as the time to solve this has taken some three months which is much more than your Service Level Objective of seven working days, I must be nearly 60 working days.
What do you think?
Regards,
Robert.

[#6]

I can appreciate the frustration slightly (slightly because I've never had a severe problem like you have), but raising with Plusnet's management team for issues out of their hand as it's down to Openreach processing all the work...what are you hoping from it? I'd say aim it at Openreach, but then I don't know where you'd go apart from Ofcom? 

[#7]

Quote

I will be escalating this issue through your management team as the time to solve this has taken some three months which is much more than your Service Level Objective of seven working days, I must be nearly 60 working days.

My genuine response is that it won't get things moving any quicker.
I know that's probably not the response you may have been hoping for but I feel it best to be open and honest with you.
Management are here to manage staff and not handle orders so they won't be able to push things through any quicker.
I'm an experienced member of our customer relations team that handle complaints, forums and social media so I'm very aware of what options are available to us as a company to move things forwards.
With that in mind what we can't do is force our supplier's hand as much as we'd like to for getting the cabling work done sooner.
what we can do is have myself offer end-to-end ownership of the problem, meaning one point of contact chasing our suppliers often and keeping you updated, following which I can arrange a good will gesture to hopefully make up for the delays and inconvenience in the meantime.

[#8]

regarding the wait time for calls to be answered, last Sunday i was on hold for almost 40 minutes, once  Plusnet were excellent at call response time but  of late standards have slipped.
if callers could be informed of the expected waiting time or position in the queue it might help

[#9]

I'm in the residential que now. Currently been waiting 61 minutes!!!

[#10]

Average answer time today at 22.89
51 minutes and 42 seconds
Absolutely unacceptable

[#11]

This is actually shocking.

[#12]

I am at this moment still waiting for an adviser, I have been on the telephone for an hour now. In 2013 I had the same problem and was told they were addressing the issue with a new call centre. Um, I don't call this addressed!!! I'm getting more annoyed by the second.

[#13]

I can only offer you a glimmer of hope, that after 65 minutes I was answered by someone called Chris (do delete the name if its not allowed) who was very helpful, and we got my problem solved quickly.
I have some further feedback though.
1) The music - it varies in loudness so much that you have to keep moving the phone to avoid being deafened
2) Each song should play-out, each time you cut to a new song I sounds like an adviser connecting, causing me to and pick up the phone unnecessarily
3) please PLEASE announce the position in the queue periodically!

[#14]

Quote from: _Adam_Walker_

I feel it best to be realistic in saying that sometimes there will be a wait of a few minutes to get through to us.

If we are been realistic , it should say, most times there will be a wait of over 15 mins to get through to PN
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,140069.0.html
At 10.45 PM
Residential call stats
Current calls waiting Longest call waiting now Average answer time today
7.10 Currently unavailable 1 hour, 3 minutes and 28 seconds
Unacceptable
Regards
Mike

[#15]

And will it improve with this? I can't see that it will