First, I lost my BB connex yesterday, Sunday, morning and was more than a little irritate. No BB means having to interact with kids at home who are generally much happier when the fibre BB connex is working. It would be fair to say that in over 13 years of using the Internet with various ISPs we've been without Network connectivity for less than 10 days over the entire period - so we kinda depend on BB - for work and play.
Anyhoo, the nice technical chap at Plusnet on Sunday morning, Jordon, explained the account had been closed/deleted by the collections team due to non-payment and, oh Lordy, the account had been passed to debt collectors. I cannot even settle the balance online as the account no longer exists! Money not being the biggest problem, at Plusnet prices, my main and growing concern was a deleted account could mean a new BB provision which could take up to 10 WORKING DAYS!!! Unfortunately, Sunday's the only day of the week the accounts team are not at work (fair enough) so there was nothing to be done until Monday morning, today, at 8.00am when I could speak to accounts directly.
8.10am Monday morning, enter Ryan from the collections team who confirms I've been sent email reminders (I don't check that mailbox much) and a few unsuccessful attempts have been made at telephone contact to chase the debt I owe before account deletion. I'm still baffled as to why an overdue debt didn't result in service suspension before account deletion. Ryan's a tad concerned too and recommends I 'leave it to him'!
Within hours this trooper Ryan's got all charges/penalties for early cessation of my contract and cancellation charges removed from my account, apologies that the account was never deleted (it seems someone in the collections team was being impressively (sic) zealous), accepts that although the account is overdue it's not that overdue and then spends a large part of his morning getting the account restored so that payment can be taken and by the time I get home fibre broadband is restored and working and I don't need to talk to the kids anymore! Yay!
I head up a small customer service for a busy online education company and we pride ourselves on our high levels of customer service. Occasionally things go wrong and my experience is that folk are quick to complain. For me the real test of customer service is not how and organisation carries on when things are going well but, more importantly, how an organisation reacts when things go wrong. End to end, my service was down for slightly over 24-hours including a Sunday before being fully restored!
Well done Plusnet for such swift service restoration but, most of all, well done Ryan for stepping up, taking ownership and control and seeing the issue through to resolution.
And thank you.
