Is Jess totally useless and can the faults reporter be improved?

[#1]

Do you have any stats which indicate Jess' productivity?
Clearly a significant investment has been made in training Jess - has any measure ever been considered on her productivity / effectiveness?  What is the user satisfaction level?  How many questions does she provide relevant answers to?
Having failed to make sensible use of the automated faults checker (more below), I asked jess "broadband drops on inbound call" and like a true blond, she told me that VoIP is no longer available to new customers.  The only correlation being "broadband" and "call".  Is it time Jess was put on a performance improvement plan, sent on a new training course or given a formal written notice to generally improve her performance or face dismissal?

Back to my issue - I do not get many land line calls, however I have recently noticed an increasing correlation of broadband drops when making or receiving phone calls.  When not having calls the BB service is moderately fast for my line (5+Mbps at SNRM 3dB on a 50dB line - ADSL2) and very stable.  Line is generally quiet (I do not spend time listening to it) but there are occasional crackles during calls, but that could be down to the DECT connection.  Basically the BB works, works well but experiences disconnects during calls.
Sought to report this via faults.plus.net gave honest answers and got "thank you ticket closed because your BB is working" - well it was at the time of filling in the form as I was using it to do so - but I did have a disconnect during the process.  The faults report process needs to cater for intermittent disconnects.
NB: Router is in master socket.  NTE5 is new NTE5 with VDSL faceplate fitted not so many months ago.
Kevin

[#2]

Dont be too hard on Jess, they dont even pay her NMW

[#3]

I don't know what the cost per hour for a virtual assistant from www.selfservicecompany.com works out as.
Jess is basically a pointless user interface to a search engine that's far worse than Google's.

[#4]

Can you pop the faceplate and run with a filter & phone in the test socket?
Drops on incoming calls are commonly caused by a dodgy filter and this test should eliminate the NTE5 having gone bad.

[#5]

Drops on incoming calls are commonly caused by a bad (high resistance) connection on your phone line.  But with this type of fault the line is usually at least a little noisy and the noise is cleared or reduced for a while by the incoming phone call.

[#6]

If you can see the noise margin badly affected by an incoming call (using RouterStats) that would be something concrete to get an engineer to look at and also something you can easily check if he says he can't find anything wrong or he says he's fixed it.

[#7]

Jelv,
That's just the point - I run RouterStats all of the time and the DS SNRM is more or less perfectly flat around 3dB.  I do not tend to watch the US very closely, though I have occasionally noticed some marked variation there.  Will review those plots associated with yesterday's drops when I get back to the computer.
Kevin

[#8]

Townman,
Thanks for your feedback on this. Feedback is precisely what we need to make ask Jess a more effective support tool.
I've passed on your comments to an individual here that deals with this. Just to set an expectation it's unlikely we'll be able to make any improvement for at least a couple of weeks but we are of course interested in making that more effective.

Quote

The faults report process needs to cater for intermittent disconnects

It does, You might want to go through the steps in the troubleshooter again as you should have an option during the process for " I can't connect or my connection drops"
That should follow the step that asks whether you can hear a dial tone or not.
If all else fails please give us a call.
Adam

[#9]

Adam,
Thank you - Jess feedback was sincere albeit jocular, glad you've seen it as such.  Fault report path - that is exactly where I went, but when you get to "is it connected when in test socket" and you answer honestly (there's no inbound call to cause the problem) it says fine, ok, goodbye.  Just reran the fault trouble shooter.  Yes I can hear a dial tone.
I know this is being revised. Can consideration be given to how the characteristics of intermittent issues might be profiled?  As is, the trouble shooter is skewed towards hard black and white failures.  I suggest that a check list of what the user knows about the problem at the start of the troubleshooter would be helpful.  Sometimes disconnects during phone calls is not going to be picked up by the troubleshooter as is.
Kevin

[#10]

Hi Townman,
Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't see your post as jocular or to the contrary TBH but feedback on these things is always welcome.

UPDATE:
Regarding what's already been mentioned about ask Jess we're updating keywords relating to VOIP and dropped calls.
As I mentioned before Jess relies on keywords that we link to responses so please make sure you let us know if anyone has some feedback for us and we'll continue to make improvements where appropriate.

[#11]

As I've posted elsewhere, I've left feedback for Jess and nobody reads it, or if they do, they don't do anything.

[#12]

I put Jess in the same bucket as Plusnet Assist a long time ago. 
Initially I was optimistic and tried Jess for a number of problems.  Fed back alternative question / routes; errors in the responses etc but nobody appeared to take any action or provide any feedback.
Now given the growing backlog of problems requiring urgent development attention I guess it would be more productive to take them both out of service until they can play a more useful part in the support process.
Maurice