Frustrating customer service from Plusnet

[#1]

We have no internet nor TV since the 8th December. First it was the phone line, but the engineer established it was a problem with the exchange which I communicated to the customer fault team. That resulted in a new investigation which was supposed to be closed by Friday 15th at 1pm, which only resulted in a new engineer appointment confirmed on Saturday,  which was set for 20th. Now got a call saying they have now realised that it's nothing that an engineer can fix, but will need to be done as a full new circuit set up - completion time 26th!!! December as the new ticket has now been added to a different work stream.

Very frustrating and for a family who wants to make Skype calls over the Christmas period really sad.

No offer of compensation or escalation - 2.5 weeks without a service I am paying for is just shocking

Surely not a way to make us proud

[#2]

Hi,

A warm welcome to the forums.  Really sad to hear of your trials here.  By the sound of things there is a serious fault between your home and the exchange, which is all in BT Openreach's control and management.  Whilst it is PlusNet's responsibility to manage the issue on yoru behalf, BTOR will do what they want when they want ... not when its needed.  There is some possibility that your service is impacted by a major cable fault in the area ... some times they can take weeks to fix.  A couple of years back we lost one of the main trunk cables into the village and it took BTOR two weeks to resolve the issue impacting a couple of hundred users.  All that any ISP can do in such situations is wait for BTOR to get there finger out.

Completion by 26th ... might mean some BTOR engineer is not going to get a Christmas dinner ... they'll be working on your phone line.

Plusnet sort out adjustments for loss of service when the issue is fixed ... until the point of being fixed, they have no idea how much you are owed.

[#3]

Openreach are dreadful, why OFCOM doesn't take away their rights from them is beyond me. They repeatedly lie about fibre in my area and I'm stuck on <2Mb/s which makes streaming and downloading virtually impossible.

Not Plusnet's fault, but they are part of BT!

[#4]

Hi Shindles,

A warm welcome to the forums.  BT has many houses and like many families there's little love lost between the houses.  Though all part of the same group they are supposed to operate at arms length ... so that there is no perceived favouritism within the industry.  I do not claim to know the full detail of their internal divisions, but the ones which are reasonably visible are...

• BT Network who provide the interconnections between exchanges
• BT Openreach who provide the exchange and local copper / fibre network
• BT Wholesale who sell the above services to retail resellers
• BT Retail - the customer facing division carrying the BT brand
• Plusnet -  a quasi independent retail CP/ISP

There are a multitude of other BT divisions offering computer IT management services and development, to say nothing of their many technology development units.  Being part of the BT brand brings no favours within.

The big issue is that much of BT still operates as though it were a nationalised business - totally unaccountable to anyone, with no real care for service and quality ... the bottom line is that 90% of the population has nowhere else to go ... the only supplier of connection to property is BT Openreach ... so their attitude becomes "Shut up and wait - you cannot go elsewhere, even if you were to change your bill provider.".

[#5]

@Shindles

What makes you think taking "rights" away from OpenReach would make any difference. It would still be the same people using the same systems as now.

Are you awaiting a fibre install or is there a particular problem with your cabinet. If you post your Exchange name and cabinet number we could have a nose around to see what info's available.

Brian

[#6]

Welcome to the community forums @thorpe74

I'm sorry to hear of the experience you're having. I'm looking into this for you now and I'll post back when I've discussed this with our suppliers and figured out what's happening.

[#7]

Thanks for waiting. Apologies for the time I've taken with this.

I've just finished discussing this with a BT Wholesale (BTW) team manager.

So we've established that your connection in the Openreach applications is inactive/ceased. Going back to around the time a couple of months ago, you downgraded your fibre service, we mistakenly placed an order to downgrade it to ADSL.

This was quickly noticed, cancelled and rectified soon after by placing the order correctly.

Sadly, the incorrect order was not cancelled in all of our suppliers systems, so the asset deactivated. To resolve this, our suppliers need to cease the asset on the BTW systems then place a new order.

What's stopping us from progressing with the above resolution is that on the 6th of this month we placed an order to improve your speeds. Likely as a result of the 40/2 to 40/10 migrations.

This order is currently stuck within our supplier systems due to an exception. This is basically a system issue where the flow of activity between various systems is interrupted and it requires manual intervention.

The team manager I spoke to is working with their application support group (ASG team) to free the order and close it off, so they can cease the asset on the BTW systems then place a new order.

I've been asked to check back for an update tomorrow. I've moved the ticket on your account to my teams workflow so we can take ownership of this for you and we'll do all we can to restore your service. Hopefully before Christmas.

[#8]

WOW @Gandalf  talk about going round in circles

[#9]

More ammunition for the superusers regarding PlusNet ordering errors and PN/BT system failures.

[#10]

Just to echo over here with what I've updated your ticket with.

Our suppliers have managed to close off the stuck order and cease the asset.

So I've now got in place a new fibre order. It will be expedited as soon as it's confirmed by Openreach.

[#11]

The fibre order has completed now and I can see connection attempts coming through to us.

It does look like the router is trying to connect using the wrong password.

Can you factory reset the router by pushing a paperclip into the reset hole at the back for 20 seconds? -Anoush

[#12 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your time on the phone @thorpe74

I'm glad to hear you're all back up and running and just in time for Christmas. Sorry again for the issues you've experienced and I've made an offer for a gesture of goodwill which you can view and reply to here.

I hope you have a good Christmas.

[#13]

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@RealAleMadrid wrote:

More ammunition for the superusers regarding PlusNet ordering errors and PN/BT system failures.

---

Indeed - there are so many angles, some PN can sort, others without a wholesale replacement of BT management, BT are never going to sort out...

This was quickly noticed, cancelled and rectified soon after by placing the order correctly.

Sadly, the incorrect order was not cancelled in all of our suppliers systems, so the asset deactivated. To resolve this, our suppliers need to cease the asset on the BTW systems then place a new order.

Considering elsewhere how BTw systems will not allow two orders on the same line at the same time, especially where one is a cease, one wonders how the suppliers system allowed this mess in the first place.  The SUs have their work cut out sorting Plusnet order failures to the right and BT order failures to the left.

[#14]

Hi Anoush,

Many thanks for sorting our services out so quickly and for making sure we had the services we needed for Christmas. It was really appreciated by the whole family and for the refund of £5.

Also, thank you for the lovely message you sent us in form of chocolate - an all time favourite from now on.

We would like to accept the offer of deduction of the line rental for the next 2 months.

Happy New Year

Katja

[#15]

Hi Katja. No problems at all, I'm happy I managed to resolve this relatively quickly for you.

Glad you like the chocolate

Happy new year to you too and I've lined up the discounts on to your account now.

Please feel free to let me know if I can be of further help.