Live Chat Availability Discussion

[#1]

We're currently experiencing an unusually high volume of calls. To try and keep wait times to a minimum, we've temporarily suspended Live Chat for all departments except cancellations. We apologise for any inconvenience, and will let you know as soon as the service is back online. Social Media and the Community remain unaffected and those requiring accessibility options can find them here

[#2]

It would help to put that on screen in the 'Contact Us' page!

[#3]

Changes to service content (such as the content of the contact us page) requires change and release control procedures to be performed.  Whilst sounding simple, the reality is that such service content is not likely to be deployed on just one server, but many virtual services.  Therefore adhoc changes to website content is not overly practical.

The status of chat is clearly signposted in the SERVICE STATUS page, on the SERVICE INFORMATION board here and the contact us pages clearly report that the service is currently UNAVAILABLE (which is different to the usual “service busy” status when the service is available, but busy).

[#4]

Live chat has been turned back on, customers should be able to access it normally.

Thanks for your patience.

[#5]

my live chat mileage differs. m click on allow cookies but its greyed out Most unhelpful

[#6]

How are we supposed to get our internet "service" back if they are not answering phones or replying to emails? Our broadband has been less than 1mb download for almost a week. Plusnet won't sort it out, so what is our next step? If they haven't sorted it out by tomorrow I'll be cancelling and going with another provider. I'm not going to continue paying for a service which is not being provided. I have spent over 2 hours waiting on the phone but it is impossible to get through to them. They should be paying me for my wasted hours!

[#7]

@JonoH

[#8]

Hello @Barney67,

I am sincerely sorry for the wait times you have experienced. We can see that we organised a phone engineer to attend your line due to noise and they believe they have resolved that side of the problem.

Please can you advise if the noise is no longer present and my team here will be able to progress the issue further.

[#9]

Live Chat is Not available to me, and I`m hearing the same from many people in the "Account/Billing" Forum.  It has been greyed out for nearly Two weeks now.  There are no options either to "Raise a Ticket" for support, and I can`t afford 2 Hours waiting on a phone line.    How on earth do I get to speak to someone who can assist?

If I disable all means of communication in my business, and stack customers in a 2 hour long telephone waiting queue, I won`t have a business for very long at all.  

Chris

[#10]

Chris,

Are you a residential user or a business user? For business users chat is virtually always UNavailable, where as for residential users during support hours it can sometimes be busy.

“Not available” is (I believe) only reported when the residential service is closed.

[#11]

Hi @Mgnl1983,

Thanks for getting in touch, I'm sorry to hear you have experienced these issues trying to get through to our Customer Support teams. I'm afraid our live chat service was taken down for a couple of weeks due to the call volumes. Feel free to send me your username via PM with a brief summary of the issues you are facing and I can take a look into this for you. - Thanks, Maddy.

[#12]

This is quite unacceptable. I am about to be a new customer but I am thinking of cancelling my order. For 3 weeks the wait time for a telephone call has been over 30 minutes and Chat is not available. You are just not staffing up to meet customer demand - it's not our fault for trying to contact you, it's your fault for not investing in call staff. What is Plusnet doing about this?

Jrod

[#13]

Hello Jrod,  It does seem to be the way of the world in big businesses now.  Very hard to find any method of speaking with someone, or contacting via a live chat facility (unless they`re after your custom of course) and it is very frustrating, when all you want is a little bit of assistance.  I don`t think it is a very wise policy at all !

[#14]

You might like to ask yourselves WHY there is such a demand for contact through live chat?

a)    "Help line" never gets answered?

b)    There are far too many problems which require assistance?  After all these years, your systems ought to have been sorted out, surely?

[#15]

Hi @sbore,

A warm welcome to the forums.

In the immediacy, this is the first monthly billing cycle of the new billing system … there are a few gremlins which have been experienced by a number of users.  Consequently support is particularly busy at the moment.