Rubbish service & non existent Customer Service.

[#1]

Wow! I have just joined this Forum in frustration. I have been having speed problems with Plusnet (especially Webmail) for quite some time. I have been a customer for exactly 7 years but that seems to count for little. In April of this year I started to complain.Initially they said it was a fault at my end & I needed a new router (which I had to pay for). I went through with this but complained that they were making me enter a new contract period because of having to buy the router. I now want to exit my contract because of the poor service and today when I got through to the accounts dept I was told that ending my contract would attract a penalty of £280!!!  In the meantime, calling the helpline attracts a message telling me the waiting time is currently 45 minutes and when I try the on line Chat service it is out of order (and has been for several days). So,in summary. The Webmail is catastrophically slow/unavailable,Plusnet will not allow me to E mail them,Calling them involves interminable waits...at the end of which,staff are unable to help. Complaints are not answered and termination charges are exhorbitant. What a terrible company! DOes anyone else have a similar experience?

[#2]

Yes,similar experience, but I hope to persevere to a resolution.  Every time I've tried online chat it hasn't worked (why don't they get rid until they fix it?)  Whenever I call they always say the wait is approaching 15 minutes,  I'm lucky that the phone works and the 0800 number is free so I put it on speaker and after about 30 minutes it gets answered. It's not ideal.   I have just got used to using an expensive PAYG 4G EE dongle, and to wait until the next day when they may or may not update me with a useful answer.

I've never had any trouble with webmail though,  always works for me.  What issues are you having with it?

[#3]

Welcome to the forums @gedleg and I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing problems with your webmail service.

It appears to be a known issue that we are aware of and are working to resolve as soon as possible, however in the mean time I would recommend setting up your email on a mail client, for example Microsoft Outlook, Windows Mail, Mac Mail because I believe you should be able to access your emails normally in this way.

This link will advise what settings you would need and explain how to set up your email on the most common mail clients: https://www.plus.net/help/email-guides/how-to-set-up-plusnet-email/

I hope this helps you

[#4]

I guess you work for Plusnet Anoush? Your response leaves me gobsmacked. When I searched the Plusnet "Help" pages for something,anything which might wake up someone at Plusnet, I saw advice suggesting I ask other customers for advice/information about my problem. What a cheek I thought...they are not prepared to make themselves available to deal with my  problem and the answer is to consult other customers who may have experienced the same problem. A bit like going into a shop to complain about faulty goods only to be told by a shop assistant to speak to another customer rather than bother him.  Anyway...I was so desperate I thought I have nothing to lose by asking other victims...and then Wo! Who is the 2nd person on the Forum to offer me advice? Its an employee of Plusnet! Exactly the person I have been trying to make contact with for weeks! The person who is impossible to get to on the phone, the person who is never on the Chat Line has suddenly popped up as soon as I joined the "Community". What does that member of staff advise me to do about the poor service provided by his company ? He tells me to use the services of another company instead! No information or apology for the service I am paying for, no suggestion of a compensation payment or a reduced monthly charge, no undertaking that the service will be improved...just go and use a different Company. And this is from the company to which I pay nearly £50 a month and which has told me I will be charged £280 if I decide to break my contract and move to another supplier. And this is after being a Plusnet customer for 7 (seven) years!!! By any standard of what is reasonable and decent this puts Plusnet way down in the bottom of the latrine. I am truly shocked that I have been treated in this way. I will make it my business to deter anyone from signing up with this company...they are a disgrace. 

[#5]

The problem is slow speed,constant failures,messages about server not being available etc etc. I sit and wait for many minutes for a simple deletion or post to take place. Often it just does not happen at all. It is excruciatingly slow and annoying.I have complained many times but no-one has ever got back to me far less apologise. I once actually managed to speak to a Customer Service guy called TOM. He checked for me only to vcome back to say that he too was having problems with Webmail & he would have to get a technician to give me a call to discuss matters. I am still waiting for that call back. At no stage have I been rude or unpleasant but I am now beginning to think that being "nice" about my complaint has got me nowhere and so ,I become angrier and less patient as time elapses. Plusnet advertise about how good their Customer Service is. If my service is good I hate to think what a bad one is like.   Bill Geddes. 

