Dial-up change to broadband & Customer Options

[#1]

Hi,
It seems you need to update your staff information on responding to dial up users wanting to upgrade to broadband as I have just had a rather unhelpful telephone call. I raised a ticket to enquire about broadband and was told market 1 prices but strongly suggested I ring the customer options team as they may be able to improve the pricing. So I rang up as my in-laws wouldn't pay the price quoted and spoke to customer service who passed me on to a sales person who passed me on to customer options who said there was nothing he could do for broadband with or without telephone and it would just be a normal new signup pricing and wanted to pass me back to sales.
Clearly your customer options team are not offering any discounts for existing dialup customers wanting broadband in a market 1 area despite all your other staff (the customer service rep I first spoke to, the sales person I also spoke to and the person answering the original ticket) believing that they do. You need to update the stock reply and brief your other staff as currently many Plusnet staff are being highly misleading to existing customers.
I'll have to go and see what BT have to offer which disappoints as Plusnet have been excellent for both my in-laws dialup (this account) and my own broadband & telephone :'(.
Cheers

[#2]

Welcome to the forums on behalf of your in-laws.
I'm wondering if in the context of broadband sign up if your in-laws should be considered "new customers"?  Though they have a PlusNET user ID for the dial-up service, if they are not on a paid for subscription service (only charges are for calls paid to their phone provider), are they "customers" in the context of broadband new-sign-up offers?
I suspect that SALES have considered them to be not new customers and thus pointed you to COT, however given that COT could not find a subscription service, there is nothing for them to offer an option on.
Personally I'd wait for someone with seniority to take a look at this and see what can be done for your in-laws.  £6 per month (if phone line is also with PN) for the essentials service does not seem to be too much to pay, or even lower if you can swing an introduction offer.
That said if they are not using the Internet that much on dial-up (phone calls cost less than £6 a month) and they have no additional usage requirement then possibly such a charge / service is more than they want / need to pay for.
Just seen the BT Internet advert, £6.50 per month is the INTRODUCTORY OFFER PRICE, not the on going charge.

[#3]

Hi, I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve, but I recently (Jan 2014) upgraded from a dial-up account to a full service.
I neither expected or received any discounts, though my phone is separate and directly with BT retail.
My situation was complicated by already having LLU ADSL (from Be) so effectively that was terminated and my old PN dial-up reactivated, with BT having to do a bit of recabling in the exchange.
Funnily enough, with all the slating of BT, that was pretty much the only bit that worked OK and I actually had continuity of service.
The PN systems really couldn't cope with this "upgrade" though and a MAHOOSIVE amount of manual intervention was required over several weeks to get everything properly running.
The longest-running bit of the saga was the direct debit which just kept going wrong, despite having been set up initially about 6 years ago and nothing having changed!  
Anyway, the main point is that no discounts were expected or received.  

[#4]

I agree with the point of no discounts being expected or received, the issue is that members of staff are implying that there may be some reduction when none is actually available. I don't have a problem with Plusnet not offering a discount, that is up to them, but if that is the case members of staff shouldn't imply that they will. I know the OFCOM adsl wholesale pricing market arrangements are not Plusnet's problem and the £1.99 from the plusnet sales website being £15.49 actual (and so too expensive an increase from £4.99 per month dialup) is just one of those things.

[#5]

I think the staff are just not at all familiar with this (very rare) upgrade so are being, at best, "optimistic" or "economical with the truth".
That said, you might as well ask, but I'm trying to be realistic to say there's actually no mechanism to give a discount.
Maybe best to just start again as a new customer and refer yourself, the dial-up account will still keep paying referrals even if it's not used? 

[#6]

Hi adlard,
I'm sorry to hear of the issues that you've experienced with our Sales and Customer Options Team. Our Sales Team generally deal with customers who either do not have any service or have service with a different provider and are looking to join us or are shopping around for prices. Our Customer Options Team deal with account cancellations and customer retentions.
I'm sorry if you felt that we were misleading you with regards to discounts that we may have been able to apply. From my experience, I've not been aware of what deals our Customer Options Team can offer so passing a customer through to them, setting expectations can be difficult but quite straight forward. It should be a case of "I'll pass you through to our Customer Options Team, and they will discuss what available options are available to you" or something along those lines - if this wasn't the kind of thing that was said - I'm really sorry, I'll ensure this is fed back.

