Disappointed with customer service response

[#1]

Having been with Plusnet since 2002 one of the things I've always been impressed by is their customer service. As well as my own line as an I.T. Consultant I also look after several other connections and have also recommended Plusnet to quite a few people mainly on the basis of their excellent customer service however my experience today cast some doubt over this.
I've had a problem with my own line that I reported on the 18th and is causing it to be VERY unstable. Basically it just dropping pings until it looses the connection altogether forcing me to reset my router. I've never had a very stable line here but up until then I only lost the connection every few weeks which is OK. I raised a broadband fault with PN who decided that the best was to stabilise a flaky line was to remove the restriction on my SNR! This has the immediate effect of increasing my sync speed but the very obvious side effect of making the line unstable to the point of being unusable.
Anyway I run OpenNMS here to monitor some of my client's connections as well as my own cloud platform and I could see the impact on the ping times and stability that the Plusnet change had made so I took the time to extract this in information in the form of pretty graphs which I sent to PN on the 20th. Having heard nothing at all since then and having had to reboot my router 5 or 6 times last night I called PN today and after a long time on hold got through to a woman who told me that I couldn't expect a response for 72 hours since my last update! As this point I got a little annoyed and pointed out that if it was going to take PN 72 hours to respond to each communication regarding my issue then my broadband fault could take a very long time to resolve.
After a couple of minutes of me being the 'awkward customer' she did do some checking and had now placed a manual restriction of 9db on my line however my point is that I don't think that this kind of response is anywhere near acceptable for a company that promotes it's call centres and service as being a feature. If I wanted those kinds of responses I could go to TalkTalk or Sky!
I do hope that this is not a sign of things to come at Plusnet. We went through the 'bad times' a few years back, if Plusnet were to return to these I'm sure that a lot of customers would not be so patient this time.

[#2]

Hi there,
Do you have a ticket ID that we could take a look at for you? I've just checked the account that's linked to this forum account and there's no faults raised on there, so I guess that's your work account as opposed to the home one?

[#3]

Thanks for replying to this Matt, my ticket ID is 46730929. I've run  / managed so many Plusnet accounts over the years that I have no idea which one is linked to my forum account! It would be good if it could be changed to my current account though but I can't find a way to do this myself.

[#4]

Hi there,
Looks like our fault agents have beaten me to it and made a change to the SNR that should hopefully stop the drops in connection. If not please pop a comment on there and they'll pick it up, I'll happily take a look over things on Monday and make sure they've moved on.

[#5]

I've had a lot more dropped connections this evening however finally i'm down to 3.9mbs and the connection seems to be stable. As I said to the customer service agent this happens mainly when it gets colder at night and also if it rains so I suspect its a recurrence of an old problem with rain and mud getting into the local BT patch point. I'm also curious as to why the initial support person thought that dropping my target SNR to 6db's would help to stabilise an already unstable connection? Surely increasing the target and reducing the sync speed would have been a better path to go down?

[#6]

Not entirely connected to the problem, but ill pass my comments as a new customer reflecting the opening post.
Got my PN 60gig pacakge after getting fed up with Sky's prices creeping up and up on a rubbish 'connect' (BT exchange).
All went well with MAC code and router sent out in a few days etc.
Got a Text and told it was ready to use, so plugged it all in and all good - this was a Thursday.
Bit worried about the weekend as i play online on a Sunday evening what with it needing to 'settle down' and all that malarky.........
Tuesday morning get a call from the missus saying theres no internet and she cant get on her Facebook 
Did all the usual in cluding a factory reset, nothing. ADSL all present and correct but no ATM activity and PPP down?
Phoned PN and told they would respond withing 48 hours, 72 at worst................to be honest at the point i was speechless - 'sorry can you repeat that'
72 hours sir..............
That then started a 7 day saga that ended the a BT engineer being called in, turns out that (at exchange level i assume) one half of the equipment was still on Sky and one half
was with PN...............
Anyways i had to ring everyday to CHASE, the PN guys did there stuff and couldnt find anything  2.5 days after reporting. Passed to BT Thursday. Rang PN again on Friday to ask the result (what the hell am i doing ringing them to chase?) Now friday mid afternoon and the dread 'of its a bit late for a weekend now'................
So i ring again MONDAY (6 days in) for PN to say ok can we book an Engineer? Bloody hell thought thats what was happening Thurs?!!!!
As said 72 hours BEFORE the fault team even do anything is frankly not good enough in 2011. I had 18 months of hell with Talk Talk (not that i EVER had an outage of more than 5 hours in that time and prob only 3 or 4 times in TOTAL)
A big selling point to me was the 'good honest broadband from yorkshire' UK call centres and all that......................i hope i have not made a big mistake. 
Worryingly was the attitude of the fault staff - no they were poilte and all that so no worries there; but the almost incredulous why am i asking why it takes 48 - 72 hours, 'thats how long it takes sir'.............
Another worrying sign whilst i had many hours waiting on the PN hold, was on of the repeated sales messages.............'Do you know about our fault update service? Move your home phone to us and benefit from having 1 provider and you send and recieve fault updates by mobile/text'!! So while im steaming im thinking ive made a VERY big mistake as the company must have many faults as thats the only selling point of moving your home to them   

[#7]

Indeed it was the 72 hour before a response quote that really got me! I can fully understand that given the complex nature of these issues it might take a while to resolve but as a customer being told that you're not even going to be dealt with until 72 hours have passed is very frustrating. To most of us broadband is now as important as any other utility. Can you imagine the uproar if Electricity companies started telling people suffering power cuts that they wouldn't even start to look into the problem for 3 days?!!!!!

[#8]

Hi JamesK,
It looks like our suppliers are wanting to get an engineer out, so if the line's still dropping and/or the speed's still slow please let us know when would be best for an engineer to attend - it'd be weekdays either between 8am and 1pm, or 1pm and 6pm. Either reply here or on the ticket, either is fine

[#9]

Any time at all!!!!! This is so important and frustrating to me that I will make sure I am around whenever they can fit me in!

adie:quote