[#6]

Web Mail has been a Issue for Years and still PN say It appears to be a known issue that we are aware of and are working to resolve as soon as possible .

This is just a regular reply to placate customers and force them to use another Email client , as they have no intention of fixing web mail

[#7]

@gedleg @mikeyd   Live Chat does work... you just need to know the secret formula...

Which.... Hopefully... @Anoush will do something about, due to my posting on this  thread.. which, ( for now ) exposes PlusNet `s hidden access to Live Chat..

https://community.plus.net/t5/Plusnet-Feedback/Communicating-with-Plusnet/m-p/1384491#U1384491

[#8]

As per my reply here, this is not something Anoush can directly fix:

https://community.plus.net/t5/Plusnet-Feedback/No-online-chat-how-to-raise-a-ticket/m-p/1384768#M742...

Also please see @jaread83's response here:

 https://community.plus.net/t5/Plusnet-Feedback/Communicating-with-Plusnet/m-p/1384741#M74291

[#9]

@Chris   But why... did it take so long for this to happen?  I have been on about this problem, as so many others have for well over a year now...

Why does it take, customer intervention, to help other customers to take advantage of the Live Chat, when it should have been sorted within a few days of it starting? ...i.e. when the first complaints about not being able to access Live Chat were appearing. ..

You may not have been able to do anything directly, yourself, but surely your position in the company, should throw more wobblies than a customer?  to get this kind of thing sorted out..

It`s this kind of thing that is giving PlusNet a bad reputation........ and could so easily have been solved a long time ago...  ( as @jaread83 seems to have done within hours of this present series of posts )...

[#10]

If you read some of the threads about this previously where I have commented, you'll also see that I have been pushing this for over a year too.

[#11]

When I started at Plusnet, one of the first things that was flagged up as a problem was that there were a lot of posts about chat not working and I raised this as something to look into. I am happy to say that the work has been done and tested and is working correctly. I think for the last few months I have actively kept a record of the amount of times this conversation happens:

OP: Chat isn't working

Community user: disable adblocking on browser

OP: It works!

So with it happening so frequently, I had a case to get this looked at as a matter of urgency and it worked as I was given this as my main task to look into for this week. Hopefully we should see less frequency in the amount of posts about the chat feature not working due to the browser blocking the scripts needed to run it.

[#12]

I agree with everything you have said, so rather than waste my time trying to plusnet email them (which I cannot do because it is always 'server unavailable' ) or contact them online or try ringing them (a complete waste of time and money) , I just send an email via another service to their CEO (andy.baker@plus.net)  . Hey presto , I get a call from one of their senior managers in about 1 hour. I feel  that many of our issues are not being reported back to their CEO who I think he will be shocked at the poor customer service. Some senior Customer Service managers are going to get their ears burned for allowing the webmail server to overload. I can only guess that they have not bothered to cost implement any capacity planning forecasting to meet a minimal service availability thresholds. In fact , I suspect it will take many months to move the webmail to another more resilient platform because they will have to conduct all sorts of testing (especially back-ups) to ensure our confidential information is made secure and not lost. I have just renewed my line rental with them before I heard of all the neglected issues on their webmail server. If I knew then what I know now, I would have moved broadband/phone to another supplier with immediate effect.

[#13]

I've been complaining about this problem for months on and off. The last few weeks have been so tedious taking 30 minutes just to retreive and delete emails etc. The customer service is okay in that I can chat online fine after a long wait (obviously there are a lot of complaints at present) but nobody seems able to help with the problem. I set up an email client as suggested but that just fails to download emails at all. So, I'm stuck with webmail that doesn't work. It seems very unfair that we are paying for a service that we aren't getting.

I only recently swapped to fibre broadband with Plusnet and the service is slower than before. I asked how much it would cost me if I decided to swap to another provider and was told nothing as I'm not contracted to them. Strange as I've only had fibre optic broadband a few months and I'm sure it was an 18 month contract. Anyway, i got a copy of the chat so I had that in writing. So, after at least 18 years with Plusnet I'm going to look into swapping to another provider.