[#7]

Chris, I suggest you get the in-laws account details from adlard and then get COT to have a sensible conversation as otherwise it's another customer lost!

[#8]

Chris,
Would it be possible to clarify here if PN does consider a non-subscription user (dial-up pay as you go to the phone provider) to be an "existing user" in the context of (non)eligibility for discounts when seeking to sign up for a subscription service?  I have one such referral and prompted by this thread I wondered what might be their eligibility for bb package discount in principle?
Cheers,
Kevin

[#9]

@Jelv - I've got the account details - it's in hand.
@Townman - If an account has Dial-up, we can upgrade the account to 'Broadband' without any issues, however you would be subject to offers that our Customer Options Team can offer you. If you were to sign up a new account, you are able to take advantage of any online offers which apply to you.
We don;t consider Dial Up customers to have no eligibility for discounts, however discounts are provided at Plusnet's discretion and isn't based on account type. Discounts on any accounts would need to be discussed by the Customer Options Team as it's not something we generally deal with.

[#10]

Quote from: Townman

Would it be possible to clarify here if PN does consider a non-subscription user (dial-up pay as you go to the phone provider) to be an "existing user"

I think the issue here is that they are currently a subscription user on FRIACO - I think the Connect Standard account is £4.99. See http://www.plus.net/support/dial-up/info/unmetered.shtml
See paragraph 11! 

[#11]

Thanks Jelv,
I had forgotten all about that service.  I only had the - non-subscription lo-cost dial up service where the only payment is to the phone provider - on my mind!

[#12]

I was on Connect for a long time waiting for ADSL - including using Home Highway which was pretty good.

[#13]

Hi All,
thanks for the comments, and thanks to Plusnet, we got there in the end. The problem was as predicted that the existing account and dialup anytime lite subscription meant it wasn't a new customer but equally the dial up account couldn't be upgraded to broadband for some reason. Not sure why as Chris above (and the dialup FAQs) seemed to think that wouldn't be a problem but this seems to be the confusion with sales and customer options team I was put through to the first time.
This evening a gentleman got to the bottom of it and was able to create a new account with a broadband connection ordered having temporarily deleted (and then reinstated, to be converted to email only) the existing account to free the telephone line in the plusnet system. Quite why a dialup CLI number should block broadband orders who knows, not a common problem!
All I can say is that I'm glad it was Plusnet customer support I was dealing with not someone else, we got there in the end.
Cheers,
Alistair

[#14]

Alistair,
So glad to hear that everything got sorted for you and your in-laws, just wish the journey was less painful for you.  I think it is unfortunate that in what is a complex supply situation there will be existing states from which there is not a clear up-grade path - computer says no - which can therefore get miss-handled, rather than escalated to some one senior as a "computer says no, but how do I meet the customer's needs?" problem.
If I understand what you've said clearly, you have needed to set up a new account (therefore new email address) whilst retaining access to the old account / email boxes.  If this is correct, what is your in-laws' forward intentions?
Continue to use the old email addresses and not the new?
Use the new address(es) and phase out the old ones?
Continuing to use the old ones and not the new ones relies of PN providing the free email service for the foreseeable future, which is not something I would personally want to rely upon.
If they intend to use the new ones, they have the chore of telling people of the new addresses and also still inspecting the old email boxes.  This could be simplified by obtaining their own domain name now and getting that hosted on their new account.  Should at some future time they choose to move away from PN, they can take the domain name with them and there will be no need to tell people that they have changed their email addresses again.
Cheers,
Kevin

[#15]

I really don't understand why upgrading from dialup to broadband has to be so difficult. I did so in January 2004 when my exchange got broadband and thousands of other users must have done the same as BT rolled out ADSL to the exchanges. Surely there's been a steady trickle since then - or are we saying that existing dialup users are more likely to move to a different ISP than stick with Plusnet who they've used for a long